Meeting students' basic food and nutrition requirements is an essential role of public schools and critical to student learning. Yet as with other support services in schools -- such as transportation and janitorial services -- school boards or school administrators who are worried about the bottom line may turn to outside companies to manage or…

"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…

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…

Pennsylvania has two programs that give tax money to private schools: the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs. Each year, EITC and OSTC provide $230 million to private scholarship organizations, or "SOs," which award tuition vouchers to families whose children attend…

The United States and Pennsylvania economies are at a pivot point: Will we build forward better or will we build back the same? Will we make things even worse? This report revisits the policy choices that lie ahead. Most of this annual checkup on the Pennsylvania economy, the 26th "State of Working Pennsylvania," presents labor market…

Apprenticeship is a learning model and a proven strategy for (1) developing a talented and trained pipeline of workers for employers; and (2) expanding family supporting careers for individuals not pursuing a traditional four-year college track (without foreclosing their opportunities to pursue college down the road). Yet in Pennsylvania, as in…

Tom Wilson, the chair of the executive committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published an op-ed titled "Save Capitalism by Paying People More." Wilson acknowledges in blunt terms that ordinary working Americans are not flourishing economically. This year's annual "The State of Working Pennsylvania" documents the accuracy of…

Pennsylvania's public schools employ tens of thousands of support professionals -- bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians, maintenance workers, secretaries, paraprofessionals, and others. Due to fiscal challenges that many local districts face, school administrators often look to achieve savings and flexibility by outsourcing the provision of…

This is the first report of a Keystone Research Center project on the "Future of Work." The aim is to identify public policies that could help ensure that the application and diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) over the next several decades fosters an economy in which Americans generally thrive. The project is motivated, in part,…

Raising incomes and increasing opportunity hinges critically on access to post-secondary education and training. If Pennsylvania does not expand access to higher education to more of its citizens, the authors argue, the Commonwealth's economy will suffer and living standards will lag growth elsewhere. With a modest and smart investment,…

"The State of Working Pennsylvania 2018," Keystone Research Center's 23rd annual review of the Pennsylvania economy and labor market finds that, nearly a decade into the current national economic expansion, many Pennsylvania workers are still waiting for a raise. The report points to three factors that help explain this. First, despite…

Each Labor Day the Keystone Research Center releases an annual checkup on the health of the Pennsylvania labor market, "The State of Working Pennsylvania." The 2018 edition focused on state-level data, mostly available through June 2018. This addendum to that report focuses on 2017 data released last month by the Census Bureau on incomes…

Far from providing relief for working families, recent proposals to eliminate school property taxes in Pennsylvania would increase taxes on the middle class while sabotaging the chance to adequately fund Pennsylvania schools for middle- and low-income families. This report provides the first estimates of the impact of property tax elimination…

The 14 four-year universities within Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education have been a pivotal engine of upward mobility for working families in Pennsylvania for decades. Today, the role of these schools in making the American Dream a reality for a hundred thousand Pennsylvanians each generation is threatened. Deep cuts in state funding…

Pennsylvania's public four-year colleges currently confront a funding and enrollment crisis, with three of the most distressed Universities in northern and western Pennsylvania regions that lack community colleges. This crisis presents Pennsylvania, and its state legislators: do they want to continue the policies of the past three decades, which…