When the pandemic disrupted American K-12 schooling, Washington responded with the largest one-time federal investment in public education in American history. Three rounds of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding sent $189.5 billion to K-12 schools. The goal was straightforward: help schools reopen, stabilize operations and give students a chance to recover from historic learning loss.
Now the evidence is clearer, and the conclusion is more nuanced than either side of the school-funding debate likely prefers. Pandemic aid did help — but not enough.
Research suggests that the funding produced measurable gains in achievement, especially in math. Yet those gains were modest relative to the losses students suffered. That makes the relief funds neither a clean failure nor a clear success. It was a stabilizing intervention that bought schools time and supported some recovery. It was not, by itself, a strategy capable of restoring pre-pandemic learning trajectories.
No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the “Mississippi miracle.” From 1998 to 2024, fourth-grade reading and math scores in my home state—the nation’s poorest—rose from among the worst in the country to among the best. When adjusting for demographic factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.
Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research. Last fall, for example, the Wall Street Journal editorial board marveled that “even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by returning to phonics” as Governor Gavin Newsom prepared to sign a major new reading bill into law. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded.
As I detail in a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute, Mississippi’s transformation depended on holding students, educators, and even policy makers accountable for better student performance. Imposing real accountability in education is politically onerous, which is why such policies have fallen out of favor over the past decade. But reforms that try to copy only Mississippi’s commitment to reading science without accountability will not deliver the intended results. Fixing education is never that simple. If states really want to replicate our success, they need to understand that what Mississippi did wasn’t a miracle at all.
WASHINGTON (April 9, 2026) — Throughout the country, Americans are talking about the “Mississippi Miracle” in which the Magnolia State jumped from the bottom of both math and reading NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) rankings in the United States to nearly the top. A new report by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) finds that the dramatic improvement is no miracle,as it took nearly two decades of work by education reformers alongside policymakers to ensure students in Mississippi get the education they deserve.
The report, “Inside the Mississippi Marathon,” authored by Rachel Canter, PPI’s Director of Education Policy, provides an insider’s account of the state’s rise in education rankings. Canter, the founder of education nonprofit Mississippi First, was instrumental in advocating and implementing policy reforms to improve public schools. Before earning a graduate degree in policy and founding Mississippi First, Canter graduated from Mississippi public schools and taught in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest areas in the country.
“Mississippi’s progress was not a miracle, and it didn’t happen overnight,” said Canter. “It was the product of nearly 20 years of policy changes and a relentless focus on higher expectations for students, schools, and the education system as a whole.”
While some claim that the reason for the state’s turnaround was simply an adherence to the “science of reading,” Canter credits four policy pillars for the education transformation in the state:
Standards, Testing, and Accountability: Committing to higher, clearer standards; a more rigorous assessment; and a transparent, outcomes-focused accountability system
Consequences for Poor Performance: Enforcing clear rules for state intervention in failing school districts
Evidence-Informed Instructional Policy: Adopting proven instructional approaches like the science of reading, pre-K, and high-quality curriculum, and embedding data-driven decision-making in schools
Support for Implementation: Providing teachers, schools, and districts with the support and resources to improve instruction, including increasing state-level capacity to help districts carry out reforms effectively
Results on par with Mississippi’s public education system require time, but Canter calls on states nationwide to invest in all of these pillars before expecting results.
“There is no quick fix for the declining student achievement we’ve seen nationwide for the last decade,” said Canter. “Just like we did in Mississippi, policymakers need to embrace a broad agenda rooted in what we know works — like serious standards, accountability, the science of reading, teacher feedback, and coaching — in order to build the public school systems that children deserve.”
The Reinventing America’s Schools Project seeks to refocus national leadership around proven strategies to improve public schools and educational achievement. We believe that American public schools must prepare children academically to be successful adults and citizens; families should have a voice in their child’s education, including a choice within the public system to find a school that best fits their child’s needs; and, though education is the province of the states, the federal government must protect the promise that every child will have access to a quality public education.
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @PPI.
It feels surreal to be a public education advocate from Mississippi these days. After decades of derision, my home state has lately become a cause célèbre for dramatically improving our students’ reading and math skills, which rocketed Mississippi from the bottom of national rankings to near the top. The resulting think pieces often border on wonder: Pundits have dubbed our story “the Mississippi miracle,” as if it must have taken divine intervention for us to do what so many others are failing to do — improve education for kids of all races, incomes, and achievement levels.
