The
annual Condition of Education data compendium put out by the National Center for Education Statistics is not the most exciting event ever–all of the information is culled from surveys and products publicly available elsewhere–but it’s an excellent resource and it presents a nice opportunity to step back and look at trends in US education. Last year, I used it to write a series of posts on the dramatic increase in
Master’s degrees awarded in education, the
college wage premium, and economic and racial
segregation in our schools. Those trends have not changed, but over the next few days I’ll be using this year’s Condition of Education to highlight some other important developments.
The first trend, and the one that’s most related to current events, is falling teacher/ student ratios. In 1990-1, public school districts employed one teacher for every 17.4 students. By 2007-8, that ratio had fallen to 15.7 to one, the lowest on record.
This change alone is responsible for more than 300,000 full-time teaching jobs. To estimate how much this costs
