💡 New from us: Tutoring Corps, Reconciliation’s impact on immigrants and their families, community partnership visas, and the Educational Choice for Children Act.
Kai Smith and Isabel Sawhill document the decline in American students’ overall academic performance over the past decade. The scores of top-performing students have declined modestly, and the scores of lower-performing students have fallen substantially. They propose high-dose tutoring as one of the best ways to help struggling students become more successful. Leveraging service fellows, such as AmeriCorps volunteers, to tutor is one potential cost-effective strategy.
In their recent piece, Zaria Roller and Tara Watson detail how the House version of the 2025 reconciliation bill aims to reshape the landscape for immigrants in the U.S. The bill proposes massive increases in enforcement spending, including $45 billion for detention centers and $27 billion for ICE removal operations. Beyond enforcement, the changes also include barring citizen children in mixed-status families from the Child Tax Credit and ACA Marketplace subsidies. The bill also makes it harder for unaccompanied immigrant children to be sponsored by family members to live in a home-based setting while awaiting adjudication. The authors argue that this legislation extends the current administration's strategy of making life harder for both legal and undocumented immigrants and their children.
Tara Watson is part of an expert working group whose new American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) report champions "Community Partnership Visas" (CPVs), an opportunity for local communities to identify their needs and partner in welcoming immigrants. The report underscores the potential of immigration to revitalize local economies and details how CPVs could work to drive economic growth and opportunity where it's most needed.
Jon Valant provides commentary on the proposed Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), which would create a $5 billion federal tax-credit scholarship program through a tax shelter for wealthy individuals. Valant argues that this bill has too little oversight over how federal education funds are spent and effectively creates a national private school voucher system without the legal hurdles of a more formal one. He illustrates how waste, fraud, and discriminatory behaviors could propagate through this new program.
