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The focus of this report is on mental health interventions delivered in K-12 neighborhood public schools. A vast array of commercially available programs, conceptual frameworks, and approaches to school-based mental health are not unanimously recommended, applied, or agreed upon. This poses a challenge to any comprehensive description or evaluation of school-based mental health. Key findings include: (1) There is a lack of high-quality evidence to support school-based mental health initiatives. Rigorous evaluations of universal programs on mental health literacy, awareness, prevention, and screening--and of many social-emotional learning programs--find neither reduced rates of mental health conditions nor improved academic outcomes; (2) The concept of school-based mental health, as currently delivered in typical neighborhood public schools, is incoherent because it primarily serves youth who are not specifically in need of mental health treatment, while insufficiently serving those with mental disorders; (3) While some youth can benefit from high-quality mental health services, universal mental health programs carry underestimated potential harms: directly, through poor-quality care, overdiagnosis, and misallocated spending; and indirectly, through wasted class time and reduced accountability in the mental health and education systems; and (4) Federal agencies responsible for school-based mental health programs provide no meaningful or coordinated guidance on essential questions such as what it means for a program to be effective, what expectations exist in "mental health deserts," and how schools should sort through numerous overlapping initiatives.

In many parts of the country, enrollment in traditional public schools has fallen to its lowest point in decades. However, states, cities, and school districts have been slow to respond to the reality of empty desks. This report examines trends in school enrollment, focusing on several of America's most populous cities, as well as the budgetary and staffing responses to those trends. It also examines the states where these large cities are located. Key findings include: (1) New York, Illinois, and California experienced the largest declines in enrollment between 2013 and 2022, while Texas and Arizona had the largest increase in enrollment; (2) Texas will soon surpass California with the most public school students; (3) In California's two biggest cities, Los Angeles and San Diego, enrollments fell between 2013 and 2022; (4) Philadelphia experienced a decline in enrollment that mirrored overall statewide trends; (5) Although Texas experienced a strong uptick in student enrollment statewide, its four biggest cities--Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and Austin--all experienced slight declines over the last decade; (6) Costs per student rose between 2013 and 2022 in New York City, Houston, San Diego, Dallas, Austin, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles; and (7) Total staff increased in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas over the 2013-22 period.

Students who have dropped out of high school--and those at risk of doing so--are at greater risk of lifelong poverty, involvement with the criminal justice system, dependence on government welfare programs, and even premature death. In the last few years, however, the problems at high schools have compounded, as pandemic-era school closures led to dramatic drops in math and reading proficiency, as well as a spike in chronic absenteeism. In the wake of the pandemic, there is thus a pressing need--as well as an opportunity--to find new, innovative approaches for recovering dropouts and retaining those at risk of dropping out. Paid high school work-study programs are a promising way to help provide opportunities to the most vulnerable teenagers and young adults. Before graduating from high school, students enrolled in work-study programs are employed in paid jobs to gain valuable, marketable skills while often receiving their first wages and being kept safe. Work-study programs make high school relevant, thus helping to prevent dropouts and to reclaim those who have already left. In preventing more students from exiting the school system, these programs can make the U.S. more economically competitive and turn around the lives of thousands of students who would otherwise likely fall into lifelong dead ends. School-district officials should work to establish these programs, starting with a select number of high schools and partners in the private sector and skilled trades.