Much of that media coverage has focused solely on Mississippi’s “science of reading” reforms, which implemented structured literacy programs. Many policymakers seem to have taken away the message that the science of reading, and particularly phonics, is the one silver bullet that all states should implement. To date, 40 states have adopted policies aimed at changing classroom instruction to align with these proven practices.
But this narrow understanding of Mississippi’s story is wrong, or at least very incomplete. No one policy, and no one person, is responsible for our educational turnaround. It also didn’t happen overnight, or in a few years. Mississippi’s progress is neither a miracle nor a myth, as some skeptics have insisted; it’s been a two-decade marathon.
I personally spent 17 years helping state leaders run that race. As the head of Mississippi First, a nonprofit I founded in 2008, I played a hand in, and sometimes led, many of the state’s key education policy conversations with the legislature while also working with the Mississippi Department of Education to implement the reform agenda. This is my insider’s view of what policymakers, philanthropists, and pundits should know about what really happened.
NO SILVER BULLETS, NO SUPERHEROES
If fixing education were as easy as banning discredited reading practices, such as three-cueing,4 from the classroom, all of us could just go home now; after all, state legislatures nationwide have already embraced that cause. But real life is not that simple. Rather than a single policy or person, Mississippi’s successful transformation rested on four pillars, all of which were variations on a central theme: holding ourselves accountable for higher expectations. These policy pillars were 1) standards, testing, and accountability, 2) consequences for poor performance, 3) evidence-informed instructional policy, and 4) support for implementation.
At first glance, nothing about this agenda — or our unifying principle — seems new. Mississippi, and the rest of the nation, had been pursuing policies containing some form of these ideas for roughly thirty years by the time our work began ramping up in earnest in 2012. I have listened to 90s ed reform stalwarts, for example, lament that “we tried standards-based reform, and it didn’t work.”
But maybe more remarkable than what we did is what we didn’t do: Mississippi resisted chasing the latest fad. Education as a sector is obsessed with the new, careening from big idea to big idea in a matter of a few short years without much thoughtfulness about why the last one seemed to fail — a psychosis the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess wrote about in his 1999 book Spinning Wheels.
I came to believe this novelty obsession was part of Mississippi’s problem. It was certainly at play in the Mississippi Delta school I taught in after college, which was haphazardly implementing a “whole school reform” for a few years during the height of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind push, only to dump it before it bore any fruit.
But the reality statewide was actually far worse. Mississippi was only pretending to embrace reforms. We said we were adopting the same policies as everyone else, and we acted like we were implementing them. But the truth was that we rarely did either with any depth or degree of excellence. We had less of a spinning car wheel and more of a lazy Susan whose turns were as slow as our dollops of policy change were small.
This pattern changed most dramatically with the 2012 legislative term. The state not only began to adopt robust, data-driven policies but to do so without compromising on the elements — or their execution — that made those policies work, even if they were difficult or controversial. We also resisted the siren call of the new big idea that would single-handedly revolutionize our schools and focused on developing a coherent policy framework we could implement with excellence over time. This is, in part, why this moment feels so incongruous: other states are turning “literacy, “especially phonics, into the next big idea in exactly the same way they did failed reform ideas of the past.
The detritus of ed reform suggests that there’s no perfect antidote to this mode of thinking, but Mississippi’s story provides a dose of reality. Instead of the primacy of a single ingredient at any given time — like “literacy” or “choice” or “standards” — Mississippi combined what I have come to think of as the three Ps of reform: policy, people, and persistence. We adopted specific policies, in a specific sequence. We did not rely on a single superhero. We built a team of leaders across state government, in-state nonprofits, and local schools that agreed on a standard of excellence for what those policies should include and how they should be implemented, and we kept each other honest. Finally, we kept going long enough to see the effects of our efforts.
Mississippi did this work in a national political atmosphere where policymakers were far too eager to abandon both learning standards and accountability just as we decided to embrace them. Both major federal education reform efforts of the past 25 years — No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top — faced bipartisan backlashes that made them political orphans. After 2015, national progress on the NAEP began to stall and has fallen off a cliff post-COVID. Neither political party seems up to the challenge of addressing the issue or is even paying very much attention at a national level.
Yet the playbook for better public education already exists. It is not a political free lunch: Anybody who believes they can fix their state’s reading scores by tweaking their literacy curriculum without embracing serious standards and accountability will be sorely disappointed. But progress is possible.
These pages explain each element of Mississippi’s reforms with great specificity so that other states can find their own roadmap to success. First, I briefly review Mississippi’s data to provide a common understanding of just how deep Mississippi’s transformation has been. Then, I turn to the policy agenda, how it came about, and what everyone gets wrong about our literacy work. Next, I describe the people who made this work possible and sustained it, while diving deeper into the political context of the reforms. Finally, I conclude with some consideration of this moment in educational history, both for Mississippi and the nation, and why I remain hopeful that America’s public schools can improve.
