In Philadelphia, if a student chooses not to attend their neighborhood school, other options include schools with specialized programming in the arts, sciences, or business fields, schools with career and technical education options, and competitive magnet schools. But choosing an out-of-catchment school rather than a neighborhood school may…

Through powerful narratives of parents of Black and Latinx students with disabilities, this book provides a unique look at the relationship between disability, race, urban space, and market-driven educational policies. Offering significant insights into complex forms of educational exclusion, the text illustrates the actual challenges and…

The purpose of this fact sheet is to make this information easily available to policymakers, activists, and parents/caregivers, and to contribute to a substantive discussion about developing equitable educational opportunities for all children.

This guide aims to help parents understand the flexibility provided to States and school districts in the "Every Student Succeeds Act" (ESSA), which amended the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act," a landmark Federal education law. Parents are the most important advocates for their children. Because States and school…

Throughout much of the nation, parents have a clear-cut choice of where to educate their children--in a public school, at taxpayer expense, or in a private school, at the family's expense. In Milwaukee and some other cities, however, that line is not so clear; students can attend public schools operated by private organizations and private schools…

This important book provides African American parents with the knowledge to diversify K-12 school choices beyond traditional neighborhood public schools in order to optimize the educational chances of their own children, and it will help educators and policymakers to close the black-white academic achievement gap throughout America. In November…

"The Achiever" is a monthly publication for parents and community leaders. Each issue contains news and information about school improvement in the United States. Highlights of this issue include: (1) President Signs College Cost Reduction Act; (2) Galvanizing the Community: Charter Schools Provides Greater Choice to Colorado Latinos…

The federal government is devoting millions of dollars to charter and voucher programs that currently require parents to abandon regular public schools. The goal of the authors of The School Choice Hoax is to expose the misleading hyperbole that has been driving the school choice movement and to show how charter schools can become more effective…

This report is a general guide for people planning a charter school. In September 1995 the Program on Reinventing Public Education, a collaborative effort of the University of Washington's Institute for Public Policy and Management and the RAND Institute for Education and Training, sponsored a workshop on charter school startup. This report…

This study used an open-ended structured interview to investigate seven parents' of students with disabilities perceptions of charter schools and why they chose this type of school to educate their child. Findings showed a general theme of parents believing that the traditional area public school did not meet their child's needs in terms of size,…

This report is the first in a series exploring a variety of the organizational spaces being developed under strategies to change and improve K-12 education in Minnesota. One strategy seeks to create an environment that focuses on creating new and different schools and with them new choices for students and families. These reports are designed to…