School boards remain one of the most powerful forces in American education, helping to set curricula, evaluate teachers, and direct hundreds of billions of dollars in education funding. Yet teachers' unions play an outsized role in determining who serves on these boards. If the interests of teachers are perfectly aligned with those of students, then there may be no reason to worry about union dominance in school board elections. When these interests collide, union power likely encourages boards to prioritize the needs of adult employees over students. This report analyzes the nature of union power in school board elections, and in particular, how unions decide which candidates to support. Key findings include: (1) Union electioneering success is not simply a product of union mobilization. Rather, union endorsements increase voters' support for union-backed candidates by 6 percentage points; (2) The union seal of approval buoys candidates' electoral prospects because voters believe union-favored candidates hold shared interests on important education issues; (3) Voters are largely mistaken about what union endorsements convey and what drives endorsement decisions. The only consistent predictor of union support for incumbents is whether the district raised salaries for senior teachers prior to an election; and (4) The divergence between what union endorsements mean and how voters interpret them have troubling implications for democratic accountability and board-based governance. Groups wishing to counteract union dominance will need to find ways to ensure that ordinary voters are aware of the actual policy priorities of union-backed candidates.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court brought to a close the country's decades-long experiment in affirmative action in a pair of closely watched cases--"Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College" and "Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina"--and overturned the use of racial preferences in higher-education admissions. In previous cases concerning race-conscious admissions, the Court relied on amicus briefs to inform its decision. Therefore, it is important to analyze the authors of amicus briefs and how they had hoped to influence the Court this time. While almost two-thirds of Americans oppose the use of an applicant's race or ethnicity as a factor in the college admissions process, it is notable that 83.5% of the advocacy groups that were amici in "Students for Fair Admissions" lobbied in support of racial preferences. Most of the amicus briefs submitted in these landmark cases did not reflect ordinary Americans' views, which begs the question: Is the Court being misled about public opinion by advocacy groups in other policy areas, too?

Over the last two years, seven states have enacted new universal education savings account (ESA) programs or have expanded existing programs to universal or near-universal eligibility. Parental-choice advocates, who have labored for decades to make incremental inroads toward achieving greater educational freedom for families. However, the authors argue. advocates, reformers, and regulators must not lose sight of the fact that the hard, but essential, implementation efforts that follow enactment will determine whether these programs achieve their transformational potential. This report examines the challenges of implementing ESAs and makes suggestions about how to overcome implantation pitfalls. Specifically, this focuses on five key priorities. First, parents must be informed about their options. Second, schools and other providers must prepare for, and respond effectively to, the opportunities and challenges provided by ESAs. Third, regulators must thoughtfully and deliberately address the need for effective program regulations. Fourth, program administrators must establish effective operational policies and procedures. Fifth, states and public-interest legal advocates must prepare for legal challenges.

In order to realize all the benefits of parental-choice programs, advocates, policymakers, and participating schools have to pay more attention to implementation challenges, both when designing parental-choice policies and after new programs are enacted. This report discusses both categories of implementation challenges. The first category--challenges that result from policy design--includes features of many programs that make them difficult to implement, such as limits on the tax benefits available in scholarship tax-credit programs, low scholarship amounts, and eligibility restrictions. The second category--challenges that occur after programs are enacted--result from advocates' and participating schools' failure to take steps that would increase the likelihood of programmatic success, such as prioritizing academic improvement among program participants, better informing parents about the choices available to them, and encouraging the development of more and better schools and school networks. This report focuses on "private-school-choice" programs--that is, programs that enable students to use public resources for private-school tuition. To the extent that education savings account (ESA) funds are used to enable participants to attend private schools, as they will be in many, if not most, cases, the report addresses implementation issues affecting ESAs. While the policy landscape is shifting rapidly, and more states undoubtedly will enact universal ESAs in the months and years to come--the vast majority of parental-choice programs are, and will continue to be, limited in scope and eligibility, necessitating continued attention to the issues addressed in this report critical to their success.

In New York State, private and religious schools are required to offer a curriculum "substantially equivalent" to what is available in local public schools. Substantial equivalency--which has been law for nearly 130 years--allows parents to direct the education of their children by enrolling them in the school of their choice, while also ensuring that schools meet certain standards. However in September 2022, the New York State Board of Regents amended the regulations governing the law's enforcement. The amendments follow a multiyear effort on the part of a small group of activists who voiced concerns over a particular group of religious schools in New York City and a few other counties in the state. These schools serve the "Haredi" Jewish community, also described as ultraorthodox. There are critical public-policy and legal issues within the debate over Haredi schools and the state's substantial-equivalence requirement, particularly how to weigh the right to religious freedom enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. This issue brief will explore those issues and attempt to place them in the context of the communities that overwhelmingly choose these schools for their children.

