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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…

March 20, 2025

To Transform K-12 Education, the Trump Administration Should Measure What Matters

When the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) was first administered in 1969, nearly nine out of 10 American children were born into married, two-parent homes. By 2023, this number had decreased to six out of 10 children on average, with wide variations across racial groups. Stunning disparities in married, two-parent households by race tightly correlate with disparities in child poverty, domestic violence, and father absence—all…

March 19, 2025

What Can We Learn from Louisiana’s Progress in K–12 Education?

The 2024 National Assessment for Educational Progress results revealed a nation in academic decline, with scores “below pre-pandemic levels . . . in ALL tested grades and subjects,” according to the National Assessment Governing Board. Louisiana, however, is an outlier: It was one of only two states that experienced growth over its pre-pandemic levels in fourth-grade…

March 14, 2025

A Historic Opportunity for Higher Education Reform 

Once a sleepy policy area on the national scale, higher education is now a central issue making headlines in the overall political discourse.   Believe it or not, the education policy divides between mainstream Democrats and Republicans used to be trivial. For example, 10 years ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) proposal to lower student loan interest rates to 3.9…

March 12, 2025

Why Alabama Needs The Success Sequence

“The American Dream is beyond my reach.” This is increasingly the view that many young men and women take regarding the long-held belief that anyone can succeed in the United States. In fact, over half of young adults today believe the American Dream is no longer within their reach. What many of them do not know is that…

March 10, 2025

Many Children Left Behind: The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress Results Indicate a Five-Alarm Fire

Key Points  Introduction By now, the awful results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)1 have been publicized, chewed over, and digested—and they are already moving into the rearview mirror as states, school districts, and teachers fall back into the comfortable routine of doing the same thing over and over again.  But continuing that…

February 24, 2025

A Conservative Vision for Higher Education Reform

Key Points Introduction The year 2019 marked a dramatic turning point in the national discourse on higher education policy. On April 22, 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren, vying for the Democratic nomination for president, announced that as president she’d cancel up to $50,000 of student debt for 42 million Americans.1 She started a chain reaction, with each…

February 24, 2025

A Glut of MBAs?

It’s all about the skills, not the credentials. You know the labor market times are changing when Harvard MBAs start showing up in the unemployment stories. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, 23 percent of recent Harvard Business School grads were still looking for work three months after graduation. In 2022, that figure was only 10 percent….

February 7, 2025

Low-Performing Students Fall Farther Behind the Pack

On January 29, the National Assessment of Education Progress, NAEP, released results from its 2024 assessment. This latest installment of the self-styled “Nation’s Report Card” makes depressing reading. Indeed, if it weren’t for bad news, there would be hardly any news at all. The previous 2022 NAEP results were bad—but they could be blamed on…