Across the country, states have expanded their voucher programs rapidly within the past few years. School choice advocates named 2023 the "year of universal choice" because of the frequency of states adopting these programs. Universal school choice programs make school vouchers available to all families, regardless of their income level…

Background/purpose: Social alienation is an individual feeling or being isolated or disengaged from others and society. It has been a well-identified element in the lives of Muslim immigrants in Europe who face significant challenges in social, economic, civic, and political participation. These challenges may have adverse impacts on the academic…

This dissertation is composed of three studies. The first and second examine the U.S. private tutoring industry which heretofore has gone largely undocumented by academic research. I show that not only has the industry grown precipitously within the last few decades, but that a disproportionate amount of that growth has taken place among areas…

School choice has influenced several educational reforms in the US and across the world in the last decades. These reforms have often promoted school autonomy, parental choice, and competition between schools to improve quality and equity. Whether those reforms work in practice is well examined, but the roles of policy design such as the extent to…

Specialized high schools are an increasingly popular way to prepare young adults for postsecondary experiences and expand school choice. While much literature ex- amines charter school spillover effects and the effects of specialized schools on the students who attend them, little is known about the spillover effects of specialized high schools on…

Schools' priorities in student selection constitute the basis for fairness in school admissions. We study the case where schools are active strategic players that rank their applicants in terms of priorities. A methodological framework is developed to examine the impact of the variation in the admission settings on the equality of opportunity in…

Since 2021, Bellwether has conducted research on flexible learning options, including interviews with 85 policymakers, state administrators, funders, navigation organizations, technology providers, and many others. The goal was to address inquiries in a nascent and fast-growing field, such as how families and students access learning within a…

Access issues are pivotal to almost all charter school tensions and debates. How well are these schools performing? Are they segregating and stratifying? Are they public and democratic? Are they fairly funded? Can apparent successes be scaled up? Answers to all these core questions hinge on how access to charter schools is shaped. This book…

Asian migrant students are typically considered as educational paragons in the West. They have been shown to surpass other students in standard indicators of educational success. However, viewing this success with a purely ethnic framework is inadequate and essentialising. It conflates the experiences of various groups into a homogenised 'Asian'…

This multimodal critical discourse analysis is part of a larger equity audit of how the websites of 11 of the largest U.S. school districts discussed access to dual language bilingual education (DLBE). Prior research has frequently documented how administrators utilize DLBE programs to compete with one another for the supposedly necessary resource…

Americans are dissatisfied with the public school system--and student academic outcomes have fallen to historic lows. Increasingly, state lawmakers are responding by giving parents more options for their children's education. Some of these new opportunities, such as in Arkansas and Iowa, allow every child in the state to apply. Policymakers also…

The availability of public funding for private schools, in both primary and secondary education, has become a common feature in a number of OECD countries. The expansion of public subsidies for privately owned schools has consequences that go far beyond the involvement of private actors in the provision of education. These include deepening forms…

This District of Columbia Public Schools School Year 2024-2025 "Parental Right to Know Guide" informs parents on their rights with regard to the following: (1) Notice of Non-Discrimination and Non-Retaliation; (2) Teachers and Paraprofessionals; (3) Student Achievement (DC CAPE Data); (4) Student Records; (5) Unsafe School Choice Option;…

In this article, we introduce a special collection of research articles that consider the processes and consequences of school choice across different social and spatial contexts in order to better understand the relationship between school choice and stratification in educational opportunity. This special issue presents a wide range of studies…

We investigate student mobility in a choice-based system that has gone to scale, New Orleans, to gain insight into an underlying improvement mechanism of choice-based reform and its potential equity-related consequences. In contrast to typical analyses of mobility, this study distinguishes incumbent school characteristics that can cause students…