December 6, 2022
Fixing Our Child Welfare System to Help America’s Most Vulnerable Kids
Every day, more and more children in America lack a safe, permanent, and loving home. Evidence increasingly shows that child welfare agencies and family courts aremuch more concerned with adults’ needs and sensibilities than with children’s safety.While reform must come from many different corners of this field, Congress should committo creating a stronger and smarter…
November 28, 2022
Public School Instructional Offerings and Enrollment Changes: Evidence from Two Years After the Pandemic
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary We examine how COVID-related reopening policies during the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years affected enrollment in public school districts. We use difference-in-differences and event study designs to estimate plausibly causal effects of different reopening policies on public school enrollment. Consistent with prior research, we find that public school…
September 30, 2022
Off Track: An Assessment of Wisconsin’s Early Care and Learning System for Young Children
Preface Raising children, as can be fully appreciated only after you’ve done it, takes place in realtime. They eat, sleep and grow whether you’re ready or not. So as parents supply childrenwith the most crucial material treasure they ever will receive — a stable, loving home — manyrely on some outside help in caring for…
September 12, 2022
Section 199A and “Tax Parity”
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act included a new deduction for business income: Section 199A. This provision allows taxpayers to deduct up to 20 percent of qualifying business income against their taxable income and provides a special tax benefit for “pass-through” businesses—those not subject to the…
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 and Prevention (CDC) guidance advised all students and teachers to mask indoors, with no flexibility based on local conditions.On February 25, 2022, the CDC adopted…
February 23, 2022
The Case Against Universal Free Lunch
Key Points Read the PDF. Introduction Who should feed children? Parents or the government? Before the pandemic, more than half of American public school students were eligible for free or reduced price school lunch (FRL).1 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has proposed expanding the program to provide free breakfast, lunch, and dinner to every American public school…
October 20, 2021
Public Places and Commercial Spaces: How Neighborhood Amenities Foster Trust and Connection in American Communities
Key Points Read the PDF.
October 19, 2021
The Divided State of Our Unions
Executive Summary Where is the American family headed as COVID-19 finally seems to be abating? Focusing on family formation in the United States, this report considers three possibilities: (a) the “decadence-deepens scenario,” where marriage and fertility fall further in the wake of the pandemic; (b) the “renaissance scenario,” where men and women turn towards family…
July 2, 2021
Addressing the Shortcomings of the Supplemental Poverty Measure
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary The US Census Bureau publishes the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) each year to provide important information on low-income Americans’ well-being. In early 2021, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) panel formed to evaluate and recommend improvements to the SPM. To inform the NASEM panel and…