Any replication of this chart should be credited to The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.
September 27, 2011
Test scores, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have barely budged in thirty years. Today, the average high school senior scores about the same as his or her parents. Since workforce skills are closely linked to productivity and compensation, the stagnation in educational performance has contributed to static or even declining wages for many Americans.
Annual Earnings of Teachers and Non-TeachersSeptember 2011
The Hamilton Project tracks the monthly “job gap,” which is the number of jobs that need to be created in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while still absorbing the workers entering the labor force each month.
It is critical that worker training programs be rigorously evaluated so that scare training resources can be targeted toward the most effective programs.
Federal spending on job training programs by the U.S. Department of Labor has gradually fallen since the 1980s, aside from a bump in 2009 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Retraining in technical fields provides higher returns for workers than retraining in non-technical classes.
Recent research suggests that hardship for dislocated workers extends beyond periods of unemployment. Once reemployed, workers typically earn significantly less than they did prior to job loss.
Over the last 35 years, the opportunity gap for children whose parents are at different ends of the earnings distribution has grown. Children at the 90th percentile of the distribution of family earnings have experienced a 45 percent increase, while children at the 25th percentile have experienced a decline of over 20 percent.
Students are more likely to respond to education incentives for certain inputs, such as reading books, than more general outputs, such as making good grades.
Over the last 40 years, the salary gap between teachers and nonteachers has grown by over $10,000.
Investments in education have narrowed the black-white skill gap for much of the twentieth century, but has stagnated since the 1980s.
The United States scores below the OCED average in mathematics, despite spending $3,000 more per student than the OCED average.
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