"The State of Working Pennsylvania 2022" centered on the continued recovery from the COVID-19 recession, highlighting that Pennsylvania was at a policy crossroads: would political leaders embrace policies to strengthen the individual and collective worker power evident a year ago? Or would austerity and anti-worker policies after the…

As we approach this Labor Day, the Pennsylvania economy is growing steadily. Working families are sharing in prosperity in a more sustained way than at any point since 1980--although many families still struggle to make ends meet and, in our polarized nation, a big partisan divide exists in perceptions of whether the economy is better than four…

This spotlight discusses the critical role of immigrants in the U.S. labor market and the importance of services that support their economic integration. Immigrants represent a significant and growing portion of the U.S. workforce and are essential for addressing labor market needs, especially in multilingual and diverse roles. The workforce…

Pennsylvania has a fragmented, underfunded high school career-related education system. This undercuts success in college and careers for hundreds of thousands of students annually, while exacerbating skill shortages for businesses and throttling Pennsylvania's economy. Pennsylvania also has a legislature that supports career-related education on…

America's labor market presents a paradox. Although the unemployment rate is just 3.9%, there are more jobs open than people who can fill them. Nationwide, there are roughly 68 workers for every 100 open jobs. Many factors contribute to this workforce shortage, but one of the most significant is a growing skills gap -- millions of workers across…

Many often identified the Catholic Church with the cause of labor and worker's rights in the United States. However that was not the common situation encountered by laborers throughout most of the nineteenth century. The proclamation of the social encyclicals: Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) and Pope Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno (1931)…

This research is a qualitative, phenomenological study of the lived experiences of special education administrators within Intermediate Unit 08 in Pennsylvania. Through the reported lived experiences, the researcher developed motivation and hygiene themes from participant response that may impact retention and attrition within the field of special…

Turnover in the US early childhood education (ECE) workforce is associated with worse outcomes for children. Greater workplace spirituality, or the perception of meaningful work, sense of community, and alignment with organizational values, is associated with reduced turnover. However, this association has not been examined in ECE professionals.…

The current brief provides an overview of the 2021-2022 school year student-to-school psychologist ratio for every United States territory, using the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) counts of school psychologists. In addition to this, data are presented on the percentage change in student-to-school psychologist ratio from the…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented economic and policy challenges to the United States and other countries. Navigating out of the pandemic slowdown is another novel experience, which makes it more difficult to answer the question addressed each year in the "State of Working Pennsylvania": How is the Pennsylvania economy…

This phenomenological qualitative study focused on the perceptions and lived experiences of special education directors in Pennsylvania in relationship to job satisfaction and retention in public school districts. This study analyzed data collected from participants through semi-structured interviews. The study engaged with six participants from…

Traditionally, academic institutions have relied on interviews with industry representatives and alumni surveys to gauge market demand, an approach that often results in dated and limited information. In this article, we show that using real-time data from job postings in professional sites provides more direct, rich, and timely insights regarding…

There are nearly 1 million credentials in the United States that students and workers can take advantage of, but how information about these credentials is collected and communicated is oftentimes inconsistent and hard to access. In February, we invited a group of postsecondary and workforce development experts to consider how policymakers can…

We tested an emotional labor (EL) model, in the form of surface acting and deep acting, as a mediator in the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and burnout as experienced by public school principals. A questionnaire survey of public-school principals in a Pennsylvania County was used to collect data. Data was analyzed using…

This playbook provides ways in which Governors and teams can blur the lines between high school, postsecondary education, and the workforce. Governors play a significant role to Raise the Bar for student success by developing an "education-to-workforce system" that focuses on Unlocking Career Success.