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,…

Over the last 30 years, the school choice movement has been one of the most prominent large-scale reform efforts in American education. In recent years, charter schools and voucher programs, in particular, have been a focus of policy makers and philanthropists. Mark Berends presents an overview of these two models, their prevalence, and what…

In 2020, Rick Hess and Pedro Noguera engaged in a long-running correspondence that tackled many of the biggest questions in education -- including topics like school choice, equity and diversity, testing, privatization, the achievement gap, social and emotional learning, and civics. They sought to unpack their disagreements, better understand one…

When determining whether public schools constitute a public good, it is important to understand what we mean by a public good. An economic definition, common among school choice advocates, focuses on the individual benefits of getting a good education. Within such a definition, selecting a school may be compared to selecting a box of cereal at the…

Even the most effective education reforms and initiatives are unlikely to have a uniform effect on all students. In fact, much like in medicine, some beneficial efforts can have adverse side effects. Yong Zhao takes up this idea as it applies to school choice and voucher programs. When researchers tout the benefits of vouchers, they focus on the…

Historically, debates about educational choice have wrestled with big, unresolved tensions that lie at the heart of American life, having to do with individual rights, community obligations, public and private interests, religious freedoms, and more. But in recent years, school reformers have tended to talk about choice as though it referred only…

Recent headlines describing the national drop in public school enrollment suggest that this is a shocking crisis brought on or worsened by the pandemic. However, Abbie Cohen argues that the current enrollment decline should not be a surprise. The underlying causes have festered for decades. Among these causes is the tension between the different…

Conventional wisdom suggests that evangelical Christians, often among the most vocal advocates of school choice efforts in the U.S., are promoting choice out of a sense of frustration with public schools and perceived bias against religion. Research by Marilyn Anderson Rhames, however, suggests that evangelicals are no more concerned about…

As policy makers call for the dramatic expansion of school choice and voucher programs across the U.S., it becomes all the more important for educators and advocates to consider lessons learned in countries--such as the Netherlands, New Zealand, and England--that have already gone down this path. Efforts to promote choice and school…

This exploration of Phi Delta Kappan's archives shows how the magazine has covered questions related to the purposes, governance, and funding of the public schools. Articles have discussed the role of schools in a democratic society, how schools should relate to the public, whether public funds should be diverted to private and religious schools,…

The definition of public education is changing rapidly and radically in our current political landscape. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debate over publicly funded school voucher systems, which direct taxpayer funds to parents to offset the cost of tuition at the private schools of their choice. Tina Cheuk and Rand Quinn address how…

Following Brown v. Board of Education, schools known as "segregation academies" that were created for the purpose of allowing White students to be educated without contact with Black students proliferated in the southern United States. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited such segregation, these schools remained in existence for…

Denver Public Schools traditional and charter schools combined to create a single system that allowed all students to indicate their school choice preferences, replacing a system of more than 60 different selection processes. The new system also gave families a wealth of information regarding school quality. A study of the new system found it was…

The Civil Rights Project was hired to identify barriers to equitable access in Buffalo (New York) Public Schools' criteria schools and propose solutions, which, if accepted by both parties, could resolve the civil rights violations and create more equitable access to those schools. The researchers found that students of color, low-income students,…

Expectations for parent involvement in their children's education have risen dramatically over the last 20 years. The demands now placed on parents to evaluate and select educational options for their children, to act as advocates for their children, and to support increasingly demanding academic standards have never been greater. Strong…