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March 25, 2025
Less Than Half of Student Borrowers Are Paying Their Loans
Student loan payments have been due for six months now—yet no one seems to have told the students. The federal government effectively suspended payments on student loans for four and a half years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading many borrowers to lose touch with their loan servicers and disengage from the repayment system. False promises of loan cancellation…
March 25, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: IES, Workforce Skills, and State Leadership
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has taken a hit from DOGE, losing about 90 percent of its workforce. Regardless of the future of the Education Department, we need to continue to improve education R&D and identify what in IES should be preserved, or indeed expanded, to meet the nation’s needs today and in the…
January 6, 2025
Congress Can Block Student Loan Cancellation—Forever
Over the holiday season, the Biden administration withdrew two pending regulations to unilaterally cancel hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of student loans. Officials evidently judged that the administration would not have time to finalize and implement the new regulations before the Trump administration takes over. For the time being, loan cancellation by executive action is dead. But a…
December 18, 2024
Employers Should Drop Hiring Preferences for “Elite 34” Colleges
How do you know if someone went to Harvard? They’ll tell you. If a recent Wall Street Journal story is any indication, though, that classic joke may soon be outdated. According to the Journal, some employers have dropped hiring preferences for graduates of elite universities—and a few even consider an Ivy League degree a black mark. The cases…
December 11, 2024
US Students Best Other Nations—in Achievement Gap Growth
US scores on the 2023 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are another sign not only that American students are losing ground in math and science, but that the achievement gap between high-performers and low-performers has grown dramatically. As I wrote a couple days ago, these trends started well before the pandemic and are…
December 9, 2024
TIMSS Shows the Bottom Is Falling Out for US Test Scores
Last week’s release of 2023 scores from the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)—an international assessment measuring fourth and eighth graders in math and science—offers a fresh look at the academic performance of US and international students. The results are grim. Three things stand out. First (and perhaps not surprisingly), the pandemic harmed student…
November 21, 2024
A Consensus on Common-Sense Education Reform
Is common ground possible in an age of extreme polarization? Perhaps! “Toward a Potential Grand Bargain for the Nation” is a new report by a group of experts from think tanks and academia meant to share consensus “policies in each of these areas: economic growth and mobility; education; environment; health; taxes; and the federal budget.”…
November 19, 2024
We Aren’t Testing Students on the Computer Skills They Actually Need
The results of the 2023 International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) were just released. ICILS is given to a sample of eighth-grade students and is supposed to measure their ability to use information and communications technology. Including the United States, 35 education systems worldwide participated in the study of “computer and information literacy,” while a subset…
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…