Public Impact News & Views

AEI, October 8, 2020, by Nat Malkus

As schools confront massive budget shortfalls in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, it is critical that they examine how they might use existing funding more efficiently. On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus talks with Bryan Hassel about how districts might rethink their staffing models in a way that will increase students’ access to excellent teachers and create opportunities for advancement within the teaching profession, all without spending more money. Byran is the co-president of Public Impact and a contributor to the newly released volume, Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck. Listen to the podcast…

Education Week, October 1, 2020, by Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

Even before COVID-19 sent students and educators home, teachers’ jobs had grown increasingly complex. Rightful demands for standards matching those of other nations—and for equitable opportunities allowing students to meet or exceed those standards—swelled over recent decades.

With research clearly indicating how important teacher and principal quality are to student learning growth, a thoughtful school staffing and compensation strategy would have been a natural response. Instead, decades of benevolently intended policy shifts snatched dollars from teachers’ pockets as their jobs got harder, while failing to innovate like other professions.

As we explain in Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck, the consequences have been devastating for students and committed educators. A vigorous pivot is long overdue.

Over the past five decades, U.S. public education went on a spending spree benefiting nearly everything and everyone—except classroom teachers. Since 1970, real per-pupil spending increased 145 percent, yet real teacher pay was nearly flat, increasing just 7.5 percent (see figure). Teachers work longer hours, so hourly pay actually declined. If teacher pay had increased in proportion to K-12 spending, teachers today would earn nearly $140,000, on average, instead of less than half that. Read the full column…

Education Week, August 25, 2020, by Bryan C. Hassel and Sharon Kebschull Barrett

To exhausted or worried parents deciding whether to send their children into school buildings this fall, “pandemic pods” may look like an appealing way out. Keeping their boys and girls at home learning alone may be better for physical health but not for mental health, and the arrangement is difficult or impossible for many employed parents. Equally undesirable is the greater risk of children catching and spreading a potentially deadly disease from a larger number of people at school.

Some parents are creating home-based, closed groups of a few families’ children to learn together under the rotating supervision of parents or a paid supervisor. Pods could keep students’ learning and social-emotional development on track while helping protect their and their teachers’ health.

But if pods are exclusively organized by parents and those parents are disproportionately well-off, this approach will inevitably further widen economic and racial gaps in learning opportunity.

Lower-income families are in fact more likely to need pods because the parents are more likely to have to go off to work. According to a study from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, 63 percent of jobs cannot be done from home, and these jobs are disproportionately lower paid.

Even if they can arrange adult supervision for a group of children, lower-income families may struggle to provide spaces conducive to learning in their homes. The KidsCount Data Center found that as of 2018, 14 percent of children live in overcrowded households. [Read more…]