Supporters of public education fear attempts to privatize schools, while the private sector has always struggled against the monopolistic power of the public schools that educates almost 90% of all K-12 students. This trepidation has recently been intensified by the creation of a "third sector" that includes charter schools, voucher…

The long-sustained effort of conservatives and their think tanks and media outlets to win support for school choice, market forces, and privatization schemes in education is paying off. But it is encountering steady resistance from the public education establishment and its supporting teachers' unions. Actions, reactions, strategies, and the…

Charter schools, and other market-based reforms such as school vouchers and the student tutoring provision of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, are steeped in politics largely because they challenge the legitimacy of traditional power and funding arrangements in public education. The charter school reform is a significant public-private hybrid…

Homeschooling has developed from a small, isolated, parent-led effort to a vibrant national movement to lobby for and legalize K-12 education at home in all 50 states. Although a majority of homeschool families are Evangelical Christians, the others come from a variety of religious and nonreligious backgrounds, giving homeschooling a broad…

Substantial policy and political changes have resulted from a 2001 state takeover of the Philadelphia School District and the subsequent hiring of Paul Vallas as the district's new CEO. Using the lens of urban regime analysis, which emphasizes the importance of public and private actors in forming a governing coalition, this article analyzes the…

Israel has recently seen the growth of a movement demanding greater parental choice and more diversity in public schools. This article examines the state-supported TALI (or reinforcing Jewish studies) schools, focusing on a study analyzing the motives behind parental choice and the effects of choice on the social and cultural composition of…

This article discusses the limited use of education vouchers in an era of unprecedented growth in school choice. It is divided into two parts: first, a description of the policy, political, and legal barriers that may limit the expansion of large-scale voucher programs is presented. Discussion then shifts to the efforts of voucher advocates to…

Two systems of metaphors (laissez-faire and communitarian) have set the parameters governing the educational choice debate. Choice proponents argue that markets will make schools more efficient and egalitarian; critics view privatization as fragmenting the body politic. When institutional racism is factored in, privatization appears to further…

The current school choice debate reflects inevitable tensions between private and public education goals. Dramatic social geographic shifts since World War II may have changed the meaning of "private" and "public" so that a new public-private arrangement has evolved. This article discusses the origin of "private citizenship," identifies its key…

Draws from the implementation of reform policies in Michigan to examine both the politics and political economy on the effects of schools as instruments for serving consumer preferences--a perspective referred to as instrumentalism. Contends that instrumentalism emphasizes individual private purposes and nonpublic forms of governance and…