By Richard V. Reeves, Simran Kalkat This week in Class Notes My next adventure! The American Institute for Boys and Men. Safety net recipients pay more for housing, but it’s better quality. Normalization or salutary warning? How teen pregnancy in a peer influences behavior. Parental incarceration strains relationships with children. Boys are falling further behind girls in college enrollment, as this week’s top chart shows. Immigration has been a success story in the United States, even if its political success is murkier, writes Idrees Kahloon in The New Yorker ..read more

By Patricia M. Kim Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded his long-awaited trip to Beijing earlier this week after months of speculation on whether his visit would be rescheduled after its postponement following the Chinese spy balloon crisis this past February. Despite harsh rhetoric from Beijing leading up to the visit, it seems Chinese leaders were just as keen as their American counterparts to restore high-level exchanges to stabilize the bilateral relationship. In Beijing, Blinken met with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang; China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi; and President Xi Jinping. Whi ..read more

By Nicol Turner Lee, Monica Anderson, Camisha Parker, Camdyn Parker, Chloe Lee Legislators across the aisle have recently linked social media platforms with increasing rates of teen depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and in more severe instances, suicide. As young people find themselves heavily engaged with social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, policymakers and now parents have raised concerns and potential interventions as extreme as banning the use of certain social media applications to guard against online privacy violations and perceived, negative mental hea ..read more

By Alex Engler On June 14th, the European Parliament passed its version of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, setting the stage for a final debate on the bill between the European Commission, Council, and Parliament—called the “trilogue.” This trilogue will follow an expedited timeline—the European Commission is pushing to finish the AI Act by the end of 2023, so it can be voted through before any political impacts of the 2024 European Parliament elections. The trilogue will certainly discuss many contentious issues, including the definition of AI, the list of high-risk AI categories, wheth ..read more

By Ghulam Omar Qargha Over the past decade, it has become evident that although more children are gaining access to schooling, there needs to be improvement in learning outcomes. The recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) highlighted a decline in reading proficiency in 28 out of the 45 participating countries between 2016 and 2021. The current model of schooling is not meeting the needs of a significant portion of the world’s population and is extraordinarily vulnerable to catastrophic events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We need to transform our educational systems i ..read more

By Jordan Kyle, Danielle Resnick In early 2023, the United Nations announced that the world is facing the highest number of violent conflicts since World War II, with a majority of these being civil conflicts. Historically, ending civil conflict and fostering democratic transitions has involved constitutional reforms that address the grievances that originally sparked violence. In fact, over 100 peace agreements signed between 1989 and 2020 have included provisions for constitutional reform. However, the period of negotiating constitutional reforms is particularly precarious in such settings a ..read more

By Papia Debroy, Blair Corcoran de Castillo Last month, Virginia became the 13th state to remove unnecessary degree requirements for hard-to-fill roles in state government. This trend of tearing the “paper ceiling” is being implemented by Democratic and Republican leaders alike, and speaks to the critical need to rethink our standard hiring practices in a labor market that is not allowing workers to reach their full potential. A shift to skills-based hiring instead of degree-based hiring is not only a sensible public sector reform to find qualified workers in a tight labor market—it can also u ..read more

By Ashley Rogers Berner, Viviana López Green Math and reading scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress—known as “the nation’s report card”—raised widespread concern when they were released last fall. Just as troubling, however, is news that the average 8th grade proficiency rates in civics and U.S. history fell to 1998 levels, or only 22% and 13% proficient, respectively. This finding is especially important in light of our country’s changing demographics. Today’s classrooms include nearly 14 million Latino students, representing more than a quarter of our K-12 public sch ..read more

By Xavier de Souza Briggs, Jessika Sherman Next week, the nation will celebrate Juneteenth, which commemorates the emancipation of slaves in the U.S. And with this commemoration comes an essential question: Are we making real and durable progress on racial justice as part of the larger project of becoming a more fair and inclusive nation? Or are we engaged in mostly symbolic, small-bore gestures that block and reverse that larger project, as it has been over and over again in our history? Last fall, Brookings’s Valuing Black Assets Initiative, in collaboration with the New School’s Institute o ..read more

By George Ingram, Susan Reichle On May 3, 2023, the Brookings Center for Sustainable Development hosted a public event on the recently released USAID Policy Framework. USAID Deputy Administrator Isobel Coleman presented the highlights, followed by a panel representing USAID and civil society discussing specific aspects of the framework. Generating a conversation around USAID’s roles and objectives as articulated in the Policy Framework could not be more timely in this era of growing development and geopolitical challenges. The Policy Framework brings together principal USAID policies, objectiv ..read more