FACT: U.S. Customs blocks about $0.8 billion worth of goods a year on suspicion of ‘forced labor.’
THE NUMBERS: For 2021 –
World goods exports
$22.290 trillion
U.S. goods imports
$2.849 trillion
Illegal profit from industrial and agricultural forced labor*
$40 billion
US imports blocked by CBP for suspected forced labor content
<$1 billion
* International Labour Organization estimates, 2024. “Industry” includes manufacturing, mining, construction, and utilities.
** CBP statistics.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
The Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, explains the Trump administration’s plan to replace its 2025 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariff decrees with new ones using different laws:
“Six Justices … ruled that IEEPA authorities cannot be used to raise even one dollar of revenue. This administration will invoke alternative legal authorities to replace the IEEPA tariffs. We will be leveraging Section 232 [a “national security” law run by the Commerce Department] and Section 301 [see below] tariff authorities that have been validated through thousands of legal challenges. Treasury’s estimates show that the use of Section 122 authority, combined with potentially enhanced Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs, will result in virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026.”
Six weeks later, Bessent’s neighbors at the U.S. Representative Office have now duly launched two “Section 301” cases. The first, on “Structural Excess Capacity,” says manufacturing industries in 16 trading partners are too big. (Our view in short: it’s neither economically nor legally serious, and has an inappropriate acronym.) The second charges that the top 60 U.S. trading partners — from the European Union to the Bahamas — are hurting America’s economy by failing to sufficiently combat trade in goods produced by forced labor. This one also seems legally shaky, but at least identifies a real phenomenon and moral challenge. Some observations:
U.S. law has barred imports of goods made by prisoners since the “McKinley Tariff” of 1890. (Though at least one U.S. prison routinely exports goods made by inmates; see below.) The 1930 Tariff Act (“Smoot-Hawley”) then banned imports of goods made with forced labor, unless buyers could show there was no available U.S. substitute. Most recently, an Obama-era law passed in 2016 banned any imports of goods with a “reasonable suspicion” of forced labor content. In sum, for the past decade the U.S. has banned all forced labor imports.
“Section 301,” a trade law dating to 1974, allows U.S. administrations to identify “an act, policy, or practice” of a foreign government which is in some way “unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts U.S. commerce,” and gives them a right to use tariffs as a negotiating tool to fix the problem. USTR’s argument for using it here runs as follows: (a) many foreign countries lack a law banning imports of goods made with forced labor like America’s, so (b) they may be incorporating forced labor goods as inputs to their manufacturing industries, which (c) might allow them to produce goods more cheaply than similar American stuff, and therefore (d) this would justify a U.S. tariff to offset this supposed advantage.
1. Law: As a legal matter, then, their argument is that the absence of a particular policy — a law similar to America’s — is the same as actually having the requisite unreasonable policy. This sounds like a stretch, but courts will decide.
2. Economics: USTR’s Federal Register Notice announcing the investigation doesn’t offer evidence that countries on its list are buying any forced labor goods, but says that “none of these countries has adopted and effectively enforced a forced labor import prohibition to date,” and this “may negatively affect U.S. commerce.” How much, then, can we really know? Reliable facts on forced labor are scarce — as is typical of criminal enterprises — but international research and U.S. data both suggest that the scale of forced-labor trade is probably small.
* International evidence: International Labour Organization reports in 2022 and 2024 (which USTR uses as points of reference for its “301” investigation), say that 27.6 million of the world’s 3.22 billion workers were in various forms of forced labor as of 2021 — most commonly, people trapped in jobs when executives withhold pay or confiscate passports. This includes 8.4 million in “industry” (by which the ILO means manufacturing, mining, utilities, and construction), out of an 800-million worldwide total, and 2.1 million of 916 million farm and agriculture workers. They say forced labor is “highest in severity and scale” in “informal micro- and small enterprises operating at the lower links of supply chains in high-risk sectors and locations,” and that with respect to trade destined for wealthier countries, forced labor is likely most common in “raw materials production in the lower tiers of supply chains of consumer goods.”
