The transition from school to work should be a bridge. For one in seven young Americans, it’s a gap. Roughly 5.5 million of those aged 16 to 24 are disconnected from school and work. These opportunity youth are full of potential but don’t have a reliable path forward. Millions more are marginally attached, working a few hours a week or taking a single class. One disruption, like a family health crisis or an unaffordable bill, disconnects them from the institutions that help them build a future.
Lessons from the UK on disconnected youth
A 2025 RAND study found that disconnected youth showed signs of struggling socially and academically well before leaving school. They reported more symptoms of depression, higher rates of substance use, and weaker social supports than their connected peers. This disconnection accumulates. By the time it’s visible, it’s hard to reverse.
The UK government just issued the first of two reports on its version of this problem, titled Young People and Work. It calls the situation “a generational fault line” and a “moral crisis” that creates “a strategic economic risk for Britain.” It uses the label NEET, not in education, employment, or training, to describe the group of nearly one million people aged 16 to 24, roughly one in eight young people. A second part with policy recommendations will be published later in 2026.
While the British and US technical definitions of disconnected youth differ, they measure the same underlying reality. These are young people who’ve lost their footing when early adulthood should be taking shape. So, we can take lessons from across the Atlantic for the US.
WASHINGTON (June 26, 2026) — Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) Director of Education Policy Rachel Canter released the following statement in response to the Virginia State Board of Education’s vote to move forward with raising learning expectations for Virginia schools on their original timeline and reject further delays:
“The Virginia State Board of Education sent a strong message in a 7-0-1 vote yesterday that children in Virginia can’t wait any longer for the state to get honest about how they’re doing in reading, math, and science.
“In 2025, the Virginia State Board of Education made the forward-looking choice to increase the definition of grade-level learning on its state assessments from the lowest bar in the country to among the highest. This move was not only a recognition that the lowest-in-the-country learning expectations are not good enough for Virginia, but also a vote of confidence in the potential of Virginia students and teachers to meet the higher bar. After much debate between those who wanted the change to happen immediately and those who wanted a long runway, the Virginia State Board chose to compromise: the bar would be phased in over four years, by boosting the definition of ‘proficient’ until reaching the permanent, higher bar in 2029-2030.
“But as almost always happens, there’s an effort afoot working harder to hide behind low expectations than helping students and teachers meet higher ones. On Wednesday, the State Board heard a proposal from the Virginia Department of Education to forgo increasing expectations until the 2028-2029 school year and then move the bar in one fell swoop.
“Thankfully, the Virginia State Board of Education recognized that calls to delay raising standards are just the nice façade people put on their true intentions to kill them entirely whenever the next deadline comes. Let’s be honest why: Some schools and districts that look just fine right now will look less stellar when the system becomes more rigorous. It’s not about student learning; it’s about the perception of a system run by adults.
“But temporary growing pains — and that’s what they are whenever we reach for better with kids — are not a reason to keep lying to children and families about how much students really know. We learned this lesson in Mississippi: Until we were truthful about what every child really knew, we couldn’t start the process of getting a whole lot better. The sky did not fall when we leveled up what we wanted from kids. Instead, families gave us the grace to keep going because we all understood that leaping over a low state bar had only ever given us one thing — last place nationally.
“Every governor in America is an education governor, whether they know it or not. States spend an enormous portion of their budgets, and frequently a significant share of local taxes, on public education. It’s one of the issues that touches the lives of every citizen in a profound way, helping to determine their opportunity in life and the economic vitality of the state and its communities. The great difference among our 50 education governors, then, is whether the person in the mansion leads on education with vision.
“Governor Spanberger has a rare opportunity to show the country what it looks like for a Democratic governor to speak loudly in support of high expectations for student learning, the belief that all children can learn, and the fundamental principle that improvement in any system begins with honesty about your starting place. She can show this commitment by supporting the State Board in staying the course. Between now and August, she can also fill the pending state board vacancy with a new member who shares the vision that Virginia students are capable of learning at high levels and that the job of education leaders is to align their work and resources to that end.
“Virginia students, like those in every state across the nation, deserve no less.”
The Reinventing America’s Schools Project inspires a 21st-century model of public education geared to the knowledge economy. Two models, public charter schools and public innovation schools, are showing the way by providing autonomy for schools, accountability for results, and parental choice among schools tailored to the diverse learning styles of children.
