All Research

May 13, 2024

Do Mothers Have “Societal Support”? Does It Count if It Comes from Neighbors?

It is an annual tradition, for some reason, for folks on social media to dump all over Mother’s Day. Some on the fringe decide it’s sexist or cisnormative or something to believe only women can be mothers or that mothers are special. The abortion lobby hates the idea that womanhood is associated with motherhood. But last year, I stumbled across an anti-Mother’s…

By Timothy P. Carney

May 9, 2024

The Federal Student Loan Program Is Unraveling

The Biden administration recently announced its most ambitious attempt yet at student debt forgiveness. Taken together with the series of initiatives the administration has already pushed forward, the new plans promise to reduce or eliminate student debt for more than 30 million borrowers. Unfortunately, the debt-cancellation campaign fails to address the underlying problems with student lending — and such efforts at mass forgiveness only…

By Beth Akers | Preston Cooper | Joe Pitts

May 9, 2024

State Housing Bills Are Dead; Time for Local Leaders to Step Up

While two statewide bills in Minnesota that would allow for missing middle housing everywhere and more dense housing in commercial zones have stalled, local officials remain acutely aware of housing affordability issues. Fortunately, they do not need to wait to take effective and immediate action. Many cities have traditionally been laser-focused on economic growth, while adding…

By Tobias Peter

May 8, 2024

Beltway Liberals Are Playing Name Games to Expand the Welfare State

Higher prices aren’t the only kind of inflation coming out of Washington these days. Wildly inflated group names are on the rise, too — and they’re being used as a tool to expand government welfare benefits given even to able-bodied adults without dependents. That’s the term long used by the Department of Agriculture to describe those in their prime working years…

By Matt Weidinger

May 6, 2024

Generation Z Has Problems Compared to Past Generations, but Money Isn’t One

If you ask why these privileged college students are bringing their campuses to a halt over an issue that has almost nothing to do with their universities, the answer is likely to expand beyond Gaza into a story of a broader struggle and trauma this generation has endured. This contention, that Generation Z has grown up in a uniquely…

By Timothy P. Carney

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…

By Howard Husock

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…

By Robert Pondiscio

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…

By Frederick M. Hess | Michael Q. McShane

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,…

By W. Bradford Wilcox

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…