“Illegal profits” from forced labor, the ILO researchers believe, totaled $236 billion in 2021. About three-quarters of this – $172 billion – came from sex trafficking. Forced-labor profits “industry” totaled $35 billion, and from agriculture $5 billion. The ILO doesn’t speculate on how much of the combined $40 billion came from purely domestic sales and construction contracts, and how much from exports of goods. But in an extreme case, if all of the $40 billion came from goods exports, about 0.2% of the world’s $22.3 trillion in 2021 goods exports would contain some forced labor content. As to effects on trade flows, if forced-labor businesses sold at market prices and pocketed the full $40 billion in profits at the expense of exploited workers, there wouldn’t be a price effect or a “burden on commerce,” but it seems likely that they would sell somewhat cheaper, losing some profit but gaining illicit market share.
* American data: Since passage of the 2016 law, CBP has imposed 55 “Work Release Orders” to block imports of goods worth $3.08 billion, or about $400 million a year. Seizures under a second law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, were about the same. Annual U.S. goods imports during this time averaged a bit above $3 trillion, so the combined $0.8 billion in seizures would be about 0.03% of U.S. import value. Meanwhile, as former U.S. trade/labor negotiator Desiree LeClercq notes, neither the 1930 nor the 2016 law actually bans export of U.S.-made goods produced with forced labor. DHS reporting, for example, shows that 5% of forced labor prosecutions in the United States show up in agriculture, and an unstated but non-zero number in manufacturing, so some U.S. exports to other countries may also contain forced-labor content.
In sum, international research and U.S. data do suggest that some products flowing between countries are made by coerced workers. But the total is likely small relative to trade flows or U.S. industry — and to the $166 billion IEEPA tariffs Bessent wants to restore. And again, the USTR hasn’t provided evidence that countries on its 60-partner list are knowing (or even unwitting) buyers. Nor for that matter is the U.S. law necessarily the world’s best: LeClercq argues that the European Union’s forced labor policy, set to enter into force next year, is better than America’s, since its program does ban exports of European goods made with forced labor, and has stronger due process rules on import cases.
3. Conclusion: International trade isn’t the core forced labor problem, and forced labor likely has only a modest influence on trade flows. But a systematic program to reduce the amount of forced labor worldwide — including keeping forced-labor goods out of the U.S. and forced-labor U.S. goods out of world markets, as will as improving laws and compliance elsewhere — would be admirable regardless of the problem’s scale. And if the administration wants ideas for such a program, it needn’t look far: the Biden administration actually ran one, combining USAID and Labor Department project support with CBP enforcement programs, diplomacy, and trade negotiations.
Bessent’s comments, though, indicate that the Trump administration simply plans to use forced labor as a pretext to recreate the IEEPA tariffs, just as its first IEEPA decrees in 2025 used fentanyl deaths as a pretext for tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods. This isn’t admirable. And if courts take Bessent at his word, they may conclude that the investigation is an illegal use of Section 301, meant not to address a “burden on U.S. commerce” but to bypass Congress and create a new tariff system by decree. As we’ve said before, the Constitution gives Congress, not presidents, the power to set tax rates, including tariffs. If the administration wants a higher tariff rate, it should simply follow the Constitution and ask Congress to pass a bill.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
And LeClercq’s critique of U.S. law notes a lack of due process and spotty enforcement. Her close:
“Like its other Section 301 investigations, USTR is inviting public comments before making its determination. I hope the CBP’s lax evidentiary standards, weak procedures, and questionable commitment to enforcement, along with U.S. forced labor practices, come to light. The U.S. administration must fully reckon with these deficiencies before imposing U.S. models on the world.”
And two U.S. stories:
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution report (2022) on an agricultural forced labor case involving onion and blueberry farming in Georgia. It’s not clear whether the produce was for strictly domestic sale or involved exports as well.
And in regard to prison labor: Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution inmates make denim jeans and shirts — “Prison Blues” — and market them in Europe and Asia via distributors in Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. PPI editorial note: This isn’t necessarily bad — voluntary, paid, and regulated prison work can help inmates develop work habits that ease reintegration to society — but an embarrassing contrast to U.S. import policy.
There’s a particular type of lie that dominates American political discourse these days. It’s not a factual lie, but a conceptual mistruth: the promise that you can make life more affordable without actually making anything cheaper. Call it affordability theater.
It’s easy to propose ideas that make things feel more affordable without actually making them less expensive. And while both parties traffic in this kind of theater, the GOP— especially under President Donald Trump—has turned it into a governing ethos.
The formula is simple. First, Trump will create an affordability problem through his own policies. Then, instead of fixing the underlying cause, he will propose to paper over the problem with a subsidy, a tax gimmick, or a check.
