• A Dispatch from the Department of People Who Work for a Living

    Our guest author is Bernie Burnham, President of the Minnesota AFL-CIO.

    Labor Day is upon us, once again, the day set aside to celebrate and honor our labor movement. Our labor movement, where the contributions of working people are recognized as valuable participants in the development and achievements of these United States.

    In recent weeks, our AFL-CIO has been on a bus tour traversing the country to remind Americans that “It’s Better in a Union.” Across this nation, union members are standing up and speaking out against the current federal administration and its attacks on labor. 

    Since he took office, Donald Trump has taken the unprecedented action of illegally cancelling collective bargaining agreements and refusing to recognize workers’ unions at six different federal agencies. 

    The attacks by this administration on the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) are outrageous, and we must stand strong as workers and be in solidarity to fight back.

  • Revisiting the Great Divergence in State Education Spending

    A few years ago, we took a quick look at the difference in K-12 education spending between the higher- and lower-spending states, and whether that “spread” has changed since the early 1990s. We found, in short, a substantial increase in that variation, one which really started in the long wake of the 2007-09 recession. 

    Let’s update that simple descriptive analysis with a few additional years of data, and discuss why it’s potentially troubling. 

    In the graph below, each teal circle is an individual state, and each “column” of circles represents the spread of states in a given year; the red diamond is the unweighted national average. On the vertical axis, we have predicted per-pupil current spending in a district with a 10 percent Census child poverty rate (roughly the average rate), controlling for labor costs, population density, and enrollment. This measure comes from our SFID state dataset (note that the plot excludes Alaska and Vermont).