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.
I. The Much-Changed Digital and Economic Landscape
In early June, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Charles Grassley introduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA, S.2992). Like its predecessor, introduced four years ago, AICOA attempts to restrain practices by large online platform owners that limit competition — both on their platforms and between competing platforms.
Yet AICOA 2.0 picks up where its predecessor, AICOA 1.0, left off. This disconnect makes it uncomfortably clear that the authors are aiming to support the agenda of anti-monopoly activists in targeting the digital sector, rather than helping consumers contend with high prices for food, healthcare, and housing.
II. AICOA’s Authors and Sponsors Aren’t Reading the Room on Consumers
The U.S. is facing one of the biggest cost-of-living crises in history. AICOA 2.0’s expansive applicability to digital market players and potential for disrupting the U.S. antitrust enforcement system has enormous implications for consumers.
For example, enforcement of AICOA 2.0 is guaranteed to divert massive, scarce antitrust resources toward enforcement in digital markets. That means resources will (necessarily) be taken away from enforcement in other sectors, including food, healthcare, energy, and housing, where serious market power problems drive up consumer prices and reduce choice and innovation.
The failure of the bill’s sponsors and co-sponsors to read the room on the problems facing American consumers could become a political liability. The high probability that voters will take to the polls in November with cost-of-living issues top of mind may explain why AICOA 2.0 has far fewer co-sponsors, both Democrat and Republican, than AICOA 1.0.
Are career pathways actually leading Louisiana students to good jobs, or are we just giving them more programs, credentials, and options that look impressive on paper but don’t clearly connect to meaningful employment? Dr. Bruno V. Manno, Chair at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, joins Newell to talk about what has to happen for education, training, and the workforce to line up.
WASHINGTON (June 25, 2026) — A new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) explains the supply-and-demand dynamics behind the “three-sided markets” that power online food delivery and finds that Americans are spending far less time traveling to and from restaurants and bars, a shift driven in large part by the ease of delivery. The report cautions that a growing wave of state and local regulations could disrupt these markets, which benefit consumers, merchants, and delivery workers alike.
The report, “A Tale Of A Three-Sided Market: Understanding Online Food Delivery Services,” explains how platforms such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart coordinate near-simultaneous transactions among three groups: merchants, delivery workers, and consumers, and why poorly calibrated rules on fees and pay risk hurting all three.
Drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use data, the authors estimate that Americans spent about 35.3 hours per person traveling to and from “eating and drinking” in 2023-24, down 16% from 42.1 hours before the pandemic. That adds up to roughly 2 billion fewer hours a year, reduced travel time, the report estimates, is worth about $46 billion at $25 per hour, a figure that does not even include the value of delivering items like groceries and prescriptions.
The “eating and drinking” industry appears to have prospered in the era of online food delivery. After dropping sharply during the pandemic, employment at restaurants and bars has recovered to about 11.4 million, close to an all-time high, while the number of U.S. eating and drinking establishments has climbed almost 10% from 2019 to roughly 670,000. Over the same period, DoorDash’s global orders rose from 263 million in 2019 to nearly 3.2 billion in 2025.
The authors argue that delivery fees, often criticized as “junk fees,” generally do not meet the definition. Junk fees are typically hidden, poorly explained, or unavoidable, the report notes, whereas major platforms usually disclose delivery and service fees early in the ordering process and explain what they cover.
The report points to Seattle as a cautionary case. After the city’s “PayUp” pay floor took effect in early 2024, platforms raised consumer fees to cover higher wages, and DoorDash reported that orders fell, wait times grew, and average hourly driver earnings dropped more than 20% from a year earlier.
“For consumers, time is money, and these platforms are saving people billions of hours a year,” said Michael Mandel, Vice President and Chief Economist at PPI. “Three-sided markets work because supply and demand stay in balance across all three sides. When price controls knock that balance out, everyone loses; consumers, merchants, and drivers alike.”
“Fees aren’t a glitch in these markets. They’re the mechanism that keeps drivers available and orders moving,” said Andrew Fung, Senior Economic and Technology Policy Analyst at PPI. “Policymakers who want to help workers and consumers should be careful not to disrupt the dynamics that make these benefits possible in the first place.”
