Education

Today, Senator Tom Cotton introduced the American Workforce Act (AWA), a landmark bill to create a robust alternative to college rooted in on-the-job experience and employer-led training, funded by a transfer of resources away from traditional higher education. The AWA is modeled on American Compass’s Workforce Training Grant, which we proposed earlier this year as […]

COVID-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.” This broad rethinking of work and human capital development is occurring while 10.4 million jobs sit unfilled and more than 8.4 million unemployed individuals look for work. There is a clear disconnect, but the ultimate outcome is far from clear. As Bob Dylan asks in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” […]

A college degree has long been the key that unlocks success in America—the good job, the high salary, the professional networks. But many individuals reflecting on their educational experiences today conclude that their preparation for college and career was disappointing. In short, there’s a disconnect between what young people expect from education and what they […]

As a father of young children, I have been shocked by the rapid growth and impact of gender ideology within our society, reaching human resource departments in practically every major corporation and recalibrating the relationship between parents, children, and public schools, both in the realm of curriculum and in policy.

The high school movement, an early 20th century American grassroots shift in secondary education, produced “a spectacular educational transformation,” according to Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. Between 1910 and 1940, 18-year-old enrollment grew from 19% to 71%, and graduation rates rose from 9% to more than 50%, boosting the country to the forefront […]

American society suffers from de-composition and de-consolidation. We are increasingly atomized. People have an attenuated sense of belonging. They are less integrated into family and community. This isolation makes us less resilient and more vulnerable. And it also makes us less stable and more susceptible to ideological infections. American Compass is developing a menu of […]

In a recent post, Chris Arnade compared the American education system to strip mining, an analogy that Patrick Deneen uses in his book Why Liberalism Failed. A similar analogy comes to mind to describe charter schools—a public policy tool that until recently earned bipartisan favor. If our education system is an intellectual strip mine, charter […]

During his growing up years, Mark, an underemployed contract laborer in his 30s, often heard his mother describe their town as “the devil’s thumbprint.” The name alluded to both its literal location in a valley and its social stigma as the watering hole of riffraff. “You gotta go up the hill and get out,” Mark […]

Editor’s note: For a longer discussion of this topic, read Bruno Manno’s essay, “A Social-Capital Approach to Education Reform,” in the new issue of National Affairs. A social capital approach to school reform focused on developing habits of mind and habits of association in young people is a basis for conservatives to lead on K-12 […]

“I will not live in the pod.” This commonplace rallying cry among younger Right-aligned people on social media is approaching the status of a credal opening statement. For the uninitiated, it simply marks a public refusal to accept the lifestyle of the young urban singleton residing in the microapartment, feeding the pet, streaming the Netflix, […]

Welcome to American Compass. Our mission is to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. Many of the most insightful and creative policymakers, researchers, and pundits on the American right-of-center, and some on the left-of-center as well, are dedicating tremendous intellectual energy toward […]