issue: Education

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.

Manno for Forbes: Dual Enrollment Blends High School And College—Next Step Is Jobs

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Allowing high school students to earn both college and high school credit at the same time has gone from boutique to baseline. These dual enrollment programs blend the last years of high school with the first year of college, often in classes taught on high school campuses. They increasingly link coursework to career pathways that lead to good jobs. They are also an underrated form of K–12 public school choice.

Done well, dual enrollment gives students a first taste of college-level expectations, lowers the cost of a credential, and accelerates the path to a good first job. Done poorly, it devolves into random acts of dual credit, with scattered classes that don’t apply to a pathway, credits that don’t transfer, and equity gaps that widen instead of close.

Keep reading in Forbes.

Manno for The Stanford Social Innovation Review: A New AI Career Ladder

Posted on by Alex Terr

The growing use of generative AI in the workplace raises a paradox for entry-level workers. The very tasks that once trained new workers—such as summarizing meetings, cleaning data, and drafting memos—are increasingly automated. This means that entry-level jobs today require experience that entry-level roles no longer supply.

AI has cannibalized the routine, low-risk work tasks that used to teach newcomers how to operate in complex organizations. Without those task rungs, the climb up the opportunity ladder into better employment options becomes steeper—and for many, impossible. This is not a temporary glitch. AI is reorganizing work, reshaping what knowledge and skills matter, and redefining how people are expected to acquire them.

The consequences ripple from individual career starts to the broader American promise of economic and social mobility, which includes both financial wealth and social wealth that comes from the networks and relationships we build. Yet the same technology that complicates the first job can help us reinvent how experience is earned, validated, and scaled. If we use AI to widen—not narrow—access to education, training, and proof of knowledge and skill, we can build a stronger career ladder to the middle class and beyond. A key part of doing this is a redesign of education, training, and hiring infrastructure.

In the words of Burning Glass Institute President Matt Sigelman, “AI doesn’t automate away jobs. It automates tasks. Whether that opens time to take on more valuable tasks, whether new efficiencies unlock latent demand that actually grows opportunity, or whether employers decide to take the savings depends on a range of factors and plays out over time… First, we need an accessible infrastructure.”

Read more in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. 

Kahleberg in the Associated Press: Black enrollment is waning at many elite colleges after affirmative action ban, AP analysis finds

Posted on by Alex Terr

On average, the decreases don’t appear to be as steep as some college leaders predicted, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute. And he believes colleges can still do more to promote racial diversity, such as giving greater preference to students from lower-income families and eliminating legacy preferences that tend to benefit wealthy, white students.

“I wouldn’t want people to draw from the data a conclusion that the situation is hopeless,” he said.

Read more in the Associated Press. 

Kahlenberg in The Wall Street Journal: A Backlash Is Growing Against Another Elite College Practice: ‘Legacy’ Admissions

Posted on by Alex Terr

“There is a huge hypocrisy in failing to examine legacy preferences, which have nothing to do with merit and everything to do with accident of birth,” said Kahlenberg, a longtime advocate for eliminating both racial and legacy admissions preferences who testified as an expert witness against affirmative action in the Supreme Court case.

Blum, Kahlenberg and Arcidiacono, the Duke economist who also testified against Harvard in the affirmative-action case, jointly sent their recent letter to the federal government.

Read more in The Wall Street Journal.