For many of America’s schools, advising means a single overworked counselor, a stack of course catalogs, and a handful of rushed conversations in junior and senior year. Students are left to piece together how their classes, their interests, and their post-graduation options actually connect.

Texas has spent the past five years testing a different model. The early results are worth the attention of state and local K-12 leaders.

Working with the nonprofit TNTP, the Texas Education Agency built the Effective Advising Framework, or EAF. The idea is simple to state and hard to execute. Instead of treating postsecondary planning as an event that happens near graduation, make sure it happens across a student’s entire K-12 experience.

The first part of this approach involved TNTP and the state agency mapping grade-level expectations from kindergarten through 12th grade across four areas: career development, academic development, financial literacy and aid, and personal and social development. Districts then adapted those expectations to their students and communities, giving every campus a common vision of what advising should look like at every age, leaving room for local judgment about how to deliver it.

Read more in Datia K12

American higher education has a completion problem it doesn’t like to advertise. For decades, the bachelor’s degree came in one shape: four years of typically uninterrupted coursework delivered on one campus. But this model is being dismantled nationwide, with little coordination and even less fanfare, leaving colleges and universities struggling.

The reason is a number that most Americans have never heard. At the start of the 2023-24 academic year, there were 43.1 million individuals who carry some college credit and no credential. This population has grown in every state and the District of Columbia since 2021, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. For decades, the policy answer to this predicament was some version of Try harder, come back.

But that’s changing. State policymakers are quietly rewriting what a bachelor’s degree is, letting community colleges grant them outright, compressing four years into three, and dissolving the line between high school and college altogether. The moves are separate, disconnected, and rarely discussed as a single trend. But together they amount to a wholesale redesign of the undergraduate degree, who provides it, and a real test of whether American higher education can build more than one model for getting a diploma.

Read more in Washington Monthly

The field of American Studies appears to be in a defensive crouch.

This January, we published a study analyzing the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly. In the report, we objected to Donald Trump’s attempt to whitewash negative aspects of our country’s story but found that the articles in American Quarterly did the reverse by erasing anything good about the United States. Examining nearly 100 articles over a three-year period, we found that 80% were critical of America, 20% neutral, and not a single article was positive.

We published the full report, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” with the Progressive Policy Institute and a summary in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject.” We said there were plenty of valid reasons to critique America, but also asked, how could the articles in American Quarterly show no curiosity about any of America’s worthwhile attributes? How could there be no articles exploring, for instance, why the United States is cited as the most desirable destination for immigrants, or why we have so many Nobel Prize winners?

The response to our findings from leading academics has been as revealing as the original study. We thought professors might argue that particular articles should have been categorized as positive. Alternatively, academics might have seen the study as an opportunity for self-reflection, to ask whether they needed to do a better job of telling the full American story. Instead, with one admirable exception, their responses have been mostly misleading and dismissive, mischaracterizing the way we conducted our review and going so far as to deny the very existence of objective historical truths.

Read more on the Radically Pragmatic Substack

In Philadelphia, a young person leaving Launchpad Philly’s post-high school graduate training track is on pace to earn nearly $30,000 within nine months and $50,000 within one year. That far outpaces the roughly $12,500 a young Philadelphian with only a high school diploma typically earns.

That’s not a best-case anecdote. It’s a design choice. And it’s one of six such designs documented in our new report, A Practical Guide to Work-Based Learning, which also examines a network of career and technical charter schools in South Bend, Indiana; an industry-themed school network in San Antonio; a rural coordination model spanning a thinly populated Indiana county; a Purdue-affiliated early college network; and a multi-district rural collaborative in Colorado.

Each program provides, by any fair measure, excellent preparation for college and career. And each one raises the same uncomfortable predicament. Education has no shortage of good ideas. What it lacks is a strategy for making them commonplace.

States should stop treating work-based learning primarily as something individual schools or districts choose to pursue and start treating it as something the state itself is responsible for enabling at scale. Based on what separated our six success stories from the much larger number of well-intentioned efforts that stall out, here are four actions state policymakers can pursue.

