The purpose of this annual national survey is to gauge public opinion on school/educational choice policies, as well as parents' schooling experiences and preferences. Each year we also attempt to stay timely with current developments regarding school choice or K-12 education. The most recent examples include schooling during the pandemic, and…

Demand for charter schools is declining. In sixteen of the forty-one states that have published 2021-2022 enrollment numbers, charter school enrollment has dropped, in some cases, by substantial amounts. In an additional six states, charter enrollment has stalled with increases of fewer than 200 students in charter schools across the state. Using…

Our essay examines the challenges and opportunities for the New York City Universal Pre-K program in Catholic Schools. We review the impact of the program before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. These Pre-K programs have brought much needed revenue for Catholic Schools and provide a pipeline for prospective Catholic K-12 school students.…

School performance measures are published annually in England to hold schools to account and to support parental school choice. This article reviews and evaluates the 'Progress 8' secondary school accountability system for state-funded schools. We assess the statistical strengths and weaknesses of Progress 8 relating to: choice of pupil outcome…

Substantial research has already examined how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected in-person schooling, but no prior work has explored its effects on cyber schools. Here, Robert Maranto, Dennis Beck, Tom Clark, Bich Tran, and Feng Liu compare the students entering a large national cyber charter school network in spring 2020, during the pandemic,…

The school-choice landscape in the United States is undergoing a rapid transformation, as states increasingly enact a new form of vouchers called Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). Unlike earlier voucher programs, which generally allowed subsidies only for private school tuition, ESAs represent a radically expansive--and potentially very…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to argue that current ways school systems have addressed social mobility is misguided at best and, at worst, hurts social mobility. Instead, we call for a focus on investment in teachers' professional capital as a primary lever for enhancing the likelihood they can effectively prepare and develop all children…

"Voting with Their Feet: A State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends" shows hundreds of thousands of families switched to charter schools during the first full school year of the pandemic. During the 2020-21 school year, charter school enrollment grew 7%, the largest increase in half a…

Rural students in Arizona enjoy far more education choice options than rural students in any other state. Education has flourished in rural areas under Arizona's robust choice environment just as much as in the remainder of the state. The data could not be clearer: Rural students with expanded opportunities thrive, as do their teachers and…

Opponents of education choice often make two arguments about its effect on rural areas: (1) education choice will not help in rural areas because there are few or no alternatives to the district school system; and (2) education choice will destroy the district school system because so many students will leave for alternative options. These two…

In this report, the author explains the small-schools environment in New York City. Prior to the pandemic, the Big Apple had a small but growing microschool and learning pod community. New York City's frequent school closures throughout 2020 and 2021 caused many families to look more closely at these education options. New York State's stifling…

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…

Microschools, small schools that educate five to 15 students, have been among the most interesting recent developments in the K-12 reform world. Neither homeschooling nor traditional schooling, they exist in a hard-to-classify space between formal and informal learning environments. One of the most prominent microschooling networks, Prenda, was…

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…

Families continue to struggle navigating a fluid K-12 education space since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and emergence of the Delta variant. Over the last 18 months, the parents of 10.8 million did not get what they wanted from their child's school -- representing nearly one in five U.S. schoolchildren. Many families' early concerns over…