States are seeking alternative means to identify low-income students for supplemental funding, as many schools no longer need to verify household income to determine students' eligibility for free and reduced-price meals. Instead, states can identify students whose families participate in social service programs with income criteria at or near 200…

The 2010 health reform bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, included a provision that would expand eligibility of the public insurance program Medicaid. One concern raised about implementing the Medicaid expansion is that it would lead to reductions in state spending in other policy domains. In this study, we test whether adopting…

Access to high-quality early care and education (ECE) supports healthy child development, accelerates academic achievement, reduces educational inequality, and catalyzes economic growth. The benefits of ECE are even greater among economically disadvantaged children, children with disabilities, and multilingual learners. However, despite these…

Each year, millions of children age 5 and under receive publicly funded early care and education services. Federal appropriations for Head Start and the Child Care and Development Fund were $9.8 and $8.1 billion respectively in fiscal year 2018. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to identify and describe all state early care and…

Today, free public kindergarten for five-year-old children is available in every state and community throughout the United States, and public education is routinely referred to as K-12. But kindergarten did not start out this way. Kindergartens in the United States once served children as young as three and four years old. In fact, today's…

The early care and education (ECE) system has been under-resourced and undervalued since well before the pandemic. Low pay and poor working environment have long plagued the ECE industry as key drivers of chronic high turnover rates and teacher staffing shortages in the field. Additional disparities within the system place providers on vastly…

This hearing of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions focuses on reauthorizing the Higher Education Act through improving college affordability. The following committee members presented opening statements: (1) Honorable Lamar Alexander, Chairman, Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; and (2) Honorable Patty…

The landscape of early childhood programs has evolved as a largely fractured landscape: most public early education programs such as Head Start and state pre-K have been limited to low-income children or children with identified risk factors, and most private programs charge tuition that is too low to support a well-compensated workforce but still…

In Ohio, the pandemic has forced students to pause their pursuit of a college degree or abandon their aspirations for higher education all together. The health crisis has accelerated a downward trend in enrollment in public higher education, at least for now, and thrown into sharp relief the barriers that prevent Black and brown students, and…

With the economic halt precipitated by the COVID-19 virus, states are starting to prepare for and beginning to address the budgetary squeeze that is sure to come absent of massive federal stimulus dollars. At the end of March, New York State was the first state to come out with a post-COVID-19 state budget (the Legislative Budget). In early April,…

Head Start is an essential part of the programs and funding streams that provide early care and education (ECE) services to young children in the U.S. Head Start focuses on supporting children and families with low incomes, but also contributes to the broader effort to expand access to high quality ECE for all young children. Programs and…

In October 2019, the Public School Forum of North Carolina launched Study Group XVII: Supporting North Carolina's Rural Students. Building on the Forum's long history of exploring the most pressing issues impacting North Carolina's public schools, the seventeenth Study Group convened thought leaders from education, academia, policy, and business…

While the importance of the period from birth to age three as the most promising and possibly consequential stage of human development has gained attention over the last quarter century, public investments in children's early learning opportunities have remained inadequate. The nation, as well as the state of New Jersey, invests the fewest public…

As schools of choice, charter schools typically have the flexibility to enroll students from across an area, rather than being bound to a neighborhood attendance zone. And as schools usually created from scratch, charters can build diversity into their design, choosing educational models designed to appeal to a wide range of families. In practice,…

In spring 2020, New America and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) partnered on a year-long research project to understand the effect of the confluence of the pandemic, economic crisis, and racial reckoning on America's colleges and universities. We interviewed over 100 college leaders from across higher education…