School leaders in Dodge City USD 443 were flummoxed. For years, the district had maintained respectable graduation rates — great, even, for a district with high rates of at-risk and low-income students. With graduation percentages in the mid to upper 80s, Dodge City USD 443 most years trailed the average statewide graduation rate, but not by much. What didn’t make sense, though, at least not initially, was the dismal rate at which students went on to pursue any kind of education or training after high school, a measure called post-secondary effectiveness that the Kansas State Department of Education started tracking in [...]

The year 2022 marked a truly historic bust for the U.S. bond market. The question now is whether 2023 will produce any kind of meaningful rebound. ... Investors were forced to repeatedly lift their expectations for how high the Federal Reserve would raise short-term interest rates to combat the worst inflation in decades. The sharp drop in bond prices was in many ways the dominant force in financial markets, driving borrowing costs higher and contributing to double-digit losses for stocks. Despite bonds’ 2022 drubbing and the criticism that the Fed has come under for being slow to act on inflation, investors, [...]