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April 24, 2025

It’s About Time: Bring Back Those Student Loan Collections 

This week, the Department of Education announced that on May 5 it will begin collecting on defaulted student loans. This will be the first time since March 2020 that borrowers who have…

April 4, 2025

How One State Improved Its NAEP Scores

The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress results had a lot of bad news, but there were some scattered bright spots. Louisiana was one of them. In fact, the…

April 3, 2025

The dangerous myth that poverty is the cause of child abuse

Why does child abuse happen? A new public service announcement says most people think it’s a “bad parent problem,” but the ad suggests “the root causes may be different than you think.”…

April 3, 2025

Trump’s Tariffs Are a Historic Tax Hike

If implemented, the tariffs announced yesterday by President Trump would constitute the largest tax increase since the 1968 levies to fund the Vietnam War. The details will matter, but my back-of-the-envelope calculation…

April 1, 2025

Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani’s Dangerous Radicalism on Child Welfare

Socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has made a splash in the race for New York City mayor. A relentless social media campaign has helped him raise big dollars, despite his long-shot odds against incumbent…

April 1, 2025

Did Maltreatment Fatalities in Texas Really Decline?

A drop in the number of children entering foster care and fatalities due to abuse in Texas is, on its face, welcome news, and some stakeholders in the well-being of…

March 28, 2025

Cracking the Code Behind Dismal 8th Grade Reading Scores

The most recent round of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results delivered a familiar gut punch: Just 30 percent of eighth graders in the United States read at or above the…

March 28, 2025

Unfreezing New York’s Projects

The imposing brick blocks covering much of the territory from West 16th to 27th Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, superficially have much in common with…

March 27, 2025

The Looming Debt Crisis, the Trump Tax Cuts, and Medicaid

Let’s start with a chart to understand the dire fiscal situation we are in as a nation. Figure 1. Federal Debt Held by the Public as a Share of Gross…

March 24, 2025

The Student Loan Payment Pause Was a Catastrophic Mistake

In March 2020, as America shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed a law suspending federal student loan payments for six months. The payment pause ended up lasting, in…