Tariffs are the most obvious example. Trump returned to office in 2025 in no small part because of voter anger about inflation and the cost of living. And his signature policy move was to tariff nearly everything Americans buy from abroad. Tariffs are taxes that raise prices, and analysis from the Budget Lab at Yale shows the costs of tariffs mostly manifest as higher prices for consumers. How does Trump aim to square this circle? Tariff stimulus checks. After worsening the cost-of-living crisis, Trump and his allies floated the idea of sending rebate checks to offset the pain.
It’s hard to imagine a cleaner example—make life more expensive, then offer to partially compensate you for the pain while taking credit for both moves. But after the check is spent, life is still more expensive than it was before.
My thanks to Chair Ward and members of the Committee for the opportunity to appear and present remarks in opposition to AB 1720. The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) urges the Committee to reject invasive regulatory price controls in the resale ticket market.
The economics of price caps on resale ticket prices and fees are simple. Price caps will eliminate the only source of competition in ticketing, driving fans back to Live Nation-Ticketmaster where they have been ripped off by monopoly ticket fees for decades.
Price caps will decimate the resale market. The resale market serves as “clean-up” hitter for primary market ticket shortages caused by the exercise of Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s monopoly power, underpricing of tickets, and ticket “holdbacks.”
Resale provides fans with a functional, competitive alternative for buying tickets – not to mention putting more “fans in seats,” for the benefit of artists and fans alike.
All of this will come crashing down under resale price caps. Invasive price controls will replace balancing supply and demand with resale ticket shortages, driving up ticket prices, guaranteeing half-full concert halls, and prompting the exit of online marketplaces from the market.
With a resale market that is debilitated by invasive price controls, ticket buyers will have two highly undesirable alternatives. The first is to go back to shadow markets, where fans will be subject to the fraud and abuse that occurred before the advent of competitive, online resale marketplaces.
The second outcome of a hamstrung resale market is that fans will have no choice but to go but back to Live Nation-Ticketmaster. There, the monopoly will sell more tickets and collect more in monopoly ticket fees. Price caps, therefore, hand the monopoly even more market power.
Finally, any state regulatory system that displaces competition in resale could legally immunize market participants from antitrust liability. This includes Live Nation-Ticketmaster, which is currently ensnarled in one of the largest antitrust cases in U.S. history.
PPI urges the Committee to be skeptical of “support” for resale price cap proposals, which are running aground in multiple states. Live Nation-Ticketmaster supports resale price cap regulation because it protects their monopoly profits.
Venues support price cap regulation because it guarantees a continued share of monopoly profits from their exclusive contracts with Live Nation-Ticketmaster. Artists support price cap regulation because their revenues come largely from the primary market and they dislike resale because they do not collect revenue “royalties.”
The only stakeholders in the market that do not like resale ticket price caps are consumers. And without consumers, there would be no live events ecosystem.
For all these reasons, resale price caps will put consumers, artists, and the entire live events ecosystem at even more risk. PPI urges the Committee to reject AB 1720, avoid invasive and distortionary regulation of the resale ticket market, and instead focus on genuine consumer protection such as price transparency, ticket transferability, and banning bots and speculative ticketing.
In an economy where opportunity increasingly depends on demonstrated knowledge rather than inherited advantage, rebuilding the first rung of the career ladder has become a public responsibility.
From the colonial era through the early republic, apprenticeship was a civic institution. Young people entered structured, multi-year relationships with master craftsmen and professionals, learning skills, discipline, and responsibility in tandem. Apprenticeship prepared individuals for economic independence and democracy. It was one way the young republic ensured that opportunity did not depend solely on inheritance.
That changed over time with industrialization, mass schooling, and the expansion of higher education, shifting that developmental burden. The first rung increasingly came from after-school jobs, summer shifts, clerical roles, and assistant positions. These jobs weren’t glamorous. But they were formative. They taught punctuality, collaboration, judgment, and accountability. They introduced young people to institutional life and adult expectations.
WASHINGTON — PPI President Will Marshall released the following statement on the firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi:
“We cheer the news that President Trump has fired Pam Bondi as U.S. Attorney General. It was evident from the beginning that she was utterly unsuited by experience and temperament for the post and was picked only for her willingness to do the president’s bidding, no matter how virulently partisan or lawless it is.
“Which of course points to the bad news: Reportedly, the president pushed her out because she wasn’t aggressive enough in criminalizing political differences and launching spurious prosecutions of people he considers enemies or obstacles. Given the many ‘vengeance prosecutions’ by Bondi’s Department of Justice, the prospect of even more MAGA lawfare should alarm Congress.
