Pay isn’t the only issue for striking teachers, write Daarel Burnette II and Madeline Will in Education Week. In Kentucky, teachers are worried about a new law changing the underfunded pension system. Teacher retirement systems are shaky across the country, they write. Teachers’ pension debt today tops out nationally at more than $516 billion, and states such as Connecticut, Illinois, and Michigan project they won’t have enough money within the next decade to pay teachers wha

uses job-market data to help students plan their futures, reports Catherine Gewertz in Education Week. Students at iLEAD Academy understand the regional job market, she writes. “They can tell you how much they’ll make as an entry-level robotics technician and whether the pay differential between an associate degree and a bachelor’s degree in that field justifies a four-year-college investment.” Superintendents of five districts near the Indiana border opened iLEAD as an “earl

Collective bargaining doesn’t improve teacher pay, according to a new study, reports Madeline Will on Ed Week. Thirty-three states passed mandatory collective bargaining laws since the 1960s. Those states do typically have higher teacher salaries and higher per-pupil education spending, but they already did so “well before the emergence of collective bargaining rights or modern teacher unions,” the study found. States offered collective-bargaining rights to weaken public-sect

“Free college” programs should include tuition-free apprenticeships, writes New America’s Iris Palmer. Arkansas, Kentucky, and Indiana try to predict “what kind of employees the labor market is going to need,” she writes. Arkansas’ ArFuture program supports certificate and associate’s degrees that are either related to science, technology, engineering, and math or address identified regional areas of high need. Kentucky’s Work Ready Scholarship program pays for a number of in

“Segregating” refugees may help them integrate, suggests the Hechinger Report’s Meredith Kolodner. Bowling Green, Kentucky has opened a special “international” high school for newly arrived refugees and immigrants next to a comprehensive high school. Faris Nakhal, 18, who survived a kidnapping in Syria, chose to attend GEO International High with “Somali, Iraqi, Burmese, Bhutanese, Ethiopian and Latin American teenagers,” writes Kolodner. Many of his classmates also had fled