This report summarizes the fiscal effects of education choice programs across the United States from an analysis of 48 private education choice programs in 25 states plus D.C. The programs in the analysis include five education savings account programs, 22 school voucher programs, and 21 tax credit scholarship programs. This study estimates the…

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is now more than twenty years beyond its inception when it was built on the concept that digital materials make learning content easy to reuse and share. This report discusses current legislative trends in OER and offers recommended OER practices for states.

Much attention has been focused on the importance of providing physical and mental health services to students in educational environments in recent years. Millions of students receive school-based health services, and for many students, schools are their first and only option to receive health care. State policymakers have a lot to consider in…

For more than two decades, tax-credit scholarship (TCS) policies have helped American families provide their children with the learning environment that meets their individual needs. Now available in 19 states, nearly 300,000 students nationwide use tax-credit scholarships to attend the school of their family's choice. TCS policies create an…

The 2022 National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) data provide a window into how the landscape of American education has shifted over the past two years in response to COVID-19-related school disruption. Between 2020 and 2022--a period marred not only by the health and safety worries that COVID brought but also by the heated debates about…

English learners (ELs) are a fast-growing and diverse student population in the U.S. K-12 public school system. Representing more than 400 languages spoken, EL students bring rich linguistic and cultural traditions to their communities. To better understand education finance equity for EL students in the Southeast, this analysis focuses on nine…

In this excerpt from How to educate an American: The conservative vision for tomorrow's schools, William J. Bennett argues that instilling knowledge, not just skills, is an important element of good schooling. In fact, developing certain skills actually requires a considerable amount of background knowledge. He offers examples of states that have…

Salaries are one of the most powerful policy levers states and school districts can use to attract qualified, effective, and diverse teachers. What role do states play in supporting strategic use of salaries? This report examines the state teacher compensation policies that influence districts' potential strategic use of teacher pay. It analyzes…

Finding funds to build and renovate facilities is a major hurdle for public charter schools because most state laws do not provide charter schools with the full amount of state and local funding that other public schools receive. Although an increasing number of states are passing laws to address charter school facility funding gaps, inequities…

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way that families and policymakers view K-12 education. Learning loss is having an outsized impact on students who were furthest from opportunity before the pandemic. And families are increasingly looking for new educational options for their children. For decades, access to educational options…

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has been studying the four-day school week since 2015. Since then, the phenomenon of the four-day school week has spread into non-rural areas and interest appears to be growing. Given these apparent changes, the author wanted to know more about recent trends in the initiative. As districts continue…

If a "curriculum" -- a set of instructional materials intended as a comprehensive course of study for a particular subject and grade level -- is well-aligned with state standards, it can help teachers deliver instruction that leads to students' mastery of those standards. However, most research suggests that curricula, in themselves, are…

In the 2018-19 school year, 5,664 U.S. schools were identified as Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI), meaning that thousands of students attended schools that performed in the bottom 5% of their state's accountability framework and/or had a graduation rate below 67%. Across the nation, states, parents, educators, principals and…

Despite the myriad of challenges that families, students, teachers and policymakers faced in 2021, the momentum to transform education did not waver. New opportunities for students unfolded in more than a dozen states through expanded private and public school choice. An additional 1.7 million students gained eligibility for private choice alone,…

On a given day, more than 43,000 youths who largely identify as students of color and are disproportionately male are held in residential placement facilities as a result of involvement with the juvenile justice system. More than two-thirds of youths living in placement facilities who participated in a national survey shared aspirations to…