issue: Education

Manno for Real Clear Education: The College Accreditation Makeover

Posted on by Alex Terr

The typically sedate college accreditation process is a battleground in America’s higher education culture war. That’s because accreditation isn’t just a gold seal on a college website. It’s the switch that turns federal student aid on and off.

Lose it, and the spigot of Pell Grants and federal student loans can close. For many institutions, especially those serving high-need students, that’s an existential problem. So in practice, accreditation functions as one of the most powerful levers in American higher education.

That’s why a process Americans rarely know anything about has become a consequential policy fight in higher education. The gatekeeper to federal money has stepped into the spotlight, pulled there by politics, a growing insistence on measurable outcomes, and a federal approach that treats accreditation less like a closed guild and more like a marketplace.

Read more in Real Clear Education. 

Canter in The St. Louis American: Missouri test scores expose achievement gap

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

Rachel Canter, founder and former longtime executive director of Mississippi First, said states must be honest about the depth of learning loss and declining achievement — trends she noted predated the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s been six years since the pandemic, and student outcomes are still not where they should be,” Canter said. “And to be honest, we were already on the decline before COVID.”

Canter argued that meaningful improvement depends on revisiting foundational education policies.

“What is the standard of expectation?” she said. “Is the bar high enough? Are we being transparent with the data, and are we truly using accountability to improve student learning?”

[…]

Read more in The St. Louis American. 

Manno for The 74: Dual Enrollment Is a School Choice Option People Don’t Talk About — but Should

Posted on by Alex Terr

National School Choice Week typically highlights the options available to families when selecting a school, including district, charter, private and homeschool. But there’s another form of choice that rarely gets the spotlight.

It’s a choice about what you study, who teaches it and how fast you can move from high school to a credential and a career. That hidden-in-plain-sight choice is dual enrollment — high school students taking college courses for credit.

National School Choice Week is an opportunity to point out that dual enrollment is one of the largest and fastest-growing forms of public school choice in America. It’s a school choice growth story that no one’s talking about.

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center recently reported a modest increase in college undergraduate enrollment in fall 2025 — about 1%, driven by a 3% increase in community college enrollment. Buried inside those headlines is a key driver of that community college growth.

Read more in The 74.

Kahlenberg in The New York Times: Yale Offers Free Tuition to Families With Incomes Under $200,000

Posted on by Alex Terr

Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, said the effort was good not just for the country but also for Yale, because it will allow students from different walks of life to attend, increasing the range of viewpoints on campus as well as the range of backgrounds.

“Economic diversity can bring racial diversity in a way that’s perfectly legal,” he said. “So after the Supreme Court struck down the use of race, institutions like Yale had to find different ways to get racial diversity.”

Read more in The New York Times 

Canter in Total Information AM: Missouri’s school scores have ‘not recovered post pandemic’ says researcher

Posted on by Alex Terr

Rachel Canter is Director of Education Policy for the Progressive Policy Institute; and Founding Executive Director of Mississippi First. She joins Megan Lynch ahead of the Fourth Annual Education Town Hall – 2025 Missouri MAP Results today at 11am at the Knight Center at Washington University. What did Mississippi do to turn their rates around? ‘We dramatically increased the rigor of our learning standards,’ says Canter, ‘we expect our students to learn more.’

Listen to the episode.

Canter in The New York Times: How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

How could Mississippi, with its low education spending and high child poverty, pull it off?

It did not do so by relying on some of the most common proposals held up as solutions in education, like reducing class sizes, or dramatically boosting per-student funding.

Rather, the state pushed through a vast list of other changes from the top down, including changing the way reading is taught, in an approach known as the science of reading, but also embracing contentious school accountability policies other states have backed away from.

“Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,” said Rachel Canter, the longtime leader of Mississippi First, an education reform group, who now works at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left Washington think tank. “But people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.”

[…]

Read more in The New York Times

Manno for Fordham Institute: The Education Research Handbook That Never Closes

Posted on by Alex Terr

If you’re a policymaker, district leader, or reporter trying to follow education research, it can feel like drinking from multiple fire hoses at once. One week brings a bold new claim about dual enrollment. Next week, there’s a re-analysis of charter school impacts or a skeptical take on short-term workforce credentials. Meanwhile, state and federal leaders are making billion-dollar bets on exactly these programs, often guided by partial evidence, dated syntheses, or the loudest advocates.