The report urges policymakers weighing new rules on delivery commissions, consumer fees, or driver pay to be cautious before disrupting markets that now provide benefits to so many, accounting not only for what each group gains, but also for the pricing flexibility that has kept these markets stable and growing.
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.
In recent years, several state and local governments have passed or considered new regulations on services providing rapid delivery of items such as restaurant-prepared meals, groceries, and time-sensitive packages like medicine. These regulatory efforts are ostensibly intended to help consumers, workers, and businesses by forcibly lowering prices, raising wages, and eliminating “junk fees.” Perversely, however, they run the risk of disrupting these complicated markets and actually hurting market participants. For example, New York City’s experiment with fee caps led to reduced orders and revenue for small businesses, and the policy was ultimately rolled back.
In this paper, we examine and explain how these complicated “three-sided” markets work, facilitating near-simultaneous transactions between three different groups of economic actors: the merchants, the people doing the delivery, and the ultimate consumers. Such services require near-flawless coordination between the business providing the product and the people doing the delivery because of the time-sensitive nature of the goods being delivered. The result, if done well, is a huge increase in consumer welfare, in the form of time saved; an increase in flexible earning opportunities for individuals doing delivery and other related tasks, such as personal time to spend with loved ones or relaxing; and an increase in demand for restaurant meals and groceries by reaching new consumers who couldn’t access the good or didn’t know about the merchant previously.
The novel structure of these newly created markets has also sparked new questions and the interest of policymakers. For instance, how should compensation for delivery drivers be structured? How should consumers be informed about the costs associated with delivery? These questions — and any potential policy changes — should be considered in parallel with their impacts on the market functions of these platforms.
In this paper, we will first offer a basic explanation of how these marketplaces work, and why they benefit all the participants — the merchants who supply the products, consumers, and the people who handle the actual deliveries. Though some academic and corporate publications have focused on related topics, an easily accessible explanation is unfortunately missing from the public policy discussion.
Then, we will look more closely at the price structure of three-sided delivery markets and show how fees and prices in these markets are structured. The section will directly address the ongoing debate about “junk fees” and the flurry of recent legislation at the state level.6 Junk fees, affecting goods like hotels, concerts, and airplane tickets, have drawn sharp criticism in recent years from consumers and regulators. There is no agreed-upon definition of junk fees, but in one 2023 report, the Biden White House implicitly defined junk fees as “unnecessary, unavoidable, or surprise charges that inflate prices while adding little to no value.” Though regional variation makes definitive generalization challenging, most online food delivery fees do not fit these criteria.
The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is the main form that prospective college students use to qualify for federal grants, loans, and work-study assistance, as well as aid from many states and colleges. Roughly 17 million students and family members use the FAFSA system each year, and at least 6 million students use it as the gateway to paying for college. It’s one of the most important pieces of the college-opportunity machinery in the country.
Over the years, however, FAFSA had grown far too complex and confusing, making it challenging for kids and their parents to navigate. Former Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee—who also served two terms as governor of Tennessee and was U.S. secretary of education in 1992 when Congress created the form—was keenly aware of the problem and made FAFSA simplification one of his signature causes.
Alexander had a showman’s way of making the point. As chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, he memorably used a giant paper copy of the FAFSA form, about seven feet long connected end-to-end, to dramatize how absurd the application had become. The prop was memorable and the point was obvious. The federal government claimed it wanted to help students get to college but required them to complete a form so long and complex it could intimidate the families most in need of that help.
With insolvency just 6 years away, only a new approach can save FDR’s vision of an earned benefit that keeps older Americans out of poverty.
Ever since Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security in 1935, it has rested on the principle that Americans should earn their retirement benefits. The president was a deep believer in the moral importance of work, who also knew his plan would be more politically durable if voters felt as if they had personally paid into it. So the program was designed to mimic a traditional pension, where payroll taxes represented a worker’s contributions and benefits increased for higher earners.
Nearly a century later, the social compact behind Social Security is fraying. Americans have not paid nearly enough into the program to cover the benefits they’ve been promised. As a result, its primary trust fund is now officially projected to run out of money in 2032. If policymakers fail to act in the next president’s term, beneficiaries will face an automatic 22% cut in order to keep payouts in line with contributions.
