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 17, 2025
How State Policymakers Can Save the Nuclear Family
Blue states are better for families. That is what many academics contend. In their classic book “Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture,” law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone argue that blue states have the liberal values and policies they believe make for strong and stable families. Scholars like…
March 17, 2025
Progressives Are Starting to Come Around on the Importance of Marriage and Fatherhood
Progressives and conservatives rarely agree. But there’s a growing consensus about this one data point: America’s men are not OK. This isn’t exactly a political phenomenon — although men are changing politically, too. Last summer, economist Tyler Cowen detected a “vibe shift” in American culture, noting people were drifting rightward. Among his 19 reasons for the shift,…
March 17, 2025
Trump Should Put an End to Rent Control
We are in a time when what would have seemed to be unimaginable domestic policy changes — from the abolition of the Department of Education to cutoffs of federal support for universities — are on the table. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is involved in this creative destruction — having pulled back a Biden-era program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which tied federal assistance for…
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 12, 2025
Stop and Go
Automated driving is picking up speed. Several years ago there was a bit of a moral panic about the prospect of automated freight transportation replacing human truck drivers. These concerns were, in part, about the prospect of automating yet another large and important industry that was dominated by noncollege, male workers. The issue faded from…
March 11, 2025
The American Dream in Ohio depends on stronger Buckeye families
The “American dream” is a “better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank,” wrote the historian James Truslow Adams over a century ago. Yet with ordinary Americans succumbing to “deaths of despair” at alarming rates, rates of happiness hitting record lows and way too many men and women stuck in poverty across generations, it’s probably no surprise…
March 11, 2025
Democrats’ DOGE Delusions
While occupied with budget bills to keep the government open and set future spending and tax levels, Congress is also cleaning up past messes. Today, the House is expected to vote on legislation to hold criminals accountable for stealing over $100 billion in pandemic-era unemployment benefits. All agree on the urgent need for action, but Democrats’…
March 6, 2025
America’s New Frontier of Opportunity and Inclusion
It would be a king-sized understatement to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have had better weeks, months, years, and decades than they are currently experiencing. From the Supreme Court’s ruling that banned affirmative action in admissions, to the Trump administration’s full-scale bureaucratic offensive to expunge DEI from federal policy and programs, to corporate America’s widespread retreat from years…