Into that gap steps a new tool with an ambitious mission. It’s called the Live Handbook of Education Policy Research, a digital, constantly updated reference edited by Tulane economist Douglas Harris and published by the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP). It’s been described as a “Wikipedia of K–12 research.” But this one is written and vetted by leading scholars and aimed squarely at practitioners and policymakers.

The handbook’s purpose is straightforward but overdue. It will provide comprehensive, rigorous, objective, and useful reviews of research on major education policy topics. Comprehensive means the chapters pull together the most relevant work across methods and disciplines, rather than relying on a few favored studies. Rigorous means not all studies are treated as equal; authors weigh the strongest causal evidence more heavily. Objective means considering multiple perspectives and connecting the outcomes that researchers study with the educational values they embody, including the level of confidence one can have in the conclusions reached. Finally, useful means the chapters are written for a broad audience—policymakers, journalists, and practitioners—not just other academics.

Read more in Fordham Institute. 

Canter for Washington Monthly: Trump’s Education Tax Credit Gambit

Posted on by Alex Terr

There’s nothing education wonks love more than slapping the word “innovation” onto an idea. The innovation du jour is Donald Trump’s school-choice tax credit, formally known as the “Educational Choice for Children Act,” which the president signed in July. If you read that title and suspect this is a tax diversion to support families who pay, or want to pay, for private or religious school tuition, you’ve got the idea.

This federal tax credit benefits donors who give to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit “scholarship granting organization” (SGO). These SGOs must award at least 90 percent of donations in scholarships for “qualified” educational expenses, including tuition, fees, academic tutoring, and special needs services, among other items, at public, private, and religious schools. Governors (or other state-designated authorities) must opt into the program annually as well as approve their state’s SGOs. Children in elementary and secondary grades with family incomes of up to 300 percent of their area’s median household income are eligible recipients. This means that wealthier families living in affluent areas will still benefit. By some estimates, nearly 90 percent of the population will qualify.

“Red” state governors, especially in states that already have private school choice programs, are likely to opt in. Maybe that’s why all the political chatter has been about whether “blue” state governors should opt in as well. And, boy, has there been chatter.

Read more in Washington Monthly.  

Kahlenberg in Inside Higher Ed: “Merit” Was the Word of the Year in Admissions. But What Does It Mean?

Posted on by Alex Terr

“Advocating for merit is a political winner,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, the director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s American Identity Project and an advocate of class-based affirmative action. Trump’s speech to Congress celebrating what he characterized as a return to merit was a “good moment, politically, for Republicans, because most Americans believe in merit.” […]

Kahlenberg, too, opposes race-based affirmative action; he testified for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC, the case that resulted in the Supreme Court’s ban. But he supports “economic” affirmative action that gives preference to low-income or first-generation students.

“If a student has a certain SAT score or set of grades and they came from a low-income family where the parents weren’t college-educated, where the neighborhood schools were pretty lousy, and they managed to do pretty well despite that—that’s something that most Americans favor,” he said. “They don’t see that as a deviation from merit; they see that as a measure of true merit.” […]

Despite the Trump administration’s focus on merit, though, they aren’t pushing to end legacy admissions.

“If you were truly committed to merit, one of the first things you would do would be to put pressure on universities to eliminate legacy preferences, which are essentially affirmative action for the rich … so one has to question the follow-through on that commitment,” said Kahlenberg.

Read more in Inside Higher Ed.

Manno for Real Clear Education: Short-Term Workforce Pell, Long-Term Stakes

Posted on by Alex Terr

The federal Pell Grant program is the cornerstone of college aid for low-income undergraduates, providing roughly $39 billion in fiscal year 2025 to help students pay for college. Those dollars go almost exclusively to semester-long academic programs leading to college degrees.

