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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…

December 5, 2024

More High-Skill Immigration Is Popular. Let’s Act on That

This might be one of the most underappreciated facts of American public opinion: As controversial as the subject of immigration is, high-skill immigration isn’t controversial at all. A Pew Research Center poll in September found 71 percent of Donald Trump supporters and 87 percent of Kamala Harris supporters favored admitting more high-skilled immigrants. Likewise, a survey last summer from…

December 3, 2024

Avoiding an Unemployment Loan Bailout

Taxpayers in most states may have dodged a billion-dollar bullet on election day. That is, if the outcome had been different, liberal lawmakers would have been uniquely positioned to bail out California and New York unemployment benefit debts, and in the process shift large costs onto taxpayers in other states. All states levy payroll taxes…

November 25, 2024

Don’t Write Off Workforce Pell Grants

Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, a former administrator of the Small Business Administration, is a proponent of expanding Pell Grants to short-term workforce education programs. In a September op-ed, McMahon boosted the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which would allow students to use Pell Grants for high-quality workforce education programs as short as eight weeks in duration (the…

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 20, 2024

End Federal Loans for Graduate School

President-elect Donald Trump and his top advisors have announced plans to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a commission tasked with slashing wasteful spending throughout the federal budget. One place they could start is the federal student loan program. The federal government loses tens of billions of dollars per year on lending to graduate students, a…

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 7, 2024

Key Data on Federal Benefits Paid to Illegal Immigrant Households

Soaring illegal immigration during the Biden-Harris administration was a major campaign theme, with a pre-election Harvard poll finding Americans considered immigration the second-most important issue—right behind inflation and ahead of the economy. An AP exit poll seconded that ranking, with 39 percent of voters citing the economy as their top issue, followed by immigration at 20 percent—up from three…

November 4, 2024

Again, Tariffs Didn’t Make American Manufacturing Great

Nationalist/populist conservatives, including the Republican nominee, claim that US economic history supports their views of trade protectionism. Donald Trump says “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and that America “in the 1890s was probably the wealthiest it ever was” because of its tariff system. First, per capita GDP is, conservatively, seven times higher…

October 23, 2024

The College Enrollment Plunge Is the Biden Administration’s Disaster

The number of first-year students on America’s college campuses dropped five percent this fall, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s new enrollment estimates. The drop—which reverses last year’s four percent increase in freshman enrollment—is directly attributable to the Education Department’s bungled launch of a new financial aid application form, which prevented hundreds of thousands of students…