500 Education, Training, Employment & Social Services
The federal Head Start program has failed to live up to its stated mission of improving kindergarten readiness for children from low-income families. In December 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that administers Head Start, released a scientifically rigorous evaluation of more than 5,000 children participating in the program. It found … Continue reading Sunset Head Start to Make Way for Better State and Local Alternatives
Federal policymakers interested in limiting and better targeting education spending should streamline the existing labyrinth of federal education programs. Federal competitive grant programs authorized under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) should be eliminated, starting with those that are duplicative and ineffective, and federal spending should be reduced to reflect remaining formula programs authorized … Continue reading Eliminate Competitive/Project Grant Programs and Reduce Spending on Formula Grants
Title II of the HEA includes Teacher Quality Partnership Grants, which are designed to enable university faculty to work with highly qualified teachers in high needs schools to provide professional development and to strengthen the content knowledge of elementary and high school teachers. Title II also includes a handful of other teacher-preparation-related grants. Such worthwhile … Continue reading Eliminate Titles II, VI, and VIII of the Higher Education Act
Currently, higher education accreditation is a de facto federal enterprise, with federally sanctioned regional and national accrediting agencies being the sole purveyors of accreditation. Student aid can only flow to institutions accredited through the federally approved system. The result has been a system that has created barriers to entry for innovative start-ups by insulating traditional … Continue reading Decouple Federal Financing from Accreditation
Policymakers can advance the goal of growing school choice by expanding access to the D.C. OSP through existing funding authorized by the D.C. School Choice Incentive Act, most recently reauthorized as the Students for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act. These bills created and continued the D.C. OSP, which provides vouchers to children from low-income families … Continue reading Expand the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program
Part B of Title IV of the Higher Education Act authorizes federal PLUS loans. The $21 billion PLUS loan program provides federal loans to graduate students and the parents of undergraduate students. Parents of undergraduate students are able to borrow up to the cost of attendance at a given college. During the 2011–2012 academic year, … Continue reading Eliminate the PLUS Loan Program
In 2012, total spending on public broadcasting, derived from all federal and non-federal sources, amounted to $2.8 billion. In that year, 82 percent of this spending came from non-federal sources. The CPB made up only $444 million, or 16 percent, of this amount. Without federal funding for the CPB, services such as the Public Broadcasting … Continue reading Privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Private contributions to the arts and humanities vastly exceed the amount provided by the NEA and NEH. According to the nonprofit Americans for the Arts, private giving to arts and humanities amounted to $13.1 billion in 2011, which compared to $292 million for the NEA and NEH combined. According to The Washington Post, Kickstarter alone … Continue reading Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Job Corps Study, a randomized experiment—the “gold standard” of scientific research—assessed the impact of Job Corps on participants compared to similar individuals who did not participate in the program. For a federal taxpayer investment of $25,000 per Job Corps participant, the study found. Compared to non-participants, Job Corp participants were less likely to … Continue reading Eliminate Job Corps
The Department of Labor has a history of operating ineffective job-training programs. The evidence from every multi-site experimental evaluation of federal job-training programs published since 1990 strongly indicates that these programs are ineffective. Based on these scientifically rigorous evaluations using the “gold standard” of random assignment, these studies consistently find failure. Federal job-training programs targeting … Continue reading Eliminate Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act Job-Training Programs