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April 24, 2025
Not Local Enough: The Montgomery County Public Schools Case
The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which parents from Montgomery County, Maryland, challenged the public school system for the right to opt their young children out from exposure to books on LGBT themes. The case appears, on the surface, to reverse long-standing views of the role of local government. Randi Weingarten, president of the…
October 10, 2024
Do Liberal Arts Colleges Pay Off? What the Data Say
Going to a liberal arts college is usually an expensive way to get a bachelor’s degree. With students more mindful of high tuition, many liberal arts colleges are seeing enrollment drop—and some are closing altogether. The schools’ defenders argue that their small class sizes and well-rounded array of courses provide students with a strong foundation on…
January 31, 2024
Long COVID for Public Schools: Chronic Absenteeism Before and After the Pandemic
Key Points Read the PDF.
January 29, 2024
The Value of a Bachelor’s Degree
Key Points As public confidence in higher education has declined, Americans have become less sanguine about the bachelor’s degree and skeptical of its potential return on investment. Nonetheless, four-year degrees continue to be associated with significant economic and noneconomic benefits for individuals and communities. For those who want to attend college, have adequate financing options, and can finish their degrees, the benefits of…
January 24, 2024
It’s National School Choice Week. Democrats: What Do You Think?
This week is National School Choice Week, which makes it a good time to ponder the state of the school choice coalition. During the Clinton–Bush school reform era, broad swaths of the public—both Republicans and Democrats—supported charter schools and different forms of public school choice. However, private school choice has long been a primarily Republican…
January 19, 2024
The Case for Curriculum
Since A Nation at Risk, Education Reform Efforts Have Mostly Stopped at the Classroom Door Executive Summary Decades of education reform have left policymakers, educators, and students alike fatigued and unimpressed. From standardized testing to accountability measures and smaller classroom sizes, almost every idea under the sun has been tried and tried again, except for one:…
January 19, 2024
Ninety Percent Student Attendance Won’t Solve Chronic Absenteeism
One day after Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona presented the Biden administration’s “Improving Student Achievement Agenda,” which appropriately focused on the unprecedented chronic absenteeism rates in US public schools, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released data under the headline, “Public School Leaders Report 90 Percent Average Daily Student Attendance Rate in November 2023.”…
January 18, 2024
Evidence Mounts That Pre-K Harms Kids
You know you’re making progress in an education policy debate when education professors and journalists start printing what used to be a conservative counter-argument as an unfortunate and perplexing fact. Last week, Education Week published an article titled: “Preschool Studies Show Lagging Result. Why?” The lede notes that although studies from the 1960s and 1970s showed strong positive…
January 11, 2024
Biden’s Dismantling of Federal Student Loan Programs Has Inspired Republicans to Go Big
House Republicans released a new legislative package today aimed at bringing down the cost of college, holding universities accountable for the value of their diplomas, and reforming our broken federal student lending system. The College Cost Reduction Act represents the largest serious and comprehensive higher education reform package in decades and, in theory, has plenty…
October 16, 2023
Serve Students, Not Institutions
More than 20,000 physical therapists left the profession in 2021 alone, notes a recent report. It’s therefore hard to imagine why anyone would want to discourage universities from offering more physical therapy programs to help renew the ranks. Unfortunately, that’s just what the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) did recently when it voted to stop…