The traditional K-12 schooling model is a "bundled" product that provides parents with an all-in-one package of services: instruction, transportation, lunch, extracurriculars, and athletics, all delivered by one provider in one location: the school. Historically, parental choice has been limited to selecting from among different…

In this article, the authors study family preferences in one of the most competitive school markets ever developed in the United States: New Orleans, where virtually all district students attend a charter school. The vast majority provide transportation from anywhere in the city, and none can charge tuition. Admission is based on parental…

Public K-12 education in the United States is distinctively a local affair: school districts are governed by local boards of education, composed of lay members typically elected in non-partisan elections. These boards have decision-making power over hundreds of billions of public dollars and oversee complex agencies that, in addition to preparing…

Americans with more education vote at higher rates. Some studies have found evidence of a causal relationship, while others have not. The available data also tell us little about why and how education increases voting. The authors looked the educational trajectories and adult voting records of students who attend charter schools in Boston. The…

Driving across tracts of new-home development in El Paso, Texas, one can't miss the signs of charter-school momentum. Charter-school enrollment has been growing in Texas for years, but in many localities and even at the state level, charter schools had until recently encountered harsher treatment from policymakers than what advocates have…

Many public charter schools in the state of Hawaii are explicitly religious. For more than two decades, students at Hawaiian-focused schools have offered chants and prayers to the pantheon of gods who rule over skies, seas, and earth, including to the volcanic god, Pelehonuamea ("she who shapes the sacred land"), popularly known as Madam…

These are the results of the 16th annual "Education Next" survey, conducted in May 2022 with a nationally representative sample of 1,784 American adults. While last year's survey revealed sharp changes in support for a variety of education reforms (EJ1348128), public opinion on most issues has since rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.…

As states have passed laws establishing charter schools, advocates have carefully tracked and analyzed state policies and enrollments to compare charter school growth, demand, and access across the United States. But to date, there have been no comparisons of charter school performance across states based on student achievement adjusting for…

In the ever-shifting world of school choice, what began as a homegrown charter-school network's small experiment in microschooling stands out as unique -- and as a uniquely promising model for replication. Gem Prep, a network of seven brick-and-mortar K-12 charter schools in Idaho, anchored by a longstanding and high-performing online school,…

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court held in "Carson v. Makin" that Maine violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by excluding religious schools from a private-school-choice program--colloquially known as "town tuitioning"--for students in school districts without public high schools. Writing for the majority,…

Charter high schools largely serving low-income, first-generation, Black and Hispanic students have long boasted of the comparatively high proportions of their students who graduate and go to college. But as these schools and their alumni grow older, charters also are looking at their rates of degree attainment, which remain lower than they'd…

On a warm December evening in Anaheim, California, in 2015, an out-of-town lawyer stood for public comment at a local school-board meeting and urged members to deny a proposed charter school. Magnolia Public Schools, which operates 10 charters in California, was hoping to open a new science academy. The attorney, John Martin of Amsterdam &…

The full reach of the U.S. Supreme court's 2020 ruling in "Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue" has yet to be seen, but it has the potential to reshape the school-choice landscape. The ruling, which prohibited Montana from excluding students at religious schools from a tax-credit scholarship program, will figure prominently in many…

Today, nearly three quarters of Miami-Dade students are enrolled in choice programs. That makes Miami-Dade the most choice-rich district in arguably the most choice-rich state. Parents and teachers who live in Miami-Dade now access more than 500 non-district schools that didn't exist or weren't accessible 20 years ago, and everybody knows even…

The 15th annual "Education Next" survey, conducted in June 2021, yields a host of specific results that reveal one large fact about the current state of public opinion on American education: The public is cautious--extremely cautious. In the presence of a still-circulating COVID-19 virus, a large percentage of parents and the broader…