In a plurality opinion in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell held that colleges and universities could consider an applicant's race in the admissions process in order to attain a diverse student body. In a pair of cases that will be decided in the current term, the Supreme Court has been asked to reconsider that precedent, sparking a reinvigorated public debate about the merits of affirmative action. In these policy debates, much has been written about the attitudes of blacks, whites, and Hispanics toward racial preferences. The views of Asian Americans, however--who are often portrayed as aggrieved victims of this policy alongside whites--have received scant attention. Dearth of information on Asian Americans' attitudes toward affirmative action has made it possible for the results of one misleading set of survey questions--suggesting that over two-thirds of Asian Americans support this policy--to gain an outsized role in the debate over the issue. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S. today. More effort ought to be put into understanding their views, on a variety of policies, in an unbiased way.

The purposes of this policy document are: (1) to encourage public-school instruction conducive to developing skills and gaining factual knowledge necessary for students' future success as critical thinkers, citizens, and leaders of the state of [STATE]; (2) to protect children against the unwarranted and harmful influence of politicized classroom instruction; (3) to provide a safe, healthy, supportive, respectful, and developmentally appropriate learning environment; and (4) to bolster parents' fundamental rights to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children.

New York State's system of public elementary and secondary schools is in steep decline, but it is salvageable. The roots of its problems pre-date the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, but the system's response to that challenge accelerated discontent with the schools and harmed students. The damage of those years will not be undone if the state blindly continues to throw money at schools--unless there is a fundamental re-thinking of the purpose and governance of public education. New York consistently leads the nation in K-12 school spending, yet by 50-state standards, student outcomes are mired in the middle. If higher spending automatically led to higher quality, New York would be a model for the nation. Unfortunately, this model has demonstrably failed, and it is time for state leaders to fundamentally rethink their approach to education. This brief discusses: (1) the impacts of a change in the mayoral control of the New York City schools; (2) charter school outcomes; (3) the misguided college-for-all push; (4) and five areas in which the governor can lead a change in approach to education.

This report is about the educational borders that have sprung up across America. Some are school district boundaries. They can form an invisible barrier between students and the schools that they might want to attend. Other borders, often aligned with the municipal boundaries of cities, counties, and states, restrict who can teach where, how much teachers are paid, and what their retirement looks like. All have profoundly shaped the way that American schools look. In this report, the authors explain how school district boundaries, which limit where children can attend school, can have negative impacts on students and homeowners, especially the most disadvantaged. They also explain how boundaries, in the form of pension rules, negatively affect teachers. They propose an alternative: a system with fewer boundaries--one that allows students to access a wide array of schools, regardless of where they live, and one that does not punish teachers for moving between public, charter, or private sectors, or between states (or even within states, in some instances)--will improve outcomes for students, increase equity among homeowners, and promote retirement security for teachers. The authors argue that as states continue to move toward providing more educational opportunities for families, teachers will need to fill some of the demands for a diverse set of options. The way that educational systems compensate teachers, however, is outdated and ill-equipped to facilitate a dynamic teacher labor market to meet families' needs.

When students are admitted through admissions preferences--especially when the preferences are large and the students pursue demanding fields of study--do they benefit from going to a more selective school? Or, instead, do they suffer from being "mismatched" with their peers--falling behind, becoming frustrated, receiving low grades, and sometimes switching to easier majors or dropping out? This brief will survey some of the most influential research on this question in order to give a bird's-eye view of the debate.

