Seismic shifts are shaking the landscape of K-12 education. Public school districts across the US have lost over a million students since 2020. Meanwhile, novel educational models--such as microschools and hybrid homeschooling--have more than doubled their enrollments. This paper explores what's driving families to seek these new learning…

In recent years, Innovative Schools in Dali have received increasing coverage in Chinese social media and have also attracted middle-class parents from cities, as viable bottom-up educational initiatives. This paper explores the rationales for Chinese middle-class parents' choice of Innovative Schools in Dali. Analysis of data from online…

The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to examine the decision-making process of K-12 parents living in the Appalachian Highlands who chose to remove their children from traditional public schools to join learning pods (sometimes referred to as pandemic pods) during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to answer this overarching…

Myriad academic, situational, and organizational factors play an important role in parental decision-making for school choice. We propose a framework for how hot knowledge is processed through the lens of parents' own sociopolitical values (i.e., constraints) to inform preferences. This study employs 8 months of ethnographic case study data from…

Parental choice remains a central theme in education policy in England. Parents have the right to choose how their children are educated. For some families this choice is surrendered, with volition and intention, to their local authority which allocates school places after parents, statutory guardians and families have made their decisions. Where…

Gill, Brandi. Student Achievement Comparison between Traditional Schools and Schools of Choice: A Quantitative Study, (under the direction of Theodore Kaniuka, Ed.D) This study provides a detailed review of school choice literature nationally and within the state of North Carolina. The literature revealed limited studies focused on school choice…

The article analyses a new educational development in Poland, that is, free democratic schools, which are grassroots initiatives of parents seeking an alternative to the traditional pedagogies of the public schooling. These schools form a broader network. Based on ethnographic research carried out at eight such schools over five years, the authors…

This poll was conducted between September 16-17, 2022 among a sample of 2,200 adults. The interviews were conducted online and the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of adults based on gender, educational attainment, age, race, and region. Among the key findings are: (1) About a third of parents believe their child's school is…

In recent decades there has been an increasing number of parents opting for alternative forms of education worldwide. However, most studies on this phenomenon are conducted within Western contexts, while little is known about alternative education in China. This paper addresses this gap by providing an overview of alternative education in China…

This study uses a framework of transformative learning theory to explore fourteen participants' experiences with learning William Glasser's Choice Theory. The researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with students, staff and alumni of an alternative secondary school in order to explore their perspectives on the transformative potential of a…

Contributing to the understanding of Steiner education as a localised practice, this paper traces the creation of two "second generation" Steiner schools in 1980s Victoria. A period of expansion for Steiner education in Australia, the 1980s saw the number of Steiner schools increase from 5 to 31. These schools were started mainly by…

To mark the ten year anniversary since the introduction of the free schools programme, New Schools Network (NSN) commissioned the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) to conduct an independent data-led investigation into what impact free schools have had since their introduction in 2010. The research examines the impact that free…

In 1988, Van Galen proposed two distinct categories to describe homeschooling parents -- ideologues and pedagogues. Her model has been widely cited in the homeschooling literature. In the 30 years since the introduction of these identifiers, homeschooling in the United States has experienced tremendous growth due to a number of intersecting…

This paper addresses aspects of alternative proposals taking place in the public education system, based on an anthropological, ethnographic, comparative study of alternative schools and educational projects in Catalonia. More specifically, it first explores educational change in Catalonia through time and on the present, with a special focus on…

The New Zealand schooling system is well-known for its progressive and innovative approach to education (Couch, 2012; Mutch, 2013; Wells, 2016). Their national curriculum is inclusive and flexible, allowing schools and teachers to select the content they deem necessary to meet the competencies in the designated learning areas (Ministry of…