Policymakers could have saved the system as we know it with modest tweaks had they acted earlier. For example, today’s retirees could have paid slightly higher tax rates over their working lives to adequately fund their benefits. But instead, they elected lawmakers who either ignored the problem or actively made it worse.
Now, it’s effectively too late to prevent massive cuts without abandoning the notion that today’s Social Security beneficiaries actually paid for their benefits. Every dollar that must be raised from higher taxes on today’s workers to prevent a cut for current retirees is a wealth transfer from young to old — from a generation that inherited this shortfall to the one that let it grow.
But policymakers can uphold FDR’s vision of a program in which benefits are earned through work without binding themselves to the false pretense that seniors paid for their benefits. It just requires them to redefine the mechanism by which benefits are earned.
To show them how, my team at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) developed a package of reforms built around an innovative new concept: Instead of calculating benefits based on how much income a person earns throughout their career, Social Security would award benefits based on how many years someone works. In other words, a riveter who earns $60,000 annually and a lawyer who earns $300,000 would get the same monthly check in retirement as long as they put in the same number of years on the job.
This redesign would strengthen Social Security’s finances by reducing the outsized benefits that go to high-earners. It would also increase support for seniors with the greatest financial need: under our plan, anyone who works for at least 20 years would receive a benefit large enough to keep them out of poverty, which isn’t guaranteed under today’s system. And it would protect older Americans by preventing automatic benefit cuts slated to take effect in just six years — all without drastically higher taxes on today’s workers.
Importantly, this reform would reinforce Social Security’s premise as a benefit people earn rather than transforming it into a stereotypical redistributive welfare program, affirming the basic Rooseveltian vision.
Our proposal is not without its critics, however. Wendell Primus —– a longtime aide to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi —– and three of his colleagues at Brookings earlier this year published a critique titled “Insufficient financing should not provoke dramatic changes to Social Security.” Notably, the authors did not object to the specific merits of PPI’s proposal. Instead, they argued that policymakers should reject any plan that weakens the link between an individual’s Social Security benefits and their tax contributions into the program. In short, they want to maintain the popular fiction that Social Security works sort of like a normal retirement account.
I don’t want to get into an endless debate over the merits of every specific detail of each proposal, because those will almost certainly be iterated upon between now and when Congress ultimately comes around to seriously considering solutions. But exploring the fundamental weaknesses of their criticism and the alternatives they propose actually shows the impracticality of clinging to the thin pretense that seniors have paid for their benefits — namely, that tying benefits to income necessitates showering benefits on rich seniors who don’t need them or cutting benefits for poor seniors who actually depend on them. It’d be better for policymakers to unshackle themselves from the failing approach of yesteryear and embrace some unconventional ideas.
On June 12, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia wrapped up a five-year prosecution of 24 individuals for a forced-labor scheme in onion- and blueberry-picking in southern Georgia, as the last three defendants — Brett Bussey, Margarita Rojas Cardenas, and Nery Rene Carrillo-Najaro — admitted to:
“‘mail fraud, international forced labor trafficking, and money laundering, among other crimes, fraudulently using the H-2A work visa program to transport foreign nationals from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras into the United States under the pretext of serving as agricultural workers.’ … The conspirators required the workers to pay unlawful fees for transportation, food, and housing while illegally withholding their travel and identification documents and subjected the workers ‘to perform physically demanding work for little or no pay, housing them in crowded, unsanitary, and degrading living conditions, and by threatening them with deportation and violence.’ The conspirators [ed. note: meaning all 24, not Bussey, Rojas, and Carrillo Najaro alone] are alleged to have reaped more than $200 million.”
Ten days earlier, as the three were preparing their ‘guilty’ pleas, the Trump administration’s U.S. Trade Representative Office published a plan to impose tariffs of 12.5% on goods from 54 trading partners, and 10% on six more, claiming they don’t do enough to stop imports of goods made with forced labor. Together, the 60 economies — the EU and the U.K., China and Taiwan, Jordan and South Africa, Japan and the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, Chile and Peru, Mexico and Canada, etc. — provide about 97% of America’s imports. Extrapolating from the revenue temporarily sucked in by last year’s illegal “International Emergency Economic Powers Act” decrees, this will likely cost Americans around $100 billion a year.