Tamim is an organization designed as a school network, much like those found in the charter school sector, among innovative public schools, and in smaller numbers in other corners of the private school sector. Tamim is built on the notion of expanding existing prekindergarten programs associated with local Chabad Jewish centers into full elementary schools. The Tamim model strives to combine educational excellence with core religious values and education, all within the context of a built-in network of local religious leaders committed to building and sustaining strong and supportive relationships between families and these schools. If this experiment works, it may provide school leaders as well as policymakers with a model of effective religious education within a larger pluralistic approach to education.

The 2022 National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) data provide a window into how the landscape of American education has shifted over the past two years in response to COVID-19-related school disruption. Between 2020 and 2022--a period marred not only by the health and safety worries that COVID brought but also by the heated debates about how schools should serve students amid a pandemic. In early spring 2020, many Catholic schools were the first to close, responding quickly to the threat that was still not fully understood. Then in fall 2020, Catholic schools, far more so than either public or charter schools, stood apart again by finding a way to reopen safely for in-person learning. The 2022 NCEA enrollment results reveal a historic 3.8% nationwide enrollment increase for all Catholic elementary and secondary schools. In order to understand whether the 2022 rebound represents a true reversal of the previous decline in Catholic school enrollment, it's important to dive deeper to understand where the increases were concentrated and what can be learned from them. To that end, analyzing the numbers by grade level provides some insight into just what may have changed and where. Pre-K, for instance, accounts for 40% (or 44,584 students) of the 2021 enrollment decline and 66% (41,190 students) of the 2022 rebound. K-8 Catholic school enrollment, by contrast, rose by 2.4% (23,100 students) between 2021 and 2022, and secondary school enrollment saw a modest 0.4% (2,164 students) decline from 2021 to 2022.

New York City has the largest public school district in the U.S., but the city's diverse educational landscape also includes charter, private, and religious schools, all of which have undergone a major transformation in the two years since the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last two school years, overall school enrollment in the city was down by 80,000 students--especially among district schools run by the city's education department. COVID was not the beginning of the city's education system ignoring the needs of these families, however. This report looks at the history of the purpose of education in both New York City and the state and evaluates how it has changed over time, especially in its emphasis on college readiness, a goal that does not align with the needs of about half of young New Yorkers and one that the city's education system has so far proved unable to achieve. This report concludes with a specific set of recommendations for policy makers to fashion a more pluralistic and responsive school sector by improving noncollege pathways for high school students, maintaining and growing access to accelerated learning opportunities for high-achieving students, adopting a cooperative and accommodating approach to private and religious schools (particularly fast-growing Orthodox Jewish schools), and strengthening the voices of parents in the governance of district-run schools. To make the city's schools more attractive to families, the state legislature, the State Board of Regents, and the city's mayor and school chancellor all must act.

The Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the legality of racial preferences, in part thanks to a lawsuit against Harvard College alleging that the school discriminates against Asian-Americans. Proving discrimination at a specific school is an arduous task, requiring access to private, detailed admissions records--as the legal documents in that case demonstrate. But this report takes a step back and focuses on a question that is both simpler and broader: As the Asian-American population in the U.S. has risen dramatically over the past 30 years, how has Asian enrollment fared at different types of colleges? This kind of analysis was a reason many became skeptical of elite colleges' treatment of Asians over the past decade, and now it is possible to update the numbers that have been publicized in popular magazines and publications. This report begins by showing that Asian-Americans are generally overrepresented at the highest levels of academic achievement, and that this overrepresentation has become more pronounced as the Asian share of the population has grown. Using federal data on college enrollment by race--but mindful of the limits of such data--it then sorts colleges according to their admittance rates and test scores for the purpose of tracking changes in the share of Asian students at different types of four-year colleges that grant bachelor's degrees.

