Through their response to the pandemic, teachers unions overplayed their hand and exposed inherent failures of the one-size-fits-all government school system. Families are now thankfully figuring out that there isn't any good reason to fund institutions when they can fund students directly instead. Support for school choice is through the roof,…

The "Wall Street Journal" declared 2011 the "year of school choice" after 13 states enacted new choice policies or expanded existing ones. This brief discusses coalitions as the secret ingredient of the choice movement's success and shares lessons learned from the most effective coalitions. Key points include: (1) parental…

This study leverages naturally occurring lotteries for oversubscribed Boston Public Schools prekindergarten program sites between 2007 and 2011, for 3,182 children (M = 4.5 years old) to estimate the impacts of winning a first choice lottery and enrolling in Boston prekindergarten versus losing a first choice lottery and not enrolling on…

This paper discusses the potential fiscal effects of education savings accounts for K-12 in New Jersey on the state and local taxpayers. Education savings accounts are a way to expand educational opportunity for all families, particularly those in need. For parents who voluntarily elect to customize their child's education, a specified amount is…

This article analyses the narratives and counter-narratives which characterised the struggle between the Chicago Public School Board (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers' Union (CTU) preceding the 2019 Chicago teachers' strike. This was an extraordinary event which has received little scholarly attention. The paper explores the types and uses of the…

How are patterns of segregation related to families' engagement in public-school choice policies across U.S. metropolitan areas? This article examines how segregation in urban public schools and the spatial mismatch between school-age children and relatively high-performing schools relate to the shares of Black, Hispanic, and White students…

A vast amount of research addressing school choice seeks to understand how and why parents/families choose schools. However, little is understood concerning the influence of choice on family beliefs and behavior. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to understand family perspectives, through the lens of Choice Theory (Glasser, 1998), of…

I calculate the cost-effectiveness of private schools participating in school voucher programs, independent charter schools, and district-authorized charter schools, compared to traditional public schools in Wisconsin for the 2017-18 school year. I calculate cost-effectiveness by dividing the Accountability Report Card score for each school by the…

This annual publication of "The ABCs of School Choice" is a comprehensive, data-rich guide to every private school choice program in America. This edition of "The ABCs of School Choice" defines each of the four types of school choice: education savings accounts, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and individual tax credits and…

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. We study changes in families' choices of school sector using longitudinal student-level administrative data from Michigan and nationally representative data from the…

When many of today's parents were students, the process of applying and enrolling in school was fairly simple and involved few choices. In many cases, a family visited the neighborhood public school at the start of the school year and enrolled the child at the school's office. But now, the proliferation of school-choice policies in districts…

This report provides a summary of the full "First Look" report, which presents data on students in the United States attending kindergarten through grade 12. The focus of the report is on parent and family involvement in the students' education during the 2018-19 school year, as reported by the students' parents. It includes the…

For more than a quarter century, Michigan public schools have been financed under a structure commonly known as Proposal A. This funding system's greater dependence on using state revenue to finance an enrollment-based funding formula has led to greater parity among districts over time and fueled more publicly supported schooling options for…

Conventional wisdom suggests that evangelical Christians, often among the most vocal advocates of school choice efforts in the U.S., are promoting choice out of a sense of frustration with public schools and perceived bias against religion. Research by Marilyn Anderson Rhames, however, suggests that evangelicals are no more concerned about…

Parents often select schools by relying on subjective assessments of quality made by other parents, which are increasingly becoming available through written reviews on school ratings websites. To identify relationships between review content and school quality, we apply recent advances in natural language processing to nearly half a million…