Read more in Thomas Fordham Institute

Chronic absenteeism remains high five years after the pandemic. More than 20% of students are still chronically absent, missing 10% or nearly a month of school each year. Progress has been real but uneven. Absenteeism rates dropped from 29% to 21% between 2021–22 and 2024–25, according to data from 31 states.

But only 29% of students are in districts on pace to meet the national goal of cutting 2022 chronic absenteeism rates in half by 2027. That suggests the pace of improvement may be stalling, and the standard way of measuring the problem may be sending schools in the wrong direction.

School is the first rung on the opportunity ladder. A student who isn’t there can’t learn, build the relationships and habits that carry them into adult life, and access the pathways that make upward mobility possible. Chronic absenteeism isn’t just an attendance problem. It’s an opportunity problem that needs a sharper diagnosis than is typically used.

Read More in Real Clear Education.

A family shopping for college today knows more about the cost of a mortgage than the real price of a college degree. That confusion isn’t only a technical problem inside financial aid offices. It’s a public trust problem for higher education.

This problem isn’t new. In 1998, the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education, created by the U.S. Congress, issued a report titled“Straight Talk About College Costs and Prices.” I served as its executive director. It warned that colleges had allowed “a veil of obscurity” to settle over their financial operations. It cautioned that continued inattention would create “a gulf of ill will” between higher education and the public it serves.

More than a quarter-century later, that warning is less a prediction than a diagnosis.

Yes, colleges publish tuitions, offer online calculators and send financial aid letters. Yet too often, the answer to a family’s simplest question about what college will cost arrives late and varies by institution. It’s also wrapped in language that blurs the difference between free money, borrowed money, campus jobs, parent loans and the amount the family must pay.

Read More in The 74

This Fourth of July brings back childhood memories. Every year, my extended immigrant family of more than two dozen relatives would gather to celebrate Independence Day at my grandparents’ Italian tavern, the Golden Gate Inn, on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. It sat in an Italian-American neighborhood called Collinwood. I have five vivid memories of those gatherings, from when I was very young to the mid-1960s, when I left for college.

The first thing I remember is that it was always hot and humid, with no air conditioning. Eventually, Dad would plug in a big square electric box fan in the kitchen to spew its version of cool air on anyone lucky to be close to it. Sooner or later, we kids gathered in the graveled backyard and sprayed each other with the green garden hose to cool off.

Second, food was everywhere. Most of it was cucina Americana: hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad, coleslaw, butter pecan ice cream, and lemon meringue pie. Italian homemade favorites abounded, including meatballs and red sauce, sausage and peppers, and Dad’s Italian wine, into which he sliced ripe peaches from the local farmer’s market. Everyone, kids included, had peaches and red wine, the amount depending on age.

Third, there were always fireworks. The afternoon display of rockets, cherry bombs, firecrackers, and sparklers, all illegal, took place up the street by another Italian tavern called Mirabile’s. In the evening, we saw the legal fireworks from the neighboring suburbs, visible from our driveway because no tall buildings blocked the view.

Read More in Merion West

The Trump administration is in the midst of a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. Department of Education. Its stated goal is to “return education to the states.” But the more immediate question is whether the new structure will make the federal education system clearer and more accountable—or leave states, schools, and families facing a maze of agencies and unclear lines of responsibility.

The administration is carrying out the overhaul through 14 interagency agreements that move at least 148 K–12 and higher education programs to six other federal agencies. Some transfers could place programs within agencies better equipped to manage them. Others—especially those involving special education and civil rights—could make it harder to determine who is responsible when services are delayed, rights are violated, or problems arise.

Interagency agreements are typically used to share services or funds without duplicating work. Here, they are being used to redistribute much of the ED’s Congressionally-assigned work across the federal government. The department is not being abolished in one stroke, as some had feared. Rather, it is being rewired and shrunk, agreement by agreement.

Read More in the Fordham Institute