As the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs, thousands of New Yorkers are searching for jobs, and employers across the state are struggling to fill empty positions. New York's publicly funded city and state community colleges are uniquely positioned to help bridge this gap, providing more job-focused education for mid-career adults and traditional college-age students. The need for job training is sure to grow in years ahead as automation and business restructuring transform the New York labor market. But meeting the need will require new thinking and new priorities--in Albany, at city hall, and on community college campuses across the state. This report discusses steps that could make the most difference, which include new State University of New York (SUNY) leadership focused on workforce education; state incentives and guidance for colleges preparing students to earn industry certifications; blurring the line between credit and noncredit education; and increased funding for short, job-focused reskilling programs.

America has a long history of small-school environments, such as one-room schoolhouses and homeschools. But in recent years, other models have developed, giving students more intimate settings for learning and enabling their families to play a larger role in their schooling. Microschools are a leading example of this growing sector that also includes pods, hubs, and hybrid homeschooling. This movement was kicked into high gear by the COVID pandemic, which caused millions of families to search for or develop flexible learning environments because of school closures and inadequate online options. For microschooling to expand and improve, state and local governments must ensure that parents, educators, and social entrepreneurs have the resources and freedom to develop, adapt, and sustain settings that meet students' and families' needs. Policymakers should consider statutes, regulations, and practices related to education funding, charter schooling, private schooling, homeschooling, online education, facilities requirements, educator certification, and more. Manhattan Institute for Policy Research commissioned three reports to understand how state policy is affecting microschooling. Each focused on a different state: Idaho, New York, and Arizona. This culminating report brings together these findings and adds related lessons from public opinion surveys, other states, and leaders in the field. [For the Idaho report, see ED618731. For the New York report, see ED618733. And for the Arizona report, see ED618480.]

Between 1994 and 2014, New York City engaged in a historic overhaul of its publicly funded high schools. This included the opening of charter high schools (made possible by a 1999 state law) and the creation of new, smaller district high schools that would, in time, replace many of the city's large, traditional, comprehensive, and vocational high schools. The reforms started during Giuliani's mayoral administration and accelerated in 2002 when the Bloomberg administration began methodically reviewing the performance of all its schools and closing those that consistently demonstrated poor performance. Despite independent research showing that the changes led to positive student outcomes, Bill de Blasio brought these efforts to a close when he became mayor in 2014. Now there is a new mayor in town. This report describes the performance of all city public high schools, district and charter, as of 2018-19--comparing them in groups determined by their size, academic selectivity, and origin--and discusses the implications of their performance for the future. Incoming mayor Eric Adams and his administration will soon have the opportunity to rethink how New York's high schools might be reorganized or modified to serve the needs of students with differing achievement levels at the end of middle school: those ready for highly advanced work and those who enter high school clearly unlikely to attain college readiness.

In this report, the author explains the small-schools environment in New York City. Prior to the pandemic, the Big Apple had a small but growing microschool and learning pod community. New York City's frequent school closures throughout 2020 and 2021 caused many families to look more closely at these education options. New York State's stifling regulatory environment shows why more microschools and learning pods did not emerge during the pandemic--and might not emerge in the years ahead. One key lesson from this study--and others in this series--is that a state's policy disposition toward school choice, private schools, and homeschooling can thwart education innovation in many ways. For microschooling and learning pods to expand in NYC and elsewhere, state policymakers must assess and reform a host of statutes and regulations, even if such rules were created with student welfare in mind and have been on the books for generations. [For the main report, "Microschooling and Policy," see ED618730.]

Microschools, small schools that educate five to 15 students, have been among the most interesting recent developments in the K-12 reform world. Neither homeschooling nor traditional schooling, they exist in a hard-to-classify space between formal and informal learning environments. One of the most prominent microschooling networks, Prenda, was founded in 2018 in Mesa, Arizona's third largest city. It has experienced dramatic growth largely because of the way it attracts parents like those interviewed for this paper. It is no coincidence that Prenda's emergence and expansion took place in Arizona, which has been a national leader in education innovation for a generation. Arizona's cultural and policy environment foster and promote experimentation, diversification, and parental choice. The state's thriving charter-school sector students in charters--has developed an expansive, varied set of choice-based public schools. This paper explores microschooling in the Grand Canyon State through parent interviews, a review of decades of public-policy reform and K-12 political battles, and an assessment of student performance data. [For the main report, "Microschooling and Policy," see ED618730.]