The logic works like this: If foreign laws aren’t good enough, forced-labor “inputs” might flow into production chains. Their unnaturally low labor costs would make them artificially cheap. That in turn would make the final goods cheaper, displacing honorably produced American goods. As we noted last week, USTR’s report contains little actual evidence, but does feature four suggestive “case studies.” Two of these claim European Union members are depriving American malt liquor and cigarette businesses of some exports, as (i) Spain’s importing of Burmese rice “strongly suggests” that Spanish breweries might have purchased “at least some” rice produced with forced labor, and likewise (ii) Polish purchasing of tobacco from three Malawian companies placed under a CBP “Withhold Release Order” from November 2019 to May of 2021 blockage of imports of tobacco from three Malawi companies “strongly suggests” that “a significant proportion” of Poland’s tobacco imports before 2020 might have had forced labor content. Sample from the malt liquor passage:
“The TVPRA list [a Labor Department publication] has flagged rice from Burma as being at risk of forced labor since 2009. … While not all of Spain’s imports of rice from Burma were necessarily produced using forced labor, the prevalence of forced labor in rice production in Burma strongly suggests that at least some of Spain’s imports of rice were produced wholly or in part with forced labor. …Faced with higher input costs, Spain would have exported a lower volume of downstream malt beer products… [while] the United States would likely have experienced greater sales, revenues, and exports of malt beer, all else equal.”
Obviously, phrases like “at least some” and “strongly suggest” themselves suggest that the report’s authors aren’t really sure Spain or Poland bought forced labor goods. And more generally, though their unexamined premise about prices — forced labor means cheaper goods and a cost advantage — feels intuitively plausible and may sometimes be correct, it’s also sometimes clearly wrong.
The report’s specific claims about rice and tobacco, for example, don’t hold up well. It doesn’t include price data, but Burmese rice sells at $339/ton this month, only 3% below India’s $351/ton and about 10% below Asia’s $378/ton average; the U.S.’ $542/ton is far above the cost of not only Burmese, but any Southeast or South Asian mass-market rice. (And rice is a very small factor in malt liquor prices anyway, probably accounting for 0.5% to 2.5% of wholesale cost.) Likewise, Malawi tobacco costs about the same as tobacco from neighboring Mozambique. So at least in these cases, there’s no evidence of a big saving on input costs.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the Georgia case’s sentencing and indictment papers provide detailed information on the actual inner working of a large forced-labor enterprise in agriculture, which did not affect the cost of goods. Its operators ran a labor contracting company called Rojas Avila Harvesting with an office in Bacon County, along with several shell companies. Farmers in six adjacent counties paid them to recruit seasonal workers from Central America for seasonal harvesting of onions and blueberries from 2015 through 2021, including handling H2A visa fees and paperwork, along with wages, transport, and other labor costs. Once the workers arrived for their jobs, the Rojas Avila Harvesting officers confiscated their passports, took much of their wages, assigned them debts to cover the travel costs, and threatened them with violence should they try to leave or get help. The trials and evidence since 2022, and journalistic accounts like this one from ProPublica, report that the scheme trapped at least 500 men and women in forced labor and brought its authors over $200 million. Though one farmer pleaded guilty to participating in the scheme, most appear to have been unaware of Rojas Avila’s actions.
Some tentative lessons:
ILO research validated: The Rojas Avila Harvesting scheme closely matches the International Labour Organization’s description of the nature of forced labor worldwide. ILO’s reports argue that withholding of wages, confiscation of passports, and debt bondage are especially frequent forms of forced labor; consider threats of violence relatively common; and believe risks are especially high for migrant workers. This fits Rojas Avila’s operations perfectly, suggesting that forced labor in the U.S. may not differ drastically from forced labor in other countries.
Forced-labor enterprises don’t always charge low prices: USTR’s report assumes forced-labor enterprises naturally sell their goods at below-market prices, but that’s not how the Rojas Avila Harvesting scheme worked. Its managers just diverted wage payments from workers to themselves to get as much money as they could. The onions and blueberries that its unlucky workers picked appear to have gone into American food industry and grocery supply chains at standard market prices.
