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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

Keep reading in Community College Daily 

For generations, college degrees came with a promise. Put in the time. Pay the price. Follow the path. You’ll then receive a bachelor’s that opens doors to work, status and upward mobility.

That promise hasn’t disappeared. But it’s weakened.

Students and working adults still want postsecondary credentials that signal to employers and the wider world that they’re ready for the workforce. What they don’t accept so easily is that this signal must come in the form of a single, expensive, time-consuming college degree.

Increasingly, they’re looking for credentials that cost less, take less time, fit around work and family, and lead more directly to labor-market value. The question is no longer whether higher education is changing. It’s whether colleges can adapt before students adapt without them.

Read more in the 74 .

The just-released Nation’s Report Card presents two different stories. One carries measured good news. The other warns that time is running out to act. Together, they give an honest snapshot of where American education stands and what needs to happen to improve the life prospects of young people.

The test results come from the Long-Term Trend edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which has measured student achievement in reading and math since the early 1970s. Unlike the main NAEP, which tests 4th and 8th graders every two years, the long-term trend assessment samples 9- and 13-year-olds. Its format is largely unchanged, making it the closest thing the U.S. has to a consistent, decades-long academic record.

The story about 9-year-olds offers cautious grounds for hope. Average scores for this group rose 4 points since 2022, with reading essentially back to pre-COVID levels. More striking, the gains were driven primarily by the lowest-performing students, those at the 10th and 25th percentiles, who had fallen furthest during the pandemic.

In reading, 10th-percentile 9-year-olds gained 8 points since 2022, and in math, 9 points. This reverses the troubling pattern of the 2010s, when achievement gains went almost entirely to top-performing students. That these youngest students, who were still in preschool when COVID arrived and largely escaped its worst educational disruptions, are recovering at all, and that the recovery is reaching the children most in need, is an encouraging signal.

Read more in Real Clear Education.

America has built a crowded opportunity system. But it hasn’t yet managed to build a clear opportunity map that guides people through that system.

The U.S. now has more than 1.85 million credentials, from high school diplomas and college degrees, to short-term credentials, industry certifications, badges and other certificates, according to Credential Engine.

They’re offered by more than 134,000 providers, with $2.34 trillion invested annually in education and workforce development. They vary in quality, market value and connection to further education or work.

But more options don’t automatically create clearer choices. For example, a student may not know which certificate leads to a family-sustaining job. A displaced worker may not know whether a short-term program connects to an apprenticeship, a promotion or a degree. An employer may say it needs skills but not know how to translate that need into a program, credential or hiring pathway.

So America has no shortage of career pathways. But it does have a navigation problem. And community colleges can play a practical role in solving it.

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