In this first installment of the series on state-level policy and microschooling, the authors explain Idaho's recent legislative debate over two competing approaches to supporting the creation of small learning communities, known as microschools. Idaho's strong homeschooling community and its low-enrollment rural districts create political dynamics not seen in many other states. Very small schools are not an innovation in Idaho; they are common across the state and have been for generations. Indeed, policy proposals to expand education options that might succeed elsewhere create complications in Idaho because, among other things, many families have concerns about entangling the government and homeschooling, and many districts would be hit hard by the loss of even a couple of dozen students. This report underscores a key finding across this series: if policy is to help advance microschooling, advocates and policymakers must begin by understanding states' histories and policies related to enrollment, funding, choice, and more. [For the main report, "Microschooling and Policy," see ED618730.]

Parental-choice debates typically focus on whether private schools should receive public funds "at all." This paper focuses on a question that inevitably follows when schools do receive them--the question of accountability. That is, what regulatory conditions ought to attend private schools' receipt of public funds? This is an enormously complicated question. On one level, it is entirely reasonable to condition private schools' participation in parental-choice programs on some government oversight. When the government acquires goods or services from the private sector, surely it is entitled to ensure that it receives what it is paying for. On the other hand, this simple logic masks enormous complexities: For what should private schools be held accountable? How should regulators determine whether their performance satisfies accountability standards? What ought to be the consequences of nonperformance? To what extent do--or might-- accountability regulations threaten the autonomy and religious liberty of participating schools? This report tackles these questions, focusing on academic accountability: How should regulators hold private schools that receive public funds accountable for their students' academic performance? After reviewing current accountability regulations in private-school-choice programs, the paper discusses challenges that are presented when parental choice and accountability policies intersect. These challenges include opponents' often disingenuous deployment of accountability demands as a weapon to undermine parental choice; the problem of selection bias; the risk that accountability regulations deter some schools from participating; and the limits of the standardized tests on which most accountability regulations rely.

While a substantial body of research exists to demonstrate the benefits that choice policies such as education savings accounts (ESAs) have on various student, family, community, and societal outcomes, the fiscal impact of these policies is also an important part of the debate. This report examines solely the potential fiscal effects of educational choice programs on New York State taxpayers and district schools. This report presents fiscal models for two ESA amounts: one worth $6,500 (90% of the state's average marginal per-pupil cost); and the other worth $9,900 (100% of the statewide average amount of total per-pupil state aid). For both scenarios, the models estimate the net fiscal effect of the program, which is the difference between the cost of the ESA program and the savings from "switchers"--that is, students who would have remained in a public school system if not for the program. As this report demonstrates, ESAs will provide fiscal benefits for the school system, meaning that students who remain in public schools generally end up with more resources on a per-pupil basis. The Empire State can be confident in expanding educational opportunities without adverse effect to its bottom line.

"Critical Race Theory" (CRT) is the term commonly applied in public debates to controversial racially charged curricula and initiatives in the public schools, as well as various parallel trainings and programs commonly being adopted in school and other settings. Initially, CRT was confined to the niche circles of legal academia from which it originated. More recently, its core ideas have been applied and expanded to an array of disciplines, including education. Unsurprisingly, many parents and teachers across the country have been troubled by these developments. CRT is unpopular with the public, especially when details of specific practices are made clear. For the abstract question of whether people support CRT, a "YouGov/Economist" survey conducted June 13-15, 2021, found that many Americans didn't know what it was; but of those who did, 56% opposed it while 38% supported it. This brief examines the history and current issues with CRT. It also crafts a proposed model legislation as a tool for elected officials to consider in crafting legislation responsive to CRT--infused pedagogy, consistent with the aforementioned principles. The model legislation includes two substantive sections, the former oriented around transparency and the latter around compelled speech and curricular content. Although the proposed model bill is crafted with constitutional limits in mind, it does not push the outer bound of what is constitutionally permitted for state legislatures, and some state legislatures could go further without running afoul of federal law.

