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August 10, 2022

A Failure to Respond: Public School Mask Mandates in the 2021–22 School Year

Key Points From September 2021 to late February 2022, school district mask mandates were in place for 61 percent of students in the US.During that period, Centers for Disease Control…

June 15, 2022

Second Time’s the Charm?

Early last year, Senator Mitt Romney proposed a new approach to family policy that exposed some significant rifts among right-leaning policy wonks who care about fighting poverty and supporting family formation….

February 23, 2022

The Case Against Universal Free Lunch

Key Points Progressives argue that universal school lunch would reduce paperwork burdens, yielding administrative efficiency gains. But the true question moves us far beyond debates over welfare economics into the…

November 16, 2021

The Changing Face of Social Breakdown

Last month, two of my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone), along with co-authors from the Wheatley Foundation and the Institute for Family Studies, published…

October 20, 2021

Public Places and Commercial Spaces: How Neighborhood Amenities Foster Trust and Connection in American Communities

Key Points The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted many Americans’ living preferences toward less dense places. For instance, more Americans would prefer to live in small towns and rural areas than…

August 23, 2021

Policies to Help the Working Class in the Aftermath of COVID-19: Lessons from the Great Recession

By Richard V. Burkhauser, Kevin C. Corinth, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated government-mandated shutdowns caused a historic shock to the U.S. economy and a disproportionate…

July 2, 2021

Addressing the Shortcomings of the Supplemental Poverty Measure

Key Points The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) partly improves on the Official Poverty Measure but still suffers from several shortcomings that limit its usefulness as an effective poverty measure. The…

August 3, 2020

Replace the Federal Student Loan System with an Income Share Agreement Program

Key Points The higher education narrative has been dominated by the student loan crisis as of late. While the magnitude of this problem is often oversold, borrowers do sometimes need…

May 4, 2020

How To Educate an American

In the years after A Nation at Risk, conservatives’ ideas to reform America’s lagging education system gained much traction. Key items like school choice and rigorous academic standards drew bipartisan support…

February 27, 2020

The American Dream Is Not Dead: A Book Event with Michael R. Strain

Event Summary On Thursday, AEI’s Michael R. Strain presented an overview of his book “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It)” (Templeton Press, 2020). In his…