“We can only hope that Republican Senators will not be derelict in their Constitutional duties again as they prepare to confirm her successor. The nation needs an Attorney General dedicated to defending the impartial rule of law, not bending it to the breaking point to punish Trump’s critics or reward his friends.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @PPI.
High school graduation is often treated as the pivotal moment when one becomes an adult. But for many young people today, adulthood unfolds unevenly over time, through a mix of work, further education, financial pressure, stalled plans, and gradual independence.
Turning the Tassel: What Generation Z Says About Life After High School Graduation focuses on that post-graduation reality. It’s a first-time survey by a nonprofit called Agency, as well as The Harris Poll. They queried more than 5,000 district and charter high school Gen Z students born between 1997 and 2012 who graduated between 2015 and 2025, examining outcomes such as salary, postsecondary degree attainment, homeownership, and civic engagement.
The findings are mixed, which is why the report deserves attention. Most survey respondents are working full-time. Most have pursued some further education or training after high school. And three in four say they believe they are headed in the right direction. But many also say they were underprepared for what they’re doing, financially fragile, and trying to find stable footing in work and adult life.
That picture fits what other recent Gen Z research has found. Gallup, Jobs for the Future, and the Walton Family Foundation reported in 2025 that fewer than 30 percent of high school students feel “very prepared” to pursue the postsecondary pathways they are considering, and even among students very interested in a pathway, fewer than half feel very prepared to follow it. Too many are trying to plan their futures without enough clarity, guidance, or confidence.
Donald Trump has long sought to disguise his dislike of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But his contempt showed through in mid-March when he rebuffed Kyiv’s offer to help defend the U.S. and its allies in the Persian Gulf. The “last person we need help from is Zelensky,” the 47th president said scornfully in two news interviews. “We know more about drones than anybody. We have the best drones in the world, actually.”
American allies in the Gulf see things differently. Nearly a dozen Middle Eastern countries have approached Kyiv in recent weeks seeking cooperation as they struggle to fend off Iranian drones and missiles. Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has called Kyiv to initiate talks. Even traditionally pacifist Japan is considering buying Ukrainian drones, and Zelensky has sent some 230 drone experts—advisers and pilots—to the Gulf. Last week, he signed long-term security agreements with Saudi Arabia and Qatar and promised more were on the way.
What everyone but Trump seems to understand: After more than four years of fiercely competitive drone warfare, Ukraine is the world’s drone superpower with some of the best weaponry and an agile, innovative defense industrial base to back it up.
But the opening this creates—for Ukraine, the U.S., and its allies—will be squandered if the parties fail to seize the opportunity.
Named for a medieval Arab kingdom famous enough for its 17th-century wealth to serve as a chapter headline in Paradise Lost, the Strait of Hormuz connects the mostly land-locked Persian Gulf to the open-water Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean. A look at the implications, and the impact to date, of its closure:
Geography: The Strait is one of 24 narrow, heavily traveled ocean channels (“maritime chokepoints”) supply-chain analysts identified in Nature last November as posing special global-economy risk from natural disasters, shipping accidents, pirate attacks, and conflicts. Shaped like an upside-down “U,” it is about 110 miles long and 30 miles wide — Iran’s Bandar Abbas port on the north, Oman’s Musandam governate on the south — and 200 meters deep. A large ship needs about two hours for the transit.
Use: The Strait is the maritime outlet for nearly all the energy the four small Gulf monarchies (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates) produce, and for about 90% of Iranian and Iraqi output. About 100 vessels a day transited last year, like cars on a highway, with incoming ships using a two-mile-wide northern “lane” near Iran and outgoing vessels a similar “lane” on the southern side. Container ships and roll-on/roll-off vessels ferry in consumer goods and cars, while oil tankers and bulk carriers carry out aluminum, fertilizer, crude oil, and natural gas. Tanker traffic usually totaled about 35 vessels per day, carrying an average of 40 million barrels of oil to customers abroad. A table of energy exports drawn from World Trade Organization data covers more than crude and LNG, but gives a sense of scale:
World Fuel Exports, 2024
$3,122 billion
Via Strait of Hormuz
$592 billion
United Arab Emirates
$286 billion
Iraq
$100 billion
Qatar
$78 billion
Kuwait
$69 billion
Iran
$47 billion
Bahrain
$12 billion
Disruption: Persian Gulf energy mainly goes to Asian customers — India, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, ASEAN members — with Europe and a smaller buyer, but the market disruption affects the world. As one illuminating data point, insurance for a Strait transit was about 0.2% of the value of a tanker last winter, and is now said to be 4% to 10%. In practical terms, that would mean insurers were charging shipping lines about $200,000 for a transit a month ago, and now $4 million to $10 million.
