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Saturday November 22, 2008

Tallying Recent Teacher Strikes Across the Nation Newsflash: Pennsylvania maintains its long held number one ranking as the state with the most teacher strikes. During the period beginning with school year 2000-2001 and running through school year 2006-2007, Pennsylvania accounted for well over half of all teacher strikes in the country, establishing its reputation as the nation’s teacher strike leader. More recently, over the past couple of school years only three states of the thirteen that allow teacher strikes have seen walkouts; Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Michigan, which does not permit strikes, suffered an illegal work stoppage in the 2008-2009 school year. Continue

Pittsburgh’s Budget: Legacy Costs Have Large and Lasting Impact For the 2009 budget and the years beyond, legacy costs—pensions, retiree health care, workers’ compensation, and debt—will dominate the discussion about taxes, spending, the level of municipal services and who provides them in the City of Pittsburgh. Legacy cost problems have been building for some time and must be dealt with. Continue

Adding Up the Costs of Pittsburgh School District’s Failures Pittsburgh Public Schools face serious problems—high per pupil spending (almost $20,000) and a rapidly declining enrollment (18 percent in the last four years) —that are seemingly intractable. Not even the hype surrounding the plan to provide college scholarships to graduating seniors, known as the Pittsburgh Promise, has been able to stem the losses. Another major problem confronting the District and the community is the large number of number of dropouts. High dropout rates lead to significant additional costs to society. Continue

Events

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