In early 2025, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was largely dismantled. The Trump administration, acting through the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), cut NCES’s federal staff from 103 employees to three, removed its commissioner, and canceled roughly three-quarters of its contracts. This disrupted or halted much of its important statistical work. That is a problem that must be remedied. The question is how. A new report from the American Statistical Association (ASA) argues that the answer is not to recreate what was dismantled, but to build a new and better agency.

Written by Shelly Wilkie Martinez and Stephen Provasnik, A Vision and Strategy for Remaking the National Center for Education Statistics is a starting point. And to that end, the ASA is seeking public feedback as it moves into a second phase, expected to commence in 2027, that will refine the vision and develop a fuller roadmap for rebuilding NCES.

The report begins from two propositions that are sometimes—mistakenly—treated as contradictory.

Read more in Fordham Institute

For the past twenty years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about—and advocating for—accountability in public education. I wrote about some of that experience in my recent paper, Inside the Mississippi Marathon, in which I chronicle Mississippi’s twenty-year climb from worst to first, when adjusting for demographics, in reading and math outcomes. Education advocates like me frequently talk about what adults in schools and positions of leadership should be doing (or not doing), and how we should hold them accountable for it. We rarely talk about what accountability means for most of the people generating education policy ideas.

Now that I have joined the ranks of national education reformers, I am thinking more and more about that question.

I have strong feelings about the responsibilities of policy wonks for good reason. Years ago, I was working on a major piece of education legislation in Mississippi, one of the many I worked on over the course of my career. A person from a national organization came down from Washington, D.C.—we will call this person “The Snob”—and met with several policymakers about the bill. I do not recall exactly how I came to be in this particular private meeting between The Snob and Mississippi Senate Education Chair Gray Tollison, but I do recall that it was not quite clear to me why The Snob had come down. She did not represent any constituency that was critical to the passage of the bill, nor did she have the standing in Mississippi to matter too much one way or another. And though she was on our side of the debate, we also did not need any more “experts” from D.C. I had already mastered the ins and outs of the legislation after spending years reading all the credible research and talking to other specialists and practitioners.

All of this would have been news to The Snob, though, who clearly felt her opinions were of the utmost importance. The meeting went off the rails almost immediately after finishing the usual niceties. “I totally disagree,” The Snob emphatically declared when we explained why one section of the bill did not exactly match the theoretical ideal that she believed in. We tried, very diplomatically, to explain again that this was an aspect of the bill that had been a source of enormous trouble and that it had taken significant work to find a solution palatable to everyone involved. “Well, I get to say whatever I want because I’m not from here,” she sniffed. “I can go back to D.C.”

It was a shocking thing to say, especially with the tone she took. Had she shared either her critique of that portion of the bill or her belief that she could bear no consequences for her words either in public or to any other Mississippi legislator than the one sitting beside me, I likely would have had to spend the next month trying to salvage the bill from the jaws of death for the umpteenth time. It took everything in me not to yell at her from across the table. The best I could do was shoot her a Julia Sugarbaker-worthy death glare.

Read more in Merion West

As students return to classrooms, the educational effects of the pandemic remain unfinished business. More than six years after schools first closed, achievement remains below 2019 levels in many districts. Researchers are still trying to determine how much the nearly $190 billion in federal emergency aid helped students recover.

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) appears to offer a discouraging verdict. It finds that additional federal aid did not increase school spending or improve student test scores in the districts the researchers studied.

Media stories about the skills mismatch between applicant qualifications and employer expectations have been a regular feature for decades. Among the most recent entries are a Washington Post story titled “Why Recruiters Can’t Find Workers and New Grads Can’t Find Jobs,” which warned of the oncoming “largest labor shortage in history,” and a Forbes report on a survey from the National Federation of Independent Businesses that showed a majority of respondents seeking to hire in June couldn’t find qualified staff. One in five said this is their biggest issue as a small business owner.

Solving this predicament is one rationale for the strong political support and attention shown to work-based learning and high school career and technical education programs. But leaders running these programs report a quandary of their own: They can’t find enough employers willing to host interested high school students in meaningful roles, or sometimes enough students to fill available spots.

The usual explanation, that one side or the other isn’t trying hard enough, misses what’s really going on. The problem isn’t effort. It’s infrastructure.

Read more in The 74

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.