This article provides a description of home-based education in the state of Florida and addresses the financial queries that often arise in the debate regarding the probative value of homeschooling and its effects on the financial coffers of state legislatures. This simple analysis of home-based education and its financial implications for Florida…

School choice remains an important part of the national discussion on education reform strategies and their benefits. While a variety of policies encourage parents' selection of schools for their children--for example, charter schools, magnet schools, and district open enrollment--scholarships that allow students to attend a private school have…

School choice remains an important part of the national discussion on education reform strategies and their benefits. While a variety of policies encourage parents' selection of schools for their children--for example, charter schools, magnet schools, and district open enrollment--scholarships that allow students to attend a private school have…

Accountability, autonomy, and choice play a leading role in recent school reforms in many countries. This report provides new evidence on whether students perform better in school systems that have such institutional measures in place. We implement an internationally comparative approach within a rigorous micro-econometric framework that accounts…

The need for alternative education programs that work is paramount in light of the nation's public education crisis. The problem is that alternative education programs fail to adequately address the issues that At-Risk students bring to, and face in, the alternative and/or the traditional classroom. This study utilized a qualitative and a…

The voucher system in Denmark combines unrestricted generous subsidies with substantial autonomy of private schools as to schedule and teaching methods. This has produced a private school sector with a wide variety of school types. This paper uses data on eight cohorts of students (over 510,000 individuals) to compare educational attainment in…

During the summer of 2006, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and union officials announced that the Pico Union area of East Los Angeles would soon be home to the Belmont Zone of Choice (BZC). The BZC encompasses the Belmont High School attendance area and will include up to 10 Belmont Pilot Schools, each with a targeted enrollment of 400…

In England, parents make "choices" (in reality, "preferences") for the state-maintained secondary schools they wish their child to attend. If there are more applicants than places, the school's published admissions criteria are used to give priority to applicants. This article examines how school composition in London varies by…

Policy makers and educators in the U.S. have recently shown considerable interest in the concept of weighted student funding (WSF) as a means of financing primary and secondary schools. WSF appeals both to conservatives, who see it as a way to promote parental choice and school autonomy, and to progressives, who are attracted by the call of extra…

The issue of social segregation in schools has seen a recent resurgence of interest--in the US, UK and internationally--as the debate rages on about whether policies that expand families' freedom to choose amongst schools encourage divergence or convergence in the types of pupil different schools admit. Most attention has been focussed on…

This paper examines the relationship between policy, organizational type, and the utilization of extrinsic incentives. Charter school reform spread throughout the country in the 1990s, providing the unique opportunity to study over a thousand new public organizations and the innovative operational decisions they made. Traditional public schools…

This report seeks to address critical issues such as these by synthesising the evidence on innovations in more market-driven education systems. The analysis draws on data from over 20 OECD and non-OECD countries, including both developed nations that seek to move beyond established systems of state-run schools, and developing nations where formal…

This paper examines evidence on the "systemic effects" of expanding school choice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee is home to one of the nation's largest and longest-running school choice programs. If there are systemic effects from expanding school choice we should be able to see them in Milwaukee. This paper also introduces a novel…

In response to the parents' question concerning the good school for their child, Cowley offers a four-point checklist of the key characteristics that any good school--whether an inner city school serving disadvantaged children or a well-endowed university-prep school--will process. To illustrate each of these characteristics of a good school, the…

This contribution is based on comparative case studies of secondary schools in England, the Netherlands and Scotland. The authors conclude that although opportunities for school choice are offered in a formal sense in each of the locations studied, in certain cases choice is not particularly encouraged. In order to explain this disparity between…