Governments must strike a balance between promoting access to financial aid while at the same time remaining good stewards of taxpayer funds by preventing fraudulent access. This paper focuses on one of the largest-scale and most consequential policies determining whether students maintain access to Title IV aid, the "Return of Title IV"…

The purpose of the U.S. Department of Education's (Department's) fiscal year (FY) 2024 "Agency Financial Report" (AFR) is to inform Congress, the President, other external stakeholders, and the American people on how the Department used the federal resources entrusted to it to advance the mission of the Department to promote student…

Accreditation is a major barrier to higher education reform. Constitutional or not, accreditors are an administrative anomaly: private nonprofit agencies that nonetheless possess life-and-death power over higher education. To maintain federal funding, universities must satisfy the administrative requirements and whims of these unelected entities.…

Scholarly assessments of Philippine education during the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos understandably focus on its authoritarian bent. What many neglect is how his dictatorship, in partnership with the World Bank (WB), incubated neoliberal education in the country. While there are academic analyses that show how WB loan programmes influenced…

The reinstatement of Pell grant eligibility for incarcerated individuals marks a pivotal moment in the landscape of higher education in prison (HEP) programming in the United States. However, despite this promising development, financial barriers persist, hindering the growth and sustainability of HEP initiatives. This qualitative study delves…

When a community loses its Head Start provider, the Office of Head Start (OHS) deploys its interim manager to temporarily operate this federally funded early childhood education program. Since 2000, OHS has placed more than 200 programs under interim management. As of September 2024, 18 of 1,600 Head Start programs nationwide were under interim…

This statutory report presents the activities and accomplishments of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General (OIG) from April 1, 2024, through September 30, 2024. The audits, investigations, and related work highlighted in the report are products of OIG's mission to identify and stop fraud, waste, and abuse; and promote…

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, student achievement levels remains low and adult approval of public schools is at its lowest point in decades. For nearly all student groups, but especially those who have been historically underserved, recovery remains unfinished business and a generation of American students is at risk of never catching…

Five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, student achievement levels are in free fall. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results released in late January 2025, fewer than one-third of students nationwide scored at proficiency levels in reading and math. Achievement gaps by race, income, and other…

The violence of incarceration creates greater responsibility for higher education administrators in supporting students who are in prison. Using focus group data with incarcerated students and formerly incarcerated alumni who participated in or are actively participating in Second Chance Pell, we explore their perceptions and understandings of the…

As U.S. school leaders anticipate the end of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds and contemplate possible budget shortfalls, they will have to make hard choices about how best to leverage limited resources to improve student outcomes. With the stakes high, lawmakers and experts urge school system leaders to rely on research and…

This First Look report introduces new data for national and state-level public elementary and secondary revenues and expenditures for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following school finance data: (1) revenue and expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) expenditures by function, subfunction, and object; (4)…

Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on…

In March 2020 one hundred and twenty-two billion in federal funding delivered through the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act was intended to mitigate the harm caused by school closures during the pandemic and ensure the appropriate re-opening of schools across America to get students "back on track." Since July 2021, AASA, The School…

The 2024 North Carolina Education Primer serves as a fact-based guide to public education in North Carolina. The Primer provides a comprehensive overview of how education policy is made, along with the current state of public education and the policies guiding it. The Forum produces this guide in order to inform current policymakers, candidates…