The American public education system is already a school choice system, which is navigated in four ways. Families are lucky (as the author ultimately was, having received a scholarship from grades 7-12 to an independent, all-boys school just outside the city). They are rich enough to pay private school tuition, or they are able to leverage the…

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,…

"Voting with Their Feet: A State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends" shows hundreds of thousands of families switched to charter schools during the first full school year of the pandemic. During the 2020-21 school year, charter school enrollment grew 7%, the largest increase in half a…

America has a long history of small-school environments, such as one-room schoolhouses and homeschools. But in recent years, other models have developed, giving students more intimate settings for learning and enabling their families to play a larger role in their schooling. Microschools are a leading example of this growing sector that also…

Microschools, small schools that educate five to 15 students, have been among the most interesting recent developments in the K-12 reform world. Neither homeschooling nor traditional schooling, they exist in a hard-to-classify space between formal and informal learning environments. One of the most prominent microschooling networks, Prenda, was…

For more than a quarter century, Michigan public schools have been financed under a structure commonly known as Proposal A. This funding system's greater dependence on using state revenue to finance an enrollment-based funding formula has led to greater parity among districts over time and fueled more publicly supported schooling options for…

For 14 years, the "Education Next" annual survey has tracked American opinion on education policy. This year's survey, administered in May 2020, provides an early look at how the experiences of the past few months as the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools nationwide may shape Americans' views on education policy going forward. The survey's…

Crises have a way of shaking up the status quo and creating space for new thinking. When shocked out of their familiarity, people start to ask questions as to why things are the way that they are and brainstorm ways to make them better. Enter entrepreneurs. They are the people who take those ideas that are lying around and attempt to create…

The COVID-19 pandemic upended American education, throwing schools first into an impromptu version of distance learning in the spring of 2020 followed by a summer beset by uncertainty then delayed and uneven reopenings in the fall. Parents faced tough decisions about their children's education during the pandemic. In July 2020, a poll found that…

In an article written for The Clearing House in 1974 titled, "Alternative schools: Can they survive?", Gerald Brunetti described features of schools that served as an alternative to mainstream public education. He raised the question of whether or not such schools would continue to exist in the future. A search of the literature reveals…

Unlike previous years of our "Schooling in America" survey project, our researchers are releasing multiple sets of results in a new, chart-focused format. This report is focused on the second wave of questions we asked about public opinion on K-12 education during the COVID pandemic. We also asked respondents their opinion on educational…

Pursuing new, commonsense approaches to education reform and work-family policies, from childcare and early education through higher education and workforce flexibility, will foster the conditions for family flourishing and increase birth rates for married couples. Affordable childcare from a variety of providers, including at-home options, access…

To innovate for the future and improve equity, while also protecting foundational and proven principles that support high-quality education, ExcelinEd is committing to 5 goals over 5 years to impact 5 million students. Those goals hold the key to impactful and far-reaching changes in education, with the power to transform schools, students' lives,…

The newly created Conservative Education Reform Network (CERN) at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) invited a group of conservative education thinkers to sketch policy proposals that they would like to see in a new education agenda. The only requirement was that they offer suggestions that would complement the traditional conservative…