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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 Pelican State was the only state in the nation that outperformed its pre-pandemic 4th grade reading scores on the 2024 NAEP. Over the past two…

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.” This message from Prevent Child Abuse America goes on to explain that child abuse is the result of families’ lack of financial resources — a…

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 suggests that the tariffs — which are taxes on imported goods — could be as large as 2 percent of annual GDP. This tax increase…

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 mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani has also adopted a platform of terrible ideas. His campaign materials portray him as a Robin…

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 children are heartened. “There have been more net positives than any negatives that show up,” Brandon Logan, executive director of the Texas nonprofit One Accord…

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 proficient level, a number that’s barely budged in decades. Even in states like Mississippi and Louisiana, which have earned national attention thanks to literacy reforms that have…

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 the rest of the city’s sprawling, dilapidated public housing system. From July 2023 to July 2024, the 2,070 apartments making up the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea…

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 Domestic Product, 1940-2054 You’re looking at how sizeable federal debt has been and will be relative to gross domestic product (GDP). From 1960 to 2008, the federal debt held by…

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 effect, for four and a half years. Though well-intentioned, the pause and its repeated extensions may go down as one of the worst mistakes in…

March 21, 2025

Increasing Financial Aid Isn’t the Solution to High College Costs

Harvard University recently announced it would make tuition free for students from families earning below $200,000—but for middle-class students not lucky enough to receive a Harvard acceptance letter, college tuition is still far too expensive. As a solution, many have proposed significant increases in taxpayer-funded financial aid to reduce or even eliminate tuition for many students. This…