This brief describes how several commonly used per-pupil funding measures derived from federal data include passthrough funding in the numerator but exclude students attached to this funding from the denominator, artificially inflating per-pupil ratios. Three forms of passthrough funding for students not educated by the school district where they…

May 17, 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were "inherently unequal." At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within…

Collaborative meaning-making across difference is often undertaken in pursuit of equity, but too often socially constructed power differentials between collaborators on the basis of social class, race, gender, ability, age or other markers are reified. This article examines the ripples produced by one literacy collaboration that took place across…

We describe the levels, trends, and patterns of school closure and restructuring in the United States from 1991 to 2019 across all sectors using a near census of K-12 schools. Focusing on the years with the best available data, 2014-2018, we find that the annual closure rate of charter, private, and traditional public schools (TPS) were 5.1, 2.9,…

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…

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way that families and policymakers view K-12 education. Learning loss is having an outsized impact on students who were furthest from opportunity before the pandemic. And families are increasingly looking for new educational options for their children. For decades, access to educational options…

Some still view arts education as a non-essential extracurricular activity despite its benefits. Even though the Every Student Succeeds Act acknowledges arts education is a healthy and well-rounded subject, local, district, and state administrators still control budget allocation and cuts, which generally affect arts education. There has also been…

Recent policy changes in the New Zealand educational context have introduced privatization into the system through partnership schools. Parties on all sides of the issue use a framework of economic values consisting of efficiency, equity, and liberty to frame themselves and their opposition. This holistic case study uses interviews, observations,…

School ratings are a ubiquitous feature of the U.S. educational system. Alongside state-mandated measures of school performance, non-state organizations such as GreatSchools.org and Niche have created consumer-oriented systems of school ratings that draw on publicly available information about schools. Claiming the purpose of their rating systems…

We examine the role of ideas in the politics of school choice policy and situate our study within scholarship that understands frames and logics as types of ideas operating in the foreground and background of policy debates. Our data are from a case study of political contention over portfolio management reform (in which a central office oversees…

Many students are enrolled in segregated school systems with unequal access to resources. In this report, we present a measure that can help policymakers identify the schools in their system that are contributing the most to segregation. How our measure differs from traditional metrics: Much research on segregation relies on an absolute measure of…

For the past 30 years, America's K-12 education system has experienced an era of expanding educational choice. Although students who participate in private school choice programs and are enrolled in charter schools comprise a small portion of the K-12 population relative to students in district schools, choice is becoming a larger part of the K-12…

In Texas, local taxpayers fund the majority of educational facilities construction and maintenance costs, with local wealth influencing facilities outcomes. The traditional school districts that comprise the predominantly Latino and segregated San Antonio area vary considerably in property wealth as well as district capacity and expertise. We…

By law, a student's admission to one of New York City's eight elite high schools is determined by his or her score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Only a very small number of black and Hispanic students make the cut, a fact that has led Mayor Bill de Blasio to engineer what he regards as a more equitable racial distribution…

Educational choice programs--defined broadly as programs that provide parents with financial aid to help their children opt out of the traditional public school system--are a hallmark of meaningful educational reform. Yet despite widespread news coverage of such programs, polls show most Americans are unfamiliar with how educational choice…