Tell the Senate: Expand the Child Tax Credit now and reject attacks on low-income families
Cynical Senators are playing politics with the Child Tax Credit―and with the lives of millions of families with young children.
Some members of the Senate are lining up to block a tax package that will benefit 16 million children in lower-income families via an expanded CTC, despite a broad bipartisan House vote. Why? For some, the answer is simple: pure politics.
Expanding the Child Tax Credit is popular and is proven to dramatically reduce child poverty levels. So why are some members of the Senate trying so hard to stop the Senate from moving forward on this bipartisan package, and kill the CTC with poison pill amendments? Maybe because they think they can get a bill with more corporate tax breaks and a weaker CTC in the next Congress. Or maybe they don’t want to hand President Biden a legislative victory on an issue he has consistently championed. Whatever the reason, they are denying low-income families with children a bigger refund check just as millions of families are filing their taxes. We need Congress to act by the end of April to make it easier for people to receive a higher CTC as soon as possible. That’s why we are holding Senators accountable to take up this bipartisan tax package now.
The expanded Child Tax Credit included in the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act would lift 400,000 children out of poverty in tax year 2023, rising to 500,000 above the poverty line in 2025. It would also add much needed income to about 16 millionchildren in families struggling to meet basic needs.
Click “START WRITING” to send a message to your Senators right now and urge them to reject the stalling tactics of politicians playing political games and pass the expanded Child Tax Credit for low-income families before the end of tax season. Children and families need help now!
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CHN’s COVID-19 Watch: Tracking Hardship, September 2, 2022
The back-to-school edition. Kids are returning to classrooms, but we find students, teachers, and schools themselves in a pandemic-related crisis. For students, the damage that has been done became more apparent than ever this past Thursday, September 1, when new data revealed just how big a hit students took academically during the pandemic’s first two years. New test results from the National Assessment for Educational Progress, often called the “nation’s report card,” showed students of all income levels and ethnicities on average fared much worse in early 2022 than they did in early 2020, just before the pandemic. But students from families with low incomes and Black and Hispanic students fared even worse.
Teachers too are in crisis – many are leaving the profession. They cite pandemic stress, low pay, and, increasingly, a developing culture war that threatens to restrict what they can teach in the classroom – restrictions that in some cases include mention of LGBTQ issues or America’s history of racism.
School districts are hurtling toward budget crises – this is due in part to the coming phasing out of pandemic relief to schools and due to declines in enrollment. Since school funding is tied to enrollment, cities that have experienced the sharpest declines are contemplating four-day school weeks, combining classrooms, laying off teachers or shutting down entire schools. Experts warn of an approaching “Armageddon” for public schools by about 2024. “Federal (relief) money is delaying it a year or two, and the fact that state budgets are healthy is delaying it a year or two,” saidMarguerite Roza, Director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “Federal money will run out, and enrollment for some of them isn’t going to come back. These cost factors are going to just slam down on people.”
In two nationwide tests of 9-year-olds, one administered just before the pandemic and the other administered two years later, math scores dropped by 7 points and reading scores dropped by 5 points. Math scores for Black students fell 13 points, compared with 8 points for Hispanic students and 5 points for White students. Tweet this.
Nearly 300,000
The U.S. faces a shortageof nearly 300,000 teachers and support staff, according to the National Education Association. Some states are particularly hard hit, with 2,000 teacher vacancies in Illinois and Arizona, 3,000 in Nevada, and 9,000 in Florida. Tweet this.
-600,000
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 10.6 million educators working in public education in January 2020, before the pandemic hit. As of earlier this year, that number had dropped to 10 million, a net loss of 600,000. Tweet this.
-23.5%
New research released in late August by the Economic Policy Institute found that teachers made 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates in 2021. That’s the widest gap ever. And salaries have essentially flatlined since 1996. The average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted only for inflation) increased just $29 from 1996 to 2021, from $1,319 to $1,348. In contrast, inflation-adjusted wages of other college graduates rose from $1,564 to $2,009 over the same period – a $445 increase. Tweet this.
55%
The percentof educators who are thinking about leaving the profession, according to a survey released earlier this year by the National Education Association. That represents a huge increase over the 37 percent who said they were thinking about leaving when NEA conducted a previous survey in 2021. The 2022 survey found that a disproportionate number of Black educators (62 percent) and Hispanic/Latino educators (59 percent) were thinking about leaving. Tweet this.
-3%
From fall 2019 to fall 2020, total public school enrollment for pre-K through 12th grade dropped 3 percent, from 50.8 million to 49.4 million students. It was the largest single-year decline since 1943.
-14%
In fall 2020, 40 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled in public schools – a 14 percentage point drop from the 54 percent who were enrolled in the fall of 2019.
340,000
Across the U.S., more than 1 million students who were expected to enroll in public schools did not show up. Of this population, a startling 340,000 were kindergarten students. A study shows that the largest kindergarten declines were in neighborhoods just below and just above the poverty line – the enrollment decline was 28 percent greater in those neighborhoods than in the rest of the country.
146/114
School shootings rosefrom 114 in 2019-2020, the first year of the pandemic, to 146 in the 2020-21 school year.
$168
With inflation, parents are expected to spend $168 more on back-to-school supplies than they did in the pre-pandemic summer/fall of 2019, according to the National Retail Foundation’s annual survey. Had the expanded Child Tax Credit been extended, it could have easily covered the extra cost. Instead, Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) allowed it to expire in December.
September 2, 2022 