June 8, 2023
Oklahoma Has Approved the Nation’s First Religious Charter School. What’s That Mean?
The school choice landscape has been in flux of late. Earlier this week, Oklahoma approved the nation’s first religious charter school. In the past two years, seven states have adopted Education Savings Accounts or expansive school voucher programs, and the legal status of state “Blaine amendments” is very much in question. It seemed like a good time to check…
May 31, 2023
Choice Reconsidered
Discussions of school choice frequently fall into familiar morality plays: Either you’re for empowering parents or supporting public education. The resulting debate manages to miss much of what matters. It ignores that all kinds of choices are hard-wired into American public education. It skips past the fact that the affluent already choose schools when purchasing homes, so…
May 25, 2023
Education Freedom and Work Opportunities as Catalysts for Increasing the Birth Rate Among Married Couples
Summary Pursuing new, commonsense approaches to education reform and work–family policies, from childcare and early education through higher education and workforce flexibility, will foster the conditions for family flourishing and increase birth rates for married couples. Affordable childcare from a variety of providers, including at-home options, access to high-quality K–12 education that reflects a family’s…
May 10, 2023
AI Tutoring Has a Lot to Offer. But so Does Human Mentoring.
In education policy circles, there’s a lot of enthusiasm regarding the promise of AI-enabled tutoring. After all, a huge stumbling block for tutoring has been the limited number of affordable, reliable, and skilled tutors. That’s why ubiquitous AI could be such a game-changer. But there’s reason to fear that the excitement of AI-enabled tutoring will distract us…
February 23, 2023
Distance to 100: An Alternative to Racial Achievement Gaps
Policymakers and practitioners can do only so much to solve any problem without a clear, unbiased view of the underlying causes. Educators today have failed to improve student achievement largely because we use an inadequate conceptual framework to understand poor academic performance. The prevailing national lens for interpreting student progress or lack of it is…
February 22, 2023
Unlocking the Future
Editor’s Note: The following chapters are AEI scholars’ contributions to a report from Opportunity America’s working group on K-12 education. The toll of the pandemic years is becoming clearer every day: devastating learning loss among the nation’s K-12 students. Parents are angry, voting for change and telling pollsters they want more control over their children’s…
February 22, 2023
Unlocking the Future
Editor’s Note: The following chapters are AEI scholars’ contributions to a report from Opportunity America’s working group on K-12 education. The toll of the pandemic years is becoming clearer every day: devastating learning loss among the nation’s K-12 students. Parents are angry, voting for change and telling pollsters they want more control over their children’s…
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…
August 30, 2022
Biden’s Student Loan Debt Plan is Driven by Politics, Not Economics
On Wednesday, President Biden announced his long-awaited plan to cancel student loans — effectively wiping away up to $10,000 for borrowers with individual income below $125,000 (and couples with joint income below $250,000). The administration’s plan forgives up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients under the same income limits. The move, which will cost taxpayers…
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…