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November 15, 2024

Calibration: Making AI a Partner at Work

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the workforce, yet the workers who stand to benefit the most are often the most wary of it. Lower-skilled and less-educated workers view AI as a threat, fearing job loss and marginalization. But research tells a different story. These workers could gain the most from AI—if they learn to use…

November 15, 2024

JD Vance is Right: Reduce the Power of Big Foundations to Help Charity

In his 2021 campaign for Senate, JD Vance, now vice-president-elect, minced no words in expressing his disdain for two of America’s largest private, philanthropic institutions: the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundations.   Both are, he said, “fundamentally cancers on American society but they pretend to be charities, so they benefit from preferential tax treatment.” Their endowments, he continued,…

November 14, 2024

The Rotting of the College Board

n 1947, the College Board opened an office in Berkeley, California. Previously, from the turn of the century onward, the organization had been administering entrance examinations for schools in the Northeast, and in 1926 it created and began using the original Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. The Board’s western expansion after World War II was…

November 14, 2024

Florida, the Forgotten Education-Reform Star

Around the turn of the millennium, Florida was widely regarded as a pace-setter in education reform. Led by then-Governor Jeb Bush, the Sunshine State implemented an outcomes-driven agenda focused on prioritizing literacy, holding schools accountable, and expanding school choice, among other agenda items. The success of these reforms garnered national attention, with significant gains seen in student performance,…

November 13, 2024

How Trump Might Fulfill His Higher-Education Campaign Promises

Donald Trump has won a decisive election victory and will take office next year as the 47th president of the United States. As of this writing, his party will hold at least 52 seats in the U.S. Senate and will probably control the House of Representatives. The results should afford President-elect Trump plenty of opportunity to enact…

November 12, 2024

The National Assessment of Educational Progress Recompete: Is It Real Change or Lipstick on a Pig?

Key Points Read the PDF. The American government runs on contracts between government agencies and private companies (both for- and not-for-profit).1 When things go awry, it is often because a long-term incumbent contractor lacked the incentive to provide more cost-effective services or accountability for a poor product, both of which have been made clear by the…

November 12, 2024

Government Contracting for “America’s Report Card” Is Broken

If you tried to apply for federal student aid this 2024–2025 school year, you would have been met with a glitch-filled online form created using 40-year-old code, released three months behind schedule, and that might have arrived too late for a college to offer you the aid you applied for. This failure of the Education Department and…

November 12, 2024

Irresistible Policy, Meet the Unmovable Labor Market

Gad Levanon, chief economist at The Burning Glass Institute, analyzed data relating to the share of undocumented workers in a wide variety of trades and lower-wage, lower-skilled occupations, as well as higher-skilled jobs in construction and manufacturing. Bear in mind that many of these occupations are related to housing, the largest contributor to our recent bout of high…

November 10, 2024

The Risks of Nonprofit Local Journalism

The decision of Washington Post owner/Amazon founder Jeff Bezos not to allow the paper’s editorial board to endorse a presidential candidate has stirred disappointment cum outrage among the paper’s readers — some 250,000 have gone so far as to cancel their subscriptions. Bezos, with the deepest of pockets, was once viewed as the Post’s savior — now he’s the devil in…

November 9, 2024

NYC Safe Injection Sites Reduce OD Deaths—but Not in the Worst Neighborhoods

There is a glimmer—the slightest bright spot—of good news about drug overdoses in New York. The city’s Health Department reports that overdose deaths in 2023 declined compared to the previous year—but they fell just one percent, from 3,070 to 3,046.  A close look at that number reveals not only is it tiny, but that an important indicator…