Media

The indictment last week of 35 teachers and administrators in Atlanta for manipulating test scores is just the latest chapter in that city's long festering "teacher cheating" scandal. In turn, Atlanta is just one of many cities where evidence has surfaced that educators fudged testing data.

Perhaps the best way to think of these cheating scandals is that they are the result of a natural experiment: What happens when you change incentives so that low test numbers translate into pain and high test numbers translate into rewards? 

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report recently with the self-concluding title thatRecent Deep State Higher Education Cuts May Harm Students and the Economy for Years to Come.

The news broke last night: a deal to bring paid sick days to a vote in the New York City Council has been reached. 

With comments straight out of President Reagan's "welfare queens" playbook, Paul Ryan is attempting to justify his proposed budgets cuts to various programs that help the poor, claiming the safety net "provides a powerful disincentive to get ahead." Never mind that since the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Welfare Reform Act, aka, "welfare reform," most of the remaining income assistance programs are both means-tested and work-based. 

I recently published an article in response to a study of high-frequency trading (“HFT”) by Professor Charles M. Jones of Columbia Business School and an opinion piece he published simultaneously in Politico.

A few decades ago, students in most places could go to a state university for next to nothing. We all know that's now ancient history. But less appreciated is how much public tuition costs have increased in just the past few years, amid an epic state budget crisis. The chart below shows the huge spike in costs.

Lotteries are often competitions for something fun, like extra money or prizes. But for thousands of Tennessee residents who have escalating medical bills, their lives almost literally depend on a twice-yearly telephone lottery for people who need help paying medical bills, but while poor, do not quite qualify for TennCare, Tennessee's version of Medicaid. They must call a hotline so popular that its 2,500 call limit is reached in an hour or less. And that's only for requesting an application for the extra funding.

More and more Americans are spending their golden years racking up debt—a trend that if left unchecked could derail entitlement reform and alter the traditional pattern of wealth being transferred from older to younger generations.

For the past several decades, millions of senior citizens have been able to enjoy relatively safe retirements, in part due to a lifetime of savings, private pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and home ownership.

The company an employee works for makes all the difference. Over the course of a 40-year career, workers at some companies lose tens of thousands of dollars in 401(k) fees and earnings -- sometimes more than double the savings lost by workers at other firms, according to an exclusive analysis of about 2,300 company 401(k) plans by FutureAdvisor, an online financial adviser.