Education Week - August 31, 2022 - 2

Biden's Student Loan
Forgiveness: Will It
Help Teachers?
The Biden administration's new student loan forgiveness
plan that will cancel up to $20,000 in debt
for eligible borrowers will benefit many teachers and
other K-12 personnel.
Like many other professionals, teachers have
taken out loans in order to pay the costs of their preservice
training, most of which takes place in university-based
programs that charge by the credit hour.
A National Education Association report last year
found that 53 percent of the pre-K-12 teachers and specialized
instructional support personnel it surveyed
took out student loans to fund their own education.
And over half of educators who took a student loan and
still had a balance by 2021 owed an average of $58,700.
The report also found that younger educators are
far more likely to have taken out student loans than
older colleagues and that there are stark differences
in levels of debt between Black educators and other
groups. Black educators, who took out loans, had an
average initial debt total of $68,300, compared with
$54,300 for white educators and $56,400 for Latino
educators.
That disparity is in part why the Biden debt relief
falls short of some advocates' hopes for an acrossthe-board
cancellation of student loan debt, including
other steps to better address racial inequities
among borrowers. Republicans, on the other hand,
said the plan will burden taxpayers, including some
who haven't gone to college.
Here's how the plan will work:
* Borrowers with an individual income of less than
$125,000, or $250,000 for households, who received
Pell Grants, are eligible for up to $20,000 in federal
loan debt cancellation.
* Borrowers with an individual income of less than
$125,000, or $250,000 for households who did not
receive Pell Grants, are eligible for up to $10,000 in
federal loan debt cancellation.
* Relief is capped at outstanding debt. So, if you're
eligible for $20,000 in relief but your remaining balance
is only $15,000, you get $15,000 in relief.
Nearly 8 million borrowers may be eligible to receive
relief automatically, according to the U.S. Department
of Education. For others, an application
to provide income data to the department to determine
eligibility will be made available in the coming
weeks.
The Gap Between Teacher Pay and That of Other
Professions Hits a New High. How Bad Is It?
Teachers don't make as much money as their college-educated
peers in other professions-a widening gap that just
keeps getting worse.
In the latest analysis on teacher pay from the Economics
Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank supported partially
by teachers' unions, researchers found that in 2021, the socalled
" teacher pay penalty " reached a new high: Teachers
earn 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates.
In other words, on average, teachers earn 76.5 cents on the
dollar compared with what college graduates earned working
in other professions.
That's tough data to overcome at a time when many districts
across the country are struggling to hire enough teachers
and other education professionals to staff classrooms and
schools. Some districts and states have relaxed their minimum
requirements to address teacher shortages, including
opening the door to hiring people without bachelor's degrees.
Teachers
generally do get better benefits-namely, retirement
plans and health insurance-than other workers, but
it's not enough to fully offset the wage penalty, the EPI analysis
found. When benefits are factored in, the total compensation
penalty was 14.2 percent in 2021. The analysis-which
uses data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics--tracks
weekly wages to account for the fact that that many teachers
do not work in the summer months. Researchers also controlled
for factors such as age, state of residence, postgraduate
education levels, and race and/or ethnicity.
The widening salary gap between the teaching profession
and other careers requiring college degrees is already a big
impediment to recruiting more prospective teachers into the
pipeline, said Sylvia Allegretto, the author of the EPI report.
" Are we really attracting the best and the brightest into
teaching? " Allegretto said. " You have to do something very
bold and sustained to really start reversing these trends that
are making the teaching profession unattractive even for students
who want to be teachers but choose not to because they
know ... this is the lay of the land. "
Grief
Continues
Parents, students,
and families arrive
for a school board
meeting in Uvalde,
Texas, where board
members voted
unanimously to fire
Pete Arredondo,
the school district's
police chief.
Arredondo has faced
broad criticism for his
response to a mass
shooting at Robb
Elementary School.
Classroom Talk on Race and Gender Identity
Are Big Targets for Legislation
State legislative sessions in 2022 brought a wave of proposed
bills meant to restrict classroom lessons and discussions, as well
as staff training on the topics of race, racism, gender identity,
and sexual orientation.
In all, state lawmakers proposed 137 such bills, according to a
new analysis from PEN America. That's a 250 percent increase
over 2021 when 54 such bills were introduced. Just seven of
the bills proposed in 2022 were ultimately signed into law, the
analysis found.
Jeremy Young, the author of the PEN America analysis, predicts
this trend of legislation will continue in 2023.
" The main reason there's been such a dramatic increase is
simply a bandwagon effect for political reasons, " Young said.
" There is some evidence that these bills fire up the conservative
base and some, I would say, shakier evidence ... that these bills
can even appeal to swing voters. And because of that, where
previously these bills were being promoted mostly by people
who were very committed to the idea of censoring and restricting
public education, now, there is a lot of pressure on particularly
conservative lawmakers to support or sponsor or vote for
these bills. "
Momentum to regulate and restrict what schools and educators
can teach and discuss so-called " divisive topics " started in
early 2021 and focused almost exclusively on issues of race and
racism. The numbers of bills targeting other topics expanded
significantly in 2022.
Last year, only five bills targeted classroom instruction related
to LGBTQ+ issues and identities. This year, that number
increased to 23, the report found. Largely fueled by Florida's
" Don't Say Gay " bill and the attention it drew, lawmakers in
a few other states proposed similar measures. No others have
passed.
In its own analysis, Education Week has identified 42 states
where legislation has been introduced or other steps have been
taken to restrict teaching critical race theory or put constraints
on how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. Seventeen
states have imposed such restrictions or bans through new laws
or other policy actions.
BRIEFLY STATED CONTRIBUTORS: Ileana Najarro, Madeline Will, Eesha Pendharkar, Lauraine Langreo, and Williamena Kwapo. Edited by Lesli A. Maxwell.
2 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 31, 2022 | www.edweek.org
Eric Gay/AP

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Education Week - August 31, 2022

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