Through powerful narratives of parents of Black and Latinx students with disabilities, this book provides a unique look at the relationship between disability, race, urban space, and market-driven educational policies. Offering significant insights into complex forms of educational exclusion, the text illustrates the actual challenges and…

Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. Secretary of Education, has a reform agenda to advance school choice. Her track record includes enabling charter school growth in Michigan at taxpayers' expense with little oversight or accountability. Although an effective advocate, DeVos represents a broader policy movement to privatize American education, much of it…

Our 32nd annual report analyzing data from southeast Wisconsin's public school districts finds progress on some college readiness indicators and largely positive showings on district report cards. Those results are offset, however, by discouraging results on standardized tests and continued substantial achievement gaps between students of…

Annual "Profiles" reports are comprehensive digests of data on education management organizations. Analysis and interpretation of the data in this report are, for the most part, limited to describing general trends over time. The report is intended for a broad audience. Policymakers, educators, school district officials, and school board…

Since the early 1990s when the nation's first charter school was opened in Minneapolis, the scope and availability of school-based options to parents has steadily expanded. No longer can public education be characterized as a monopoly. Sponsored by the National Center on School Choice (NCSC), this handbook makes readily available the most rigorous…

The rationale for taking bold action on the nation's persistently failing schools can be summed up in one dramatic and disturbing statistic: half of the young Americans who drop out of high school attend just 12 percent of the nation's schools. Ending the cycle of failure at schools is a daunting challenge and a surprisingly controversial one.…

This report suggests that charter schools need to consider six critical questions as they develop a student accountability plan for their school. These questions are: (1) "What is our school's mission?"; (2) "What do we want our students to know and be able to do?"; (3) "How will we know whether our students are achieving or attaining the goals…

For-profit schools are serviced by commercial companies whose primary goal is to raise student achievement to a designated level within a period specified by contract. Different school systems are discussed along with their positive and negative points. Questions related to possible issues are presented in each case for consideration. Reasons for…

The last 2 decades of the 20th century have witnessed a growing movement to reform the American education system. While people debate why and how reform should be accomplished new initiatives are being developed and applied in many different areas: student performance standards, curricular innovation, assessment, accountability, professional…