Each year, more than 55,000 students graduate from the public high schools run by the New York City Department of Education (DOE); 58,000 did so in school year 2019-20. In percentage terms, the city's cohort graduation rate--that is, the percentage of entering ninth-graders who graduated within four years--has increased steadily from the early 2000s and now stands at 78.8%. However, the meaning, or value, of a high school diploma has been debated during the two decades that the city's graduation rate increased. Meanwhile there is a more fundamental question: "Should" a high school diploma, of any type, signify college readiness? More generally, is enrollment in an academic course of study in college the "only" appropriate goal for high school graduates? This paper considers these fundamental questions by examining the academic standing of NYC DOE high school graduates (that is, district public schools, not private or public charter high schools) who enter associate's degree programs in the City University of New York (CUNY), as well as the measurable outcomes, retention, and graduation rates of its colleges. It is based on publicly available aggregate data maintained by the city's DOE and CUNY's Office of Institutional Research.

This issue brief seeks to add to the discussion of educational pluralism by highlighting the history, features, and successes of the classical education model. The model is unique for its emphasis on building the student to be a scholar and an active citizen. Classical schools come in the form of private and charter schools, homeschooling, and micro-schooling. This paper profiles classical-model charter schools in New York City, Washington, DC, and Nashville. Each one has a majority-minority student body whose state test scores match or exceed their respective district public school's average.

Expanded public subsidies for child care and prekindergarten command solid bipartisan support. According to recent polling, two-thirds of Republicans and nearly nine out of 10 Democrats would like to see Congress increase federal investment in early education. At the state level, public investment and student enrollment in prekindergarten increased at a faster rate in single-party-control Republican states than it did in Democratic states during the first half of the last decade. The child-care industry has been deeply affected by the coronavirus pandemic and attendant lockdowns. A report from the National Women's Law Center estimated that about one in five child-care workers lost their jobs between February and July 2020. Even before the pandemic, progressive politicians--including many of the Democratic presidential candidates--were calling for unprecedented expansions to federal investment in early education. This issue brief analyzes the research on early education. First, it presents and contextualizes the arguments made by early-education advocates and the research used to support those arguments. Then it reviews other studies that are frequently elided or ignored but that are more relevant to contemporary policy debates. These studies present a consistent pattern: while early education "can" be a profound boon for deeply disadvantaged students, it can also set disadvantaged students further back and potentially do lasting harm to students born into middle-class families.

The coronavirus has profoundly disrupted American public education and substantially harmed the learning trajectories of tens of millions of students. The incoming administration will have its hands full trying to get schools reopened and students back on track. As it does so, it may feel tempted to use this crisis to consolidate federal control or may perceive that the election has given it the mandate to make "systemic" changes to public schools. There will undoubtedly be many groups calling for it to do just that. For the sake of national cohesion, this paper recommends three broad policy areas where the Biden administration should tread lightly: (1) Federalism; (2) School discipline; and (3) The culture wars.

Higher education took center stage during the Democratic presidential primaries, and congressional leaders in the party are calling for universal student loan forgiveness and tuition-free public college. The incoming Biden administration will thus face pressure to radically expand subsidies for higher education. Conservatives and moderates tend to reject socializing higher education or declaring a federal student-loan jubilee, which matters because--progressive pressure notwithstanding--Biden will need to work with a Congress that is balanced politically and in which radical measures are unlikely to advance. The good news is that a number of sensible measures are capable of attracting bipartisan support and improving the circumstances of college students and aspiring college students who are truly in need of more help. These measures involve: (1) Pell Grants; (2) College loans; and (3) Nontraditional higher education.

