April 4, 2025
How One State Improved Its NAEP Scores
The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress results had a lot of bad news, but there were some scattered bright spots. Louisiana was one of them. In fact, the Pelican State was the only state in the nation that outperformed its pre-pandemic 4th grade reading scores on the 2024 NAEP. Over the past two…
April 3, 2025
The dangerous myth that poverty is the cause of child abuse
Why does child abuse happen? A new public service announcement says most people think it’s a “bad parent problem,” but the ad suggests “the root causes may be different than you think.” This message from Prevent Child Abuse America goes on to explain that child abuse is the result of families’ lack of financial resources — a…
April 3, 2025
Trump’s Tariffs Are a Historic Tax Hike
If implemented, the tariffs announced yesterday by President Trump would constitute the largest tax increase since the 1968 levies to fund the Vietnam War. The details will matter, but my back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the tariffs — which are taxes on imported goods — could be as large as 2 percent of annual GDP. This tax increase…
April 1, 2025
Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani’s Dangerous Radicalism on Child Welfare
Socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has made a splash in the race for New York City mayor. A relentless social media campaign has helped him raise big dollars, despite his long-shot odds against incumbent mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani has also adopted a platform of terrible ideas. His campaign materials portray him as a Robin…
April 1, 2025
Did Maltreatment Fatalities in Texas Really Decline?
A drop in the number of children entering foster care and fatalities due to abuse in Texas is, on its face, welcome news, and some stakeholders in the well-being of children are heartened. “There have been more net positives than any negatives that show up,” Brandon Logan, executive director of the Texas nonprofit One Accord…
March 31, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: DARPA for Education
Earlier in my professional life, I was the head of the political science department at Stony Brook University. When the chairs of the arts and science met, someone from the physical or life sciences would inevitably argue that the “hard” natural sciences deserved more support than the “soft” social sciences. My rejoinder was one of…
March 31, 2025
Putting Children First: Child Welfare Priorities for the New Administration
Event Summary On March 31, AEI hosted a discussion on child welfare priorities, moderated by AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley. Experts Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, Rachel N. Morrison of the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Darcy Olsen of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, and Tom Rawlings of Child Welfare…
March 28, 2025
Cracking the Code Behind Dismal 8th Grade Reading Scores
The most recent round of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results delivered a familiar gut punch: Just 30 percent of eighth graders in the United States read at or above the proficient level, a number that’s barely budged in decades. Even in states like Mississippi and Louisiana, which have earned national attention thanks to literacy reforms that have…
March 28, 2025
Unfreezing New York’s Projects
The imposing brick blocks covering much of the territory from West 16th to 27th Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, superficially have much in common with the rest of the city’s sprawling, dilapidated public housing system. From July 2023 to July 2024, the 2,070 apartments making up the Fulton & Elliott–Chelsea…
March 27, 2025
The Looming Debt Crisis, the Trump Tax Cuts, and Medicaid
Let’s start with a chart to understand the dire fiscal situation we are in as a nation. Figure 1. Federal Debt Held by the Public as a Share of Gross Domestic Product, 1940-2054 You’re looking at how sizeable federal debt has been and will be relative to gross domestic product (GDP). From 1960 to 2008, the federal debt held by…