President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act added a new twist to the Pell program. It created Workforce Pell, a bipartisan policy change that makes students in short-term, job-focused training programs eligible for Pell Grants. This sounds like a modest tweak to the nation’s main college-aid program. But it isn’t.

It’s a big bet that faster, job-focused credentials can become real pathways to opportunity. It also acknowledges that the traditional semester-by-semester college model is no longer the only route to economic mobility.

Read more in Real Clear Education. 

Kahlenberg in the Associated Press: Without affirmative action, elite colleges are prioritizing economic diversity in admissions

Posted on by Alex Terr

Racial diversity does not necessarily follow economic diversity

On many campuses, officials hoped the focus on economic diversity would preserve racial diversity — Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans have the country’s highest poverty rates. But even as low-income numbers climb, many elite campuses have seen racial diversity decrease.

Without the emphasis on income, those decreases might have been even steeper, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute who advocates for class-based affirmative action. He called the latest Pell figures “a significant step in the right direction.”

“Economic diversity is important in its own right,” he said. “It’s important that America’s leadership class — which disproportionately derives from selective colleges — include people who’ve faced economic hardships in life.”

[…]

Earlier this year the College Board — the nonprofit that oversees the SAT — suddenly discontinued an offering that gave admissions offices a wealth of information about applicants, including earnings data from their neighborhoods.

Kahlenberg and others see it as a retreat in the face of government pressure. The College Board offered little explanation, citing changes to federal and state policy around the use of demographic information in admissions.

Read more in The Associated Press. 

Manno for Forbes: Rebuilding The First Rung Of The Opportunity Ladder

Posted on by Alex Terr

America’s Informal Apprenticeship System Is Changing.

Work-Based Learning Closes The Experience Gap And Makes Experience The New Currency of Mobility

For generations, young people entering the U.S. job market followed a predictable script. They went to school, graduated, landed an entry-level first job, learned on the job, and accumulated the experience they needed to advance.

Today, that system is disappearing, along with the first rung on the hiring ladder that moved individuals from school to work to opportunity. In its place, a new reality has emerged: an experience gap that quickly becomes an opportunity gap for those entering the workforce.\

Read more in Forbes. 

Manno for Forbes: Diplomas, Degrees, And Digital Wallets: Revisiting Credentials

Posted on by Max Sherrill

The high school diploma and the bachelor’s degree have long stood as the unquestioned gold standards of American education. For generations they signified that an individual had followed a prescribed path, logged the required seat time, and emerged with an accredited document of accomplishment. But that academic social contract is faltering, prompting a fresh look at what an education credential truly represents.

Consider higher education. A New York Times profile highlights Katie Gallagher, a former sales and marketing director with a four-year degree who has been unemployed for nearly a year despite applying to more than 3,000 jobs. “I have checked all the boxes of ‘success’ my entire life: went to college, got a degree, worked toward a career,” she says.

Research backs her experience. A recent Annenberg Institute analysis shows that the traditional college pathway credential choice model falls short in matching students’ experiences. So conventional credentialing systems must be more accommodating to diverse entry points and flexible progression rather than a single, standardized route.

Together, these signals point to a broader public unease. Many Americans now question whether the traditional markers of a diploma and college degree still reflect the knowledge and skills needed for success.

Keep reading in Forbes.

Manno for The Hechinger Report: Too Many College Graduates Are Stranded Before Their Careers Can Even Begin. We Can’t Let That Happen

Posted on by Max Sherrill

This fall, some 19 million undergraduates returned to U.S. campuses with a long-held expectation: Graduate, land an entry-level job, climb the career ladder. That formula is breaking down.

Once reliable gateway jobs for college graduates in industries like finance, consulting and journalism have tightened requirements. Many entry-level job postings that previously provided initial working experience for college graduates now require two to three years of prior experience, while AI, a recent analysis concluded, “snaps up good entry-level tasks,” especially routine work like drafting memos, preparing spreadsheets and summarizing research.

Without these proving grounds, new hires lose chances to build skills by doing. And the demand for work experience that potential workers don’t have creates an experience gap for new job seekers. Once stepping-stones, entry-level positions increasingly resemble mid-career jobs.

Keep reading in the Hechinger Report.