U.S. itself not free of forced-labor goods: Between 2015 and 2020, the U.S. exported blueberries to 59 countries and onions to 80, with Canada the largest buyer and Caribbean island countries most reliant on U.S. supply. Press coverage suggests the farms contracting with Rojas Avila Harvesting sold to domestic buyers rather than exporting, so these particular berries and onions might not have entered international supply chains, but at this point certainty may be impossible. And while abuses on the scale of Rojas Avila Harvesting are likely rare, each year since 2020 the DoJ has prosecuted 183 to 208 people for forced labor and human trafficking crimes a year since 2020, it would probably be naïve to consider them wholly unique.
Against that background, the logic USTR employs for Spanish malt and Polish cigarettes would encourage worldwide policies along the following lines:
Some U.S. onions and blueberries were harvested in the recent past with forced labor;
Therefore, all U.S. onions and blueberries are suspect;
Buyers of U.S. onions and blueberries could use them to make processed foods like sauces and pies, unfairly competing with our food;
A foreign country that buys any U.S. onions and blueberries should therefore face tariffs on everything it produces.
Again, forced labor remains an egregious human rights violation in the United States or anywhere else, and forced-labor trade an appropriate target for policy. But Americans, as well as targeted countries, would have strong and well-founded complaints about a policy like this. As the EU, Canada, the U.K., Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, and dozens of developing countries do about the administration’s claims about them. All, really, should view forced labor not as a pretext for tariff increases, but a human rights and law-enforcement concern broadly shared and requiring sustained cooperative work to solve.
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.
USTR’s “Section 301” report calls for tariffs on goods from 60 trading partners, alleging insufficient laws against forced labor imports.
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.
Thought leaders, lawmakers and former administration officials from both parties are marking the nation’s semiquincentennial by sounding the alarm about the effects of polarization.
Citing recentstatistics, including that only 4 in 10 Gen Zers are more likely to describe the Founding Fathers as “villains” rather than “heroes,” an advisory board convened by the center-left Progressive Policy Institute launched the American Identity Project meant to guide policymakers and educators on the future of civics education.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., an adviser on the project, said he worries the liberal patriotism modeled by figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and former President Barack Obama is “vanishingly rare.”
“The central emotion of our time is not patriotic hope about America, but rage against America across the political spectrum,” Torres said at the think tank’s June 11 event to unveil the board’s Identity Project “manifesto.”
Linda Chavez, a former Reagan administration official and chair of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, said she sees the problem on “both the left and right.”
“I see kids on the left who find our whole system of government, including democracy, as not important, and you know they seek to transform the country, they want to throw everything out,” Chavez said at the June event.
“And on the right I see young people who are falling under the sway of people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, who want to divide Americans, and basically they’re going to get to decide what an American is and who gets to count as an American.”
In 2008, Rachel Canter founded , an education non-profit with the mission of improving educational outcomes for students across the state. Dating back to the 1990s, Mississippi ranked near the very bottom on educational assessment metrics for reading and math. Today, Mississippi’s elementary school students score above the national public average and the eight graders have nearly reached the national public average. For nearly two decades, Rachel has been on the frontlines fighting to improve reading and math outcomes for Mississippi’s public school students. In the process, she has learned that there are no quick fixes, silver bullets, or magical solutions. Improving educational outcomes takes time, accountability, evidence, and institutional support. Rachel and the have produced a short research paper on this incredibly improvement in outcomes titled “.” This paper is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of education in America. Whether you are a researcher, policy maker, parent, or student, Inside the Mississippi Marathon charts a path for national improvement in education.
Rachel Canter is the Director of Education Policy for the Reinventing America’s Schools project at PPI. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and History from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In 2008, she founded Mississippi First and served as its Executive Director for over 16 years.
President Trump has announced his intent to nominate Jay Clayton as the director of National Intelligence, with the controversial Bill Pulte set to take the reins as acting director upon Tulsi Gabbard’s accelerated departure last week. While it remains to be seen how long Pulte will serve in the role, Trump has stated that he intends to have Pulte reduce the size of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), calling it “unnecessary and/or too big.”
Apparently not content with the reported 40 percent workforce reduction and declining morale inflicted by Gabbard, Trump is pushing for Clayton to lead a dramatically smaller and weaker office. This would be a massive mistake that undermines the necessary role ODNI plays in coordinating the 18 organizations comprising the intelligence community.
