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December 2, 2024
Key Points Executive Summary Higher education suffers from barriers to entry. Though the ranks of students at traditional colleges have grown by 29 percent over the past three decades, the number of active institutions has declined. Four in five students today attend an institution that was founded before 1970, and virtually none attend a school…
October 16, 2024
Key Points Read the full pdf. Introduction America is becoming worse at connecting workers with jobs—in part because it is unnecessarily difficult to offer and access education and training that could prepare students for a career. Two decades ago, there were just over three million open jobs, and it took, on average, fewer than 20…
August 1, 2024
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March 21, 2024
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May 25, 2023
Summary Pursuing new, commonsense approaches to education reform and work–family policies, from childcare and early education through higher education and workforce flexibility, will foster the conditions for family flourishing and increase birth rates for married couples. Affordable childcare from a variety of providers, including at-home options, access to high-quality K–12 education that reflects a family’s…
February 23, 2023
Policymakers and practitioners can do only so much to solve any problem without a clear, unbiased view of the underlying causes. Educators today have failed to improve student achievement largely because we use an inadequate conceptual framework to understand poor academic performance. The prevailing national lens for interpreting student progress or lack of it is…
February 22, 2023
Editor’s Note: The following chapters are AEI scholars’ contributions to a report from Opportunity America’s working group on K-12 education. The toll of the pandemic years is becoming clearer every day: devastating learning loss among the nation’s K-12 students. Parents are angry, voting for change and telling pollsters they want more control over their children’s…
February 22, 2023
Editor’s Note: The following chapters are AEI scholars’ contributions to a report from Opportunity America’s working group on K-12 education. The toll of the pandemic years is becoming clearer every day: devastating learning loss among the nation’s K-12 students. Parents are angry, voting for change and telling pollsters they want more control over their children’s…
November 28, 2022
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary We examine how COVID-related reopening policies during the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years affected enrollment in public school districts. We use difference-in-differences and event study designs to estimate plausibly causal effects of different reopening policies on public school enrollment. Consistent with prior research, we find that public school…
August 10, 2022
Key Points From September 2021 to late February 2022, school district mask mandates were in place for 61 percent of students in the US.During that period, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance advised all students and teachers to mask indoors, with no flexibility based on local conditions.On February 25, 2022, the CDC adopted…