The Heartland Institute

With Tax Day around the corner, AEI’s polling analysis team has updated its work on public attitudes toward taxes. Below are some of the highlights from the new AEI Public Opinion Study. • Half of Americans believe the amount they pay in federal income tax is “just right,” in the latest question from CNN/Opinion Research ...

Ben Zycher, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes a letter to Congressman Henry Waxman and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in response to an inquiry they submitted to Dr. Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, in regards to "actions the federal government can take to address climate ...

The Committee does not believe that Glass-Steagall should be reinstated, and sees no persuasive rationale for the Volcker Rule. The 1999 partial "repeal" of Glass-Steagall in the Gramm- Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) eliminated some restrictions on the ability of bank holding companies (BHCs) —but not insured banks—to engage in underwriting ...

The conceptual approaches to prudential regulation embodied in the Basel III and the U.S. approaches suffer from fundamental deficiencies that require remediation. These deficiencies include (1) relying upon fixed risk weights for measuring risk-based capital that are arguably inaccurate, 2) relying upon fixed weights that, even ...

The Indiana Choice Program has the potential to be the largest and most diverse manifestation of school choice in America, writes Michael McShane in this American Enterprise Institute working paper. Parents want school options. But without increasing the scholarship amount, eliminating the prior public school enrollment requirement ...

Like the other information technology (IT) markets that comprise the Internet ecosystem, broadband communications services are characterized by rapid innovation, declining costs, product differentiation, competitive price discrimination, network effects, and “multisidedness.” Broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) make large sunk cost ...

The flood of new legislative activity regarding teacher evaluations responds to obvious problems with old systems, but also risks cementing premature solutions and imperfect metrics, write the three authors of this American Enterprise Institute report. The paper highlights four tensions to consider in developing new teacher evaluations ...

A wave of education reform advocacy organizations are working to pull parents into larger policy debates over school reform by mobilizing them to lobby policymakers, testify in front of school boards, and vote for certain policies. Reformers’ high hopes and good intentions often lead to naïve expectations of what parent power ...

President Obama has announced a way to help states get around No Child Left Behind’s requirements. His plan grants certain states waivers from No Child Left Behind accountability requirements if they agree to a series of preset conditions. Although many states are enthusiastic about obtaining this relief, the waiver plan poses ...

The current economic environment of low—virtually zero—interest rates has hit savers hard, but the US Federal Reserve’s accommodative monetary policy is actually having a stabilizing effect on the economy. Abruptly raising interest rates could harm economic growth and the housing market. Until the economy stabilizes enough that ...

Roger Feldman, Robert Coulam, and Bryan Dowd write that "A major reason Medicare faces a severe fiscal crisis is because it pays too much for basic benefits. But chronic overpayment can be cured by harnessing market forces in the form of competitive bidding. It uses bids from private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and the ...

By characterizing education primarily as the path to personal and professional advancement, reformers have (albeit unintentionally) redefined education as a private good, divorcing schooling from its historic role of instructing young people for citizenship, write Robin Lake and Cheryl Miller in a report for the American Enterprise ...

Largely missing from the debate over for-profit higher education has been a more detailed look at how traditional and for-profit institutions differ in important areas like administration, instructor experience, mission and governance, data collection and use, and student recruitment and retention, writes Ben Wildavsky of the Kauffman ...

Mayoral control and other popular remedies mistakenly focus on the faltering performance of school boards themselves and thereby fail to address the underlying dysfunction of an outdated Progressive approach to schooling, write Frederick Hess and Olivia Meeks in a paper for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. This approach reflects ...

A growing number of studies have demonstrated that private schools and many charters provide a much better civic education than public schools, notes David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame. This contradicts conventional wisdom that public schools are necessary to inculcate citizenship. Even so, he says, the right question ...

Schools can and should encourage a strong civic education, writes James Youniss of the Catholic University of America, and can also do so without indoctrinating children. He suggests three methods: informed, civil discussion and debate; student government with input into school management; and volunteering. Each approach is supported ...

Students who take education classes at universities receive significantly higher grades than students who take classes in every other academic discipline, documents Cory Koedel in an American Enterprise Institute study. The only reasonable explanation from this and other data is that education classes’ higher grades result from ...

Digital learning “unbundles” education so it can be customized for individual students, writes Frederick Hess for a Thomas B. Fordham Institute working paper. This flexibility also creates quality control challenges for families, schools, and states, who want to promote and ensure high-quality programs without squashing them. Hess ...

Over the past two decades, the cost of a college education has risen dramatically. Tuition and fees have increased at twice the rate of inflation, rising more quickly than market goods or services and outstripping the growth in family incomes. In his new study, Opportunities for Efficiency and Innovation: A Primer on How to ...

One of schools’ biggest expenses currently is updating and building new facilities, but local budgets often do not have room to do this work, writes Himanshu Kothari in an American Enterprise Institute working paper. Private investors could be an excellent partner to offer what schools need, but they are often stymied by inconsistent ...