By Andrew Pillow
The country isn’t quite back to it’s pre 2008 recession form, however by most objective accounts the country is recovering. But according to FiveThirtyEight, this recovery hasn’t hit schools yet.
According to the article, as whole state education funding is “6.6%” lower than it was in 2008. Federal funding although up, did not make up the slack left behind state budget slashing.
Schools are struggling to cope as evident by number of teachers employed and class sizes:
“The 7-year-old economic recovery has not been kind to the American public education system. In May 2008, as the Great Recession was just beginning, U.S. school departments employed 8.4 million teachers and other workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This past May, they employed just 8.2 million — despite public-school enrollments that the Department of Education estimated have risen by more than 1 million students during the same period. Student-teacher ratios are as high as they’ve been since the late 1990s, though they’re still well below their levels of the 1980s and most of the 1990s.”
Read more here. (FiveThirtyEight)