November 25, 2024
Don’t Write Off Workforce Pell Grants
Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, a former administrator of the Small Business Administration, is a proponent of expanding Pell Grants to short-term workforce education programs. In a September op-ed, McMahon boosted the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which would allow students to use Pell Grants for high-quality workforce education programs as short as eight weeks in duration (the…
November 21, 2024
A Consensus on Common-Sense Education Reform
Is common ground possible in an age of extreme polarization? Perhaps! “Toward a Potential Grand Bargain for the Nation” is a new report by a group of experts from think tanks and academia meant to share consensus “policies in each of these areas: economic growth and mobility; education; environment; health; taxes; and the federal budget.”…
November 20, 2024
End Federal Loans for Graduate School
President-elect Donald Trump and his top advisors have announced plans to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a commission tasked with slashing wasteful spending throughout the federal budget. One place they could start is the federal student loan program. The federal government loses tens of billions of dollars per year on lending to graduate students, a…
November 20, 2024
Eliminate Federal Lending to Graduate and Professional Students; Revenue to Fund Block Grants to States
Graduate student lending is out of control. Students are effectively borrowing without limit to pay for graduate and professional schools, many of which offer little or no return on their investment. The status quo is untenable for both students, who bear the risk of taking on unaffordable debts amid uncertainty about the future of forgiveness…
November 19, 2024
We Aren’t Testing Students on the Computer Skills They Actually Need
The results of the 2023 International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) were just released. ICILS is given to a sample of eighth-grade students and is supposed to measure their ability to use information and communications technology. Including the United States, 35 education systems worldwide participated in the study of “computer and information literacy,” while a subset…
November 14, 2024
The Rotting of the College Board
n 1947, the College Board opened an office in Berkeley, California. Previously, from the turn of the century onward, the organization had been administering entrance examinations for schools in the Northeast, and in 1926 it created and began using the original Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. The Board’s western expansion after World War II was…
November 14, 2024
Florida, the Forgotten Education-Reform Star
Around the turn of the millennium, Florida was widely regarded as a pace-setter in education reform. Led by then-Governor Jeb Bush, the Sunshine State implemented an outcomes-driven agenda focused on prioritizing literacy, holding schools accountable, and expanding school choice, among other agenda items. The success of these reforms garnered national attention, with significant gains seen in student performance,…
November 13, 2024
How Trump Might Fulfill His Higher-Education Campaign Promises
Donald Trump has won a decisive election victory and will take office next year as the 47th president of the United States. As of this writing, his party will hold at least 52 seats in the U.S. Senate and will probably control the House of Representatives. The results should afford President-elect Trump plenty of opportunity to enact…
November 12, 2024
The National Assessment of Educational Progress Recompete: Is It Real Change or Lipstick on a Pig?
Key Points Read the PDF. The American government runs on contracts between government agencies and private companies (both for- and not-for-profit).1 When things go awry, it is often because a long-term incumbent contractor lacked the incentive to provide more cost-effective services or accountability for a poor product, both of which have been made clear by the…
November 12, 2024
Government Contracting for “America’s Report Card” Is Broken
If you tried to apply for federal student aid this 2024–2025 school year, you would have been met with a glitch-filled online form created using 40-year-old code, released three months behind schedule, and that might have arrived too late for a college to offer you the aid you applied for. This failure of the Education Department and…