Schools in the U.S. are faced with a complex set of barriers that limit their ability to provide equitable and meaningful education to students, such as reduced funding levels, increased concentrations of high-needs students, and institutionalized forms of oppression. However, research suggests that school leaders can spearhead efforts to overcome…

Across Canada, school districts have been confronting a backlash to their equity and social justice initiatives. Critics of public education have been arguing that the solution to these controversies is to increase school choice. Using several examples from the United States, this paper argues that the endgame of these strategies is to undermine…

The purpose of this action research study was to investigate and improve the school choice experience for students in a large urban school district on the East Coast. Participants in Cycle 1 were comprised of middle and high school staff, and data was collected via surveys, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Action steps included…

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…

Despite a growing recognition of the significance of student transportation for promoting equitable school choice, to date, there has been limited understanding of the implementation of school transportation policies, particularly in choice-heavy settings. Moreover, little is known about the challenges associated with managing student…

Segregation on the basis of race or ethnicity is one of the most enduring and pervasive inequities in US public education. School segregation is determined not only by residential sorting and families' preferences but by local policy choices such as the drawing of school attendance boundaries. This report examines the role of individual school…

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…

While parents of students with disabilities (SWD) select schools according to various factors, schools also choose students through different sorting mechanisms. Thus, parents of SWD may need to employ different strategies to enroll their child in their preferred school. We employed an intersectional approach for studying school choice,…

Policy makers in California intend to provide free preschool to all 4-year-olds solely within public schools by 2026, becoming the nation's second largest single pre-K program in the United States after Head Start. This initiative builds on the state's existing Transitional Kindergarten (TK) option that has served a modest share of 4-year-olds…

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…

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…

As one of the key elements of the Nordic welfare model, education systems are based on the idea of providing equal educational opportunities, regardless of gender, social class and geographic origin. Since the 1990s, Nordic welfare states have undergone a gradual but wide-ranging transformation towards a more market-based mode of public service…

In efforts to better understand program availability, quality, and characteristics related to family choice among universal prekindergarten (preK) programs in Vermont, this study examined the characteristics of approved preK programs overall, public school and private programs separately, and programs in local education agencies with different…

This research examines social justice leaders' community activism in response to three local and national political contexts. Grounded in literature that advances ecological models of school leadership, we analyzed how seven urban school leaders conceptualized community activism as linked to school outcomes, and how leaders conducted activism…

Examining the experiences of families of students with disabilities seeking to exercise school choice is crucial to informing cogent policies and practices that will ensure