New York City's public school system unraveled last year in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. Before the pandemic, criticisms of the public schools typically centered on performance measures: Were enough students meeting state benchmarks? Was success evident across all racial, socioeconomic, and ability groupings? Today, foundational concepts--such as the importance of compulsory school attendance and the collection and dissemination of basic measures of average daily attendance, class grades, and test scores--have been abandoned. A national study found that the city's hybrid approach to schooling (which the system began to move away from in late November) is delivering less than half the instructional time required by the state in normal years. Within even that limited offering, attendance was abysmal, and the quality of remote instruction was low. The available data show that attendance numbers for black and Hispanic youngsters are poorer than those for white and Asian students. As a result, there seems to be no doubt that the city's handling of its schools during the pandemic will widen the achievement gap between white and Asian students, on the one hand, and black and Hispanic students, on the other--a sad coda to the eight-year term of Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose educational program promised "Equity and Excellence for All." The de Blasio administration entered office defining the core problem facing the schools as one of inequity rather than overall performance, and it introduced a set of centrally planned program initiatives meant to address that inequity. Uniformity was emphasized over both responsiveness to local communities and nimble program design and operation. As many of these centrally mandated programs failed to produce the desired equitable results, the administration turned to a more redistributionist approach, in the belief that the success of some students was coming at the expense of others. By attacking merit-based admissions, the administration not only alienated immigrant parents but also higher-income parents with the ability to choose options outside the district school system. It also ignored some facts: half the white children in New York City are enrolled in private and religious schools, and 30% of black children are enrolled in either public charter private or religious schools. When the new mayoral administration takes office in January 2022, it will inherit a school system facing large-scale financial challenges and the glaring mistrust of many parents. The new mayor will also face large numbers of parents considering whether they can continue to raise their families within the city. On the positive side, New York City still has many fine-to-excellent district, charter, religious, and independent private schools; it just needs more. Ultimately, New York's new mayor will need to respect and honor the educational choices made by parents who continue to see the city as a place to raise their children. This report offers recommendations on how the new mayor can address the very real problems of low-performing schools, not by redistributing the seats in good schools but by growing the number of good schools.

On June 30, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court held, in "Espinoza v. Montana," that the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause precludes states from excluding religious schools from private school choice programs. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded: "A State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious." But, as Justice Stephen Breyer asked in his dissenting opinion, "What about charter schools?" Can states prohibit religious charter schools? All states with charter schools currently do so. Are these restrictions constitutionally required, as is commonly assumed? Or, on the contrary, are they unconstitutional after "Espinoza"? This report addresses these questions. Efforts to permit religious charter schools (by legislation and/or litigation) will likely be undertaken in the near future. This report discusses the legal issues raised by such efforts, examining whether the First Amendment's Establishment Clause permits religious charter schools and whether the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause precludes states from prohibiting them.

Education reformers have long lamented America's persistent racial and socioeconomic achievement gap and framed school choice as a means to provide low-income students of color trapped in failing schools with a ticket to a better education. Yet when parents who participate in school choice programs in states like Georgia or Indiana have been surveyed, at least half of them cite safety as a primary motivating factor. Florida's Hope Scholarship program, signed into law on March 11, 2018, enables students who have been subjected to bullying--regardless of disability status, income, or district school performance--to transfer to another public school or provides them with a tuition tax credit scholarship to use at an approved private school. To inform ongoing and potential state-level debates around anti-bullying voucher or tuition tax credit programs, this paper describes the basic mechanics of Florida's anti-bullying scholarship, the political origin and debate around its passage, and the program's implementation to date.

The purpose of this policy document is to ensure public transparency in schools' instructional, training, and learning materials; and to give parents and students reasonable access to review such materials.