This report examines current educational options for U.S. students and the challenges of ensuring that choices are equally available and offer high-quality education. The report suggests what state policymakers can do to create high-quality opportunities that offer each family a system of schools worth choosing. The analysis starts from the…

Community colleges act as the gateway for students to higher education. Many of these colleges realize this mission through open-door policies where students lacking in basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills can enroll. But, this open-access policy often creates challenges when meeting academic standards. Based on data collected from…

The deregulation movement has impacted the social, political, and economic landscape in the United States and continues to do so. In this article, we briefly summarize the general history of deregulation in this country and the meaning of deregulation within the specific context of education policy and reform. We focus on deregulation efforts…

This paper examines thirty major American cities to determine how "choice-friendly" they are today. Selected for their size and geographic diversity, the cities reveal both the best and worst conditions for school choice to take root and grow. "School choice" is defined broadly to incorporate a wide range of public and private…

This dissertation entitled "Educational choice and educational space" aims to explore the confluence of constructed space and geographic space using a supply-side context for New Zealand's public school system of quasi-open enrollment. In Part I, New Zealand's state and state-integrated school system across four urban areas is analyzed…

Creating smart, coherent education policy is painstaking work; there are technical, budgetary, and political challenges at almost every turn. But it is some of the most important work that state leaders can undertake. As Ohioans prepared to elect a new governor in late 2018, we at the Fordham Institute began rolling out a set of policy proposals…

Open access is central to the Community College mission. For this reason, any restriction in online enrollments should not be undertaken lightly. This study uses institutional data gathered from a large, urban community college to examine a policy aimed at increasing student retention in online courses by restricting those eligible to enroll based…

The Obama administration's recurring policy emphasis on high-performing charter schools begs the obvious question: how do you identify a high-performing charter school? That is a crucially important policy question because any evaluation strategy that incorrectly identifies charter school performance could have negative effects on the economically…

The largest gains in graduation rates over the past decade have been accomplished at open-access or nearly open-access colleges and universities. In addition, states could see even bigger increases if they directed their policies and supports toward improving graduation rates at these nonselective institutions. These findings from the author's…

Immigrant youth and children of immigrants make up a large and increasing share of the nation's population, and over the next few decades they will constitute a significant portion of the U.S. workforce. Robert Teranishi, Carola Suarez-Orozco, and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco argue that increasing their educational attainment, economic productivity, and…

The author describes the challenges of a four-year, open-admission institution where equality of access has not equaled equality of success for basic writers. While there is a good deal of scholarship on student departure by compositions and experts in student retention and persistence, some models of student departure and success offered by these…

Open access institutions have achieved the goal of providing higher education to all who seek it. To compete in a global economy, these higher educational institutions must do more than open the door; they must ensure that admitted students succeed. This study examined effects of New York State's financial aid policy that requires…

An open admissions policy for the City University of New York was approved by the University's Board of Higher Education in 1969, ushering in a new era of greater access to college for the city's poor and working class Blacks, Latinos, and white youth. This policy change was made in response to demands from students, civil rights organizations,…

After a brief overview of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their historical development, the authors discuss how these colleges and universities were at the vanguard in terms of both access to higher education and diversity, long before these ideas were embraced by the academic mainstream. Despite a long history of…

Community colleges enroll nearly half the undergraduates in the U.S. These institutions play a significant role in the academic, social, political, and economic future of our nation. As historically open admission institutions, with a primary focus on providing access to higher education, they have been pressed in recent decades--as has all of…