Fast Fact

In South Korea and Germany, starting salaries for teachers are about 141% of per capita GDP, while the figure for the United States is only 81%; in fact, all countries in this sample pay their teachers a significantly higher relative wage as a starting salary compared to the United States.

With one day of Iraq War funding we could have hired 6,921 new public school teachers for a year.

With one day of Iraq War funding we could have sent 6,883 high school graduates to four fully funded years at
public universities.

The Bush tax cuts for households with annual incomes above $1 million will cost more than the federal government spent last year on K-12 and vocational education. The cuts will exceed the combined budgets of the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

State colleges raised tuitions rose at three times the rate of inflation between 2000 and 2006, putting college out of reach of many families.

The American Lung Association reported that “American children missed more than 12 million school days in 2000 because of asthma exacerbated by poor indoor air quality”.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave America’s school infrastructure a “D”.

Every dollar invested in early childhood education yields seven times that in savings, with less need for special ed, welfare and criminal justice services.

Only 70% of entering freshmen and barely half of students of color finish high school with a regular diploma four years later. Every school day, nearly 7,000 American high school students become dropouts.

Nearly half of all teachers leave the profession during their first five years.