Research Roundup

A study of Indiana's voter ID rules finds that many registered voters in Indiana lack the required photo identification required under the law, meaning legally qualified voters are being disenfranchised.  The report by the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity and Race finds that African Americans, the elderly, less educated, and lower-income voters are disproportionately disenfranchised under the law.

In a series of reports, the Brookings Center on Children and Families examines economic mobility in America.  While two out of three Americans have higher incomes than their parents, the Brookings Center found most of the gain was due to families having two earners. A separate report found that mobility differed dramatically between the races, with black adults being far more likely to be poorer than their parents than whites.

As states crackdown on various forms of predatory lending, some critics claim working families will miss the access to easy debt.  But after North Carolina cracked down on payday lending, a new report by the North Carolina Commissioner of Banks finds that lower-income families don't miss the payday loan shops and overwhelmingly think they are better off with them gone.

In what is said to be the first study to compare standardized scores across countries, the American Institutes of Research found that while the test scores of American eighth graders in most states do better than similar-age students in Europe but that even in the best-performing states like Massachusetts, students are underperforming students in Singapore and other Asian countries.