We hope you are enjoying your Tuesday. Take a moment to delve into the latest in education news with the following headlines.
According to the Associated Press despite research that supports the notion that arts programs help students perform better in school, the percentage of elementary schools with a visual arts class declined from 87 to 83 percent. In drama, the drop was larger: From 20 percent to 4 percent in the 2009-10 school year.
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Speaking on "Meet the Press" about the nation's education challenges, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted, "I think it's gonna drive us into class warfare like we've never seen, because education, even in the segregated South, was always the way that you got out."
Dr. Rice's comments are an important addition to the national discussion on income equality that's been happening over the last few weeks. This isn't a matter of simple Thanksgiving guilt, but based on real analyses on the economy and what inequality means for the nation's future. Recently, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published a report showing that income inequality grew significantly in the last three decades. While the income of the top 1 percent and top 20 percent in the nation grew by 275 percent and 65 percent, respectively, between 1979 and 2007, the income of the nation's lowest income quartile grew by only 18 percent. As the chart above shows, when factoring in inflation, the actual disparity is even greater.
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The unemployment rate for high school dropouts aged twenty-five or older soared by 10 percent in September, meanwhile, the unemployment rate for college graduates actually dropped. -U.S. Department of Labor. Read more about these numbers in Jason Amos’ latest blog post.
Minnesota has become the 38th state to adopt the common standards, but only in English/language arts, not in math. –Education Week
More than $9 billion was spent by state and federal governments to support students at four-year colleges and universities who left school before their sophomore year during a five-year period. -American Institutes for Research. To find out more, check out this blog post.
Although the recession technically ended in 2009, district budgets are not expected to regain their pre-recession (2008) funding levels until late in the decade. –The Center for Public Education
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For several years, the Alliance for Excellent Education (the Alliance) has been beating the drum on the potential economic gains of a college- and career-ready education and the economic costs resulting from the nation’s high school dropout crisis. Last week, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (the Center) made a similarly powerful case that policymakers, as well as all members of society, should heed.
On June 15, Anthony Carnevale, a member of the Alliance’s President’s Policy Council, and his colleagues at the Center released a state-by-state report forecasting the educational needs of the job landscape through the year 2018. The report, Help Wanted: Projections of Job and Education Requirements Through 2018, highlights the growth of jobs by education level in every state and the District of Columbia.
To those of us following education and economic trends, the findings are not surprising. It is projected that, by 2018, 63% of all jobs will require some level of postsecondary education. There will still be jobs for those who do not graduate from high school, but those jobs will continue to decline in each state. The report also provides state-by-state information on the number of jobs forecasted in 2018 by education level and the occupations that are increasing or decreasing in demand.
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