The presidents of the nation’s two big teachers’ unions, Lily Eskelsen-Garcia of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, are demanding the federal government fully fund federal programs for schools that teach the nation’s poorest kids.

And that includes making up a $580 billion shortfall in such funding, accumulated since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Act was passed as part of the War on Poverty. That shortfall is documented in a new report released at the Congressional Black Caucus foundation’s annual conference.

Eskelsen-Garcia challenged politicians “to come see what the best public schools are – you’ve just got to live in the right neighborhood to attend one.”

“It’s institutional racism that decided who will get school funds and who will not,” she declared before issuing her challenge to the pols at a September 12 press conference.

“It’s long past time to have just the rhetoric of these policies, without the funding,” Weingarten added at the same confab. Other school advocates, including Service Employees Vice President Heather Conroy, sounded the same themes.

Confronting The Education Debt, a report issued this month by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, said the federal government pledged when ESEA passed to add 40 percent “above each state’s per-pupil spending base for each Title I eligible child.” Title I is the ESEA section that authorizes – but does not actually dole out – money for helping schools educate poor kids.

The report notes the feds have never hit that 40 percent mark. Though the report does not name her, the GOP Trump administration’s Education Secretary, Elizabeth “Betsy” DeVos, prefers funding private schools, charter schools and taxpayer-paid vouchers to parents of public school kids. The report calls for a moratorium on those priorities.

It also calls for fully funding that $580 billion shortfall by repealing the $1.5 trillion Trump-GOP tax cut for the rich and corporations and redirecting part of that money to the 21 million-30 million Title I kids.

The nonprofit Century Foundation officially unveiled its new federal agenda for revitalizing America’s manufacturing communities on Thursday, centered on ways to increase the number of high wage jobs and create a pipeline of qualified workers to fill them.

And the foundation attracted some big names to help them do it.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) were among the keynote speakers at a summit sponsored by the foundation in Washington. Biden and Gillibrand — both of whom are being floated as potential 2020 presidential contenders — noted that too many Americans are stuck working low-paying jobs, and elected leaders haven’t done enough to help them.

“Ordinary Americans can do extraordinary things, if you just give them a chance,” Biden said. “This is not beyond our capacity. There is so much we can do to begin to change things.”

Gillibrand echoed Biden’s remarks.

“We have the hardest working people in the world. We have an ideal, it’s called the American dream,” Gillibrand said. “I can tell you, wherever I travel in my state, people don’t believe the dream is for them anymore…They just want someone fighting for them.”

The Century Foundation’s new agenda serves as a blueprint for doing just that, and manufacturing is at the heart of it. Foundational officials spent the past year meeting with hundreds of people in cities like Cleveland, Chicago, and Pittsburgh to help put their ideas together.

Corruption eats away at the heart of democracy. My bill to #EndCorruptionNow will make sure government represents the people – not just the wealthy and well-connected. pic.twitter.com/4gr1n1ten9

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 30, 2018

One of the particularly frustrating, fact-free aspects of the conservative push to add (or ramp up) work requirements in anti-poverty programs like Medicaid or SNAP is that low-income people who can do so are already working hard. Moreover, as the job market tightens, they respond to tightening conditions.

Using the new Census data, Kathleen Bryant and I, with help from Raheem Chaudhry, used the 2017 microdata (the data on which the poverty and income numbers are based) to compare the employment rates of low-income single mothers (with incomes below twice the poverty threshold) with prime-age (25-54), non-poor adults. We found that between 2010 and 2017, the employment rates of the low-income single moms increased by 5.4 percentage points (67.7% to 73.2%), while those of non-poor adults increased by just 1.2 percentage points (87.8% to 89%).

It’s true that the single moms, by dint of their lower employment rate levels, have more room to grow, but the prime-age adults are not obviously hitting a ceiling on their rates.

At any rate, we believe this shows that a large and growing majority of low-income moms are already trying to both raise their kids and support their families through work, and that they’re actively taking advantage of the tight labor market. Adding work requirements will just give them one more needless, bureaucratic barrier to leap over, likely reducing their ability to maintain their benefits, even as they’re playing by the rules. Forgive me if I cynically suspect that such hassle-induced benefit losses are the point.

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Reposted from On the Economy

A couple of stories caught our eye last week.

First, there’s this piece in the Wall Street Journal on how employers “feel the pinch” because of an “increasingly tight labor market.” There were 650,000 available jobs in the United States in July, the highest level on records back to 2000, according to the article.

The story mirrors what we often hear about the “skills gap” in manufacturing, the idea that there are many advanced manufacturing jobs out there but not enough workers with the know-how to fill them.

Remember that — we’ll come back to it.

We also came across this devastating story in the New York Times on Wednesday about how so many of the jobs out there — especially for workers without a college degree — simply do not pay enough to live on. Here’s an excerpt:

“In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the ‘productivity-pay gap’ — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat… American workers are being shut out of the profits they are helping to generate.”

That NYT piece profiles Vanessa Solivan, a mother-of-three who, when times are good, makes about $1,200 a month as a home health aide. The 33-year-old spent almost three years as part of the “working homeless,” holding down a job but not making enough money to afford a place to live.