The State of the (Federal) Budget

An Ominous White House Announcement On Monday the White House announced that the president would propose a 10 percent spike in defense spending, offset by cuts across other agencies’ budgets. It’s unclear at the moment what those cuts will look like. Offsetting the proposed increase would require $54 billion in cuts across non-defense discretionary (NDD)…

Read More

Does the Congressional Review Act Apply to Inaugural Addresses?

One line in particular from President Trump’s inaugural address jumped out at me: “an education system flush with cash [that] leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.” I’m confident that I read this statement through a different lens than our president as he (supposedly) wrote it, but in many ways President Trump is…

Read More

Big News: Disconnected Youth Included in Next Round of Federal Innovation Grants

In a breakthrough Federal policy development for the youth reconnection field, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) last week announced priorities for 2017 innovation grants that include an emphasis on dropout recovery programs. The former Investing in Innovation (i3) program, renamed Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grants by the Every Student Succeeds Act, supports “early…

Read More

Reflections on An Unexpected Election

This year has not turned out as many of us imagined, in many ways. I didn’t think my Cubs had a shot at coming back in the World Series, down three games to one. In fact, prediction site fivethirtyeight.com deemed their comeback less likely than Donald Trump winning the presidential election. Especially as it relates…

Read More

Out Today: Promising Practices in Work-Based Learning for Youth

As workforce-development agencies across the country consider how to implement WIOA’s requirement that 20 percent of youth funds go toward work experiences, NYEC and the National Skills Coalition today released a new paper on work-based learning strategies for young people. In the paper, Katie Spiker of NSC and I examine four different work-based learning models,…

Read More