ODNI is not a perfect organization, and there are reforms to be made. Its mission and its staff size have grown over time, and careful study is warranted in order to right-size both. However, as Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) stated, serious discussion is necessary before dismantling organizations created to address failures identified after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Reducing the office’s ability to deconflict intelligence collection resources and provide strategic guidance on national intelligence priorities would be a colossal step backward and would make America less safe.
For decades, the federal government has helped millions of Americans climb the opportunity ladder by financing their postsecondary education and training. But it’s paid too little attention to whether the credentials actually moved them up that ladder toward better jobs and higher earnings.
This spring, the U.S. Department of Education undertook its most serious effort to solve that problem. It issued three separate regulatory packages that, taken together, point in a single direction. Community colleges have a lot at stake in what Washington is doing.
The Workforce Pell final rule opens the Pell Grant program for the first time to short-term workforce training programs. The proposed Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) ties every program’s access to federal loans to a test of whether graduates out-earn people who never enrolled. The proposed Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) rule will dramatically rewrite the rules under which accreditors judge colleges. All three packages came from negotiated rulemaking committees that reached consensus, giving these changes unusual staying power.
Taken together, they describe an approach that redistributes power across American higher education. And that redistribution runs in one direction. It’s away from the institutions and accreditors that have long governed quality, toward three new centers of power: an earnings-accountability system measuring what graduates actually earn, state governments whose governors decide which workforce programs deserve federal aid, and students with new rights to information about costs, outcomes and transfer credit.
In 1958, the normally staid Eisenhower administration was rocked by scandal. White House chief of staff Sherman Adams was forced to resign for accepting a vicuna coat and a rug from a Boston textile manufacturer under federal investigation.
Adams, Eisenhower’s top political enforcer, was never charged with a crime. His ethical lapses look laughably tame compared to the Roman orgy of corruption President Trump presides over today. In fact, the magnitude and brazenness of Trump’s reign of grift and graft is without parallel in U.S. history.
Three previous administrations stand out as the most scandal-prone. Coincidentally (or not), all also were led by Republican presidents: Richard Nixon, Warren G. Harding and Ulysses S. Grant.
Nixon makes the list mainly because of the Watergate break-in and subsequent White House cover up, which led to his impeachment and resignation to avoid a likely conviction in a Senate trial. But with his “enemies list,” campaign slush fund and secret bombing of Cambodia, “Tricky Dick” also presaged Trump’s penchant for dissembling, trading access for cash and siccing federal agencies on political foes.
Philanthropy often funds programs to help people move up, like scholarships, tutoring, job training, youth development, mentoring, college access, entrepreneurship, and community revitalization. Much of this work is valuable.
But a new Gallup / Walton Family Foundation report, How Opportunity Takes Root, suggests that donors should widen the lens. Opportunity doesn’t depend only on programs but on whether communities create the conditions that allow people to shape their own lives.
The report finds that two-thirds of Americans feel they can mostly determine their own path, even when things are difficult. But one-third feel mostly compelled by circumstances beyond their control. This agency gap has enormous consequences. Adults who feel in control are more than twice as likely to thrive as those who feel pushed by circumstances, 63% compared with 25%, respectively.
For donors, the message is clear. Funding isolated interventions isn’t sufficient to help people in need. Instead, donors must invest in the local conditions that make personal agency possible, allowing residents to solve problems at a local level.
For several decades, K–12 ed-reformers and policy leaders have pushed to expand public school options and pathways. This has led to the creation of such alternatives as magnet and charter schools, microschools and learning pods, as well as dual enrollment, course choice, beefed-up Advanced Placement, and the importing into high schools of industry credentials and youth apprenticeships.
A new analysis from the University of California, Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education underscores just how much the system has expanded, bringing confusion in its wake. Participation in everything from Advanced Placement to non-degree credentials to workforce training has grown significantly over time.
Multiple pathways are a major gain, shifting from a one-size-fits-all model toward something closer to what I call opportunity pluralism. In that sense, the Berkeley findings are encouraging. They show that the system has, in fact, diversified. Students are participating in a wider array of education and learning options than ever before.
The problem, the authors suggest, is fragmentation. The U.S. has built a far more diverse K–12 education and training system, but not a coherent one. And a system with many entry points but weak connections among them can leave students stranded.