Since the Trump administration opened its campaign at the end of February, Strait transits have dropped by about 96%, and tanker transits appear to be running at one or two per day. This implies about 280 million “barrels” of oil taken out of the world market, or roughly 20% of the worldwide oil supply. With a sudden contraction in energy supply, and no change in Asia’s need for it, prices have risen fast. Crude oil jumped from $55 per barrel at the end of February to about $100 per barrel by mid-March, and stayed there.
Prices: As crude oil prices rise, refined fuels and petroleum-based manufactured goods — plastics, synthetic fabrics, dyes, and some chemical fertilizers — follow them up. Crude oil costs are half the cost of gasoline, where prices are especially easy to track, and markets respond quickly. According to the American Automobile Association, U.S. gas prices averaged $2.98 per gallon (for “regular” quality gasoline) the week before the war, and topped $4.00 yesterday. Using this morning’s $4.06 average, the near-doubling of crude oil prices has now raised gas prices by more than a third. Diesel prices are up a bit more, by 45%, to a $5.38 average. Sustained for a year, this would cost a middle-income family about $950 (assuming no change in driving habits), a bit more than their spending on “personal care products” like soaps, makeup, and shaving supplies. The common use of petroleum in these things – paraffin wax in lipstick, skin creams, plastic packaging — means their prices will be rising too.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
Offer a positive alternative.
Straits:
In Nature last November, supply-chain analysts Jasper Verschuur, Johannes Lumma, & Jim Hall review risk premiums at 24 maritime chokepoints, including the Straits of Hormuz, Taiwan, Dover, and Malacca; the Suez and Panama Canals; the Bab al-Mandeb, the Windward Passage, etc. They think Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East are especially vulnerable to chokepoints, the U.S. and Western Europe are less than most, and China and Japan are in the middle.
Lloyds Intelligence has an eye-catching graph of day-by-day transits since January 1.
And the U.S. Naval Institute looks at ship transits, missile strikes, and risk premiums.
Country perspectives:
Oman’s Foreign Ministry, watching from very close, offers analysis.
And a mid-March 35-country policy statement from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, et al.
Food:
The Strait carries not only energy, but about 30% of world fertilizer trade. Carnegie Endowment scholars Noah Gordon and Lucy Corthell assess the implications of Strait closure for fertilizer and food production.
…while U.S. Farm Bureau officers fear yet another shock to American agriculture.
The Energy Information Administration (a DOE branch) explains the role of crude prices in consumer gas costs.
And for those wanting details, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey explains American spending patterns. They say that America’s literal “middle class” — the 27 million households in the third, or middle, of five income quintiles — earned on average $74,474 in 2024. (Most recent year for which data is available.) Gasoline and other vehicle fuels cost them $2,645. If they don’t scale back, driving a 36% price increase sustained for a year would cost them about $950. Here’s where gas fits into the budget:
Income
$74,474
Tax payments:
~$4,662
Savings
~$2,912
All spending
$66,900
Home/apartment
$15,257
Food (not including restaurants):
$5,820
Health expenses
$5,676
All non-food/housing/health spending
$40,147
Restaurants (“food away from home”)
$3,277
Entertainment
$2,764
Gasoline/other auto fuel
$2,645
Clothes
$1,642
Personal care products (e.g., soap, makeup)
$892
* Tax payments are estimated based on the results in 2023, as the BLS hasn’t yet published a 2024 figure. The third-quintile family’s 2023 tax payment averaged $4,451, including federal, state, local, and property taxes. This was 6.3% of that year’s $71,507 mean income. The $4,662 above assumes that taxes accounted for the same 6.3% share in 2024.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
America’s schools and colleges rightly devote attention to what young people should know. They focus on developing human capital: the knowledge, skills and credentials needed for the labor market. That matters, but it’s not enough, because knowledge, skills and credentials don’t exist in a vacuum. They move through relationships and networks.
This social capital — the knowledge of how to forge connections that make opportunities visible and attainable — is the missing curriculum in American K-12 and postsecondary education. And it’s a shortcoming with consequences.
Young people from well-connected families absorb social capital almost by osmosis when it comes to learning things like how to ask for help, follow up and signal ambition without arrogance. Others, equally capable but from less-connected families, must figure this out alone. The result is unequal starting lines and unequal outcomes — a yawning gap between social wealth and social poverty.
Social wealth means having not only knowledge and credentials, but relationships that open doors, including mentors who give advice, supervisors who challenge us when we need to grow and networks that surface opportunities. Social poverty is the absence of those assets. It is being a talented individual without advocates.
