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May 4, 2024

Make Parents Pay for Kids Who Miss School To Curb Chronic School Absenteeism

The COVID pandemic has ebbed, but one of its most damaging long-term effects has not. Chronic school absenteeism — collateral damage from students accustomed to staying home for alleged online learning — persists across the country. In New York City, a stunning four in 10 students — some 353,000 — were chronically absent, for the last full school year…

May 2, 2024

A New Lost Generation: Disengaged, Aimless, and Adrift

More than a quarter of America’s school-aged children were absent from school 10 percent or more of the time last year. There’s no shortage of explanations on offer for this surge in “chronic absenteeism,” mostly blaming the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath: lockdowns; lowered expectation; health and hardship; bullying and school safety issues. Remote learning…

May 2, 2024

Q&A: A Conservative Vision for Education

We just published a new book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College. As the title makes clear, we unabashedly make the case for a conservative approach to education. But we think it’s important to clarify the kind of “conservatism” we have in mind. We’re not talking about politics. We’re not politicos…

May 2, 2024

Lives Cut Short: A Project to Document Child Maltreatment Fatalities

Every year, at least 2,000 children die of maltreatment. Many of the adults responsible for their deaths were known to child welfare services or law enforcement before the fatal incident occurred. Unfortunately, state governments fail to count many of these deaths or release information that would help determine their causes. Why is this? How can…

May 1, 2024

Getting Higher Education Right

Higher education has a vital role to play when it comes to safeguarding the store of human knowledge, promoting scientific inquiry, and teaching wisdom to the next generation of civic and community leaders. But rising costs, bureaucratic bloat, double standards, and campus sloth have come to plague America’s colleges and erode Americans’ faith in them….

May 1, 2024

The closing of the American heart

In the late 1990s, I began my study of marriage and family as a graduate student at Princeton University “for the sake of the children.” Then, I was concerned that our nation’s retreat from this core institution since the 1960s was harming children. And at that point, the share of children residing with their married,…

April 30, 2024

I’m a Conservative But Defunding NPR Is a Mistake. What Should Happen Instead Might Be Surprising

The liberal political and cultural bias of National Public Radio has moved center-stage, thanks to the Free Press essay by Uri Berliner, the former NPR editor who resigned earlier this month. In his essay he correctly observed that NPR news both caters to and reflect “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US…

April 29, 2024

New “Scorecard” Report Promotes Better Use of Data to Prevent Unemployment Fraud

Criminals inflicted unprecedented fraud on taxpayer benefits during the pandemic, and some of the most abused programs were those that provided temporary federal unemployment benefits. As we documented in a January 2024 report (Pandemic Unemployment Fraud in Context: Causes, Costs, and Solutions), official government tallies of improper payments and fraud stretch toward $200 billion, while unofficial estimates…

April 26, 2024

Washington, District of Benefit Cliffs

As the welfare state expands while policymakers struggle to contain its costs, one unintended result is the creation of significant benefit cliffs. A little-noticed September 2023 report authored by Elias Ilin and Alvaro Sanchez of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (“Mitigating Benefits Cliffs for Low-Income Families: District of Columbia Career Mobility Action Plan as a Case Study”) explains…