I recalled this moment recently, when I came across a report from the Progressive Policy Institute: “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s.” The report excoriates American studies for painting “a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait” of the United States. Reviewing almost 100 articles over three years in American Quarterly, the authors coded their orientation as “critical,” “neutral,” or “positive.” Eighty percent were critical; zero were positive. I am a historian of the political culture of the United States, and my colleagues in American studies are, it seems, unlikely to adorn their cars with American flags, or even to take seriously the impulse to do so.
The responses to the report have been predictable but fail to offer a productive path forward. The right-wing anti-woke crowd seized on the new evidence to cheer the dismantling of the humanities with renewed vigor. On the other hand, the president of the American Studies Association, Alex Lubin, made no effort to deny the leftist slant of the field. Instead, he swiped at the “purportedly ‘progressive’ policy institute” that published the report, insinuating that its authors, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, were colluding with the Trump administration (the uncritical patriotism of which they condemn outright) at an especially “dangerous moment.” Academics, Lubin argued, should be focused on the White House’s authoritarianism rather than taking a hard look inward at their own disciplines.
Egging on the destruction of the humanities, infusing more patriotism into scholarly study, or denying there’s any merit to these criticisms are all indefensible responses. As The Chronicle Review’s Len Gutkin argued in these pages, the “ritual political posturing” common in American studies is undeniable, but the solution to the field’s “credibility problem” does not lie in balancing it with more positive depictions of the American past but rather in a recommitment to dispassionate scholarly rigor.
Furthermore, the sharp analysis of American ideas, images, experiences, and aspirations has never been more urgent. American studies, one would think, is exactly where such work should transpire — but for several of the reasons the institute’s report lays out and others, the field can feel more symptomatic of academe’s well-documented alienation from much of the American public than a place to understand the full range of American experience.
Surveys suggest that many Americans are distrusting of fully autonomous vehicles. But Andrew Fung, a senior analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute who is focused on economics and technology, says that is likely to change, and that it’s likely to change very quickly.
He referenced a study that found a 45 percentage point shift in public opinionin San Francisco between 2023 and 2025. San Francisco, like Las Vegas, has been a hub of AV testing.
“It seems like when people get their hands on these cars and can actually experience them and what they’re like, they’re generally very positive of them,” said Fung. “When they think about them as kind of an abstract thing, the sentiment is much less positive.”
Those findings could serve as a warning to state lawmakers: Get ahead of statutory and regulatory issues around safety, taxation and legal liability now because trying to do so after rapid adoption will be far more difficult.
“I would recommend legislators not take their eye off the ball,” Fung said. “Think about how to get ahead of the issues. How do we set ourselves up for success, so that you’re not chasing behind after the rollout comes?”
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) welcomes the opportunity to provide comments on the draft guidance for Flavored Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) Premarket Applications – Considerations Related to Youth Risk. We appreciate that the draft guidance clarifies FDA’s position on flavored ENDS, including what the agency describes as a “sliding scale” regarding the evidentiary burden for various ENDS flavorings. Importantly, the draft guidance makes it clear that the agency does not have a de facto flavor ban for e-cigarettes. Despite this appreciation, the draft guidance fails to account for critical real-world factors that should inform FDA’s perspectives on the potential risks and benefits associated with flavored ENDS.
The draft guidance suggests “FDA’s current approach to PMTA review for determining whether a flavored ENDS product is ‘appropriate for the protection of the public health’ (APPH) includes evaluating the risks and benefits, considering all relevant evidence and circumstances associated with the new product to the population as a whole.” However, the draft guidance does not sufficiently acknowledge the following “relevant evidence and circumstances” or describe how these factors were considered when FDA conceptualized the evidentiary burden necessary to authorize flavored ENDS:
The agency fails to adequately acknowledge that youth ENDS use declined rapidly and dramatically while illicit flavored products were widely available.
The agency fails to acknowledge that existing FDA-authorized ENDS products do not sufficiently meet adult consumer demand, which sustains the illicit market for flavored ENDS
By not adequately accounting for these factors, the proposed framework is likely to overestimate the risks flavored ENDS pose to youth, undervalue their potential benefits to adults who smoke cigarettes, and fall short in helping address the illicit ENDS marketplace. In the context of declining rates of youth use and growing public safety concerns with illicit tobacco products, FDA guidance should provide clear pathways that are likely to accelerate the authorization of flavored ENDS products that benefit adult smokers, better meet adult consumer demand, and begin to draw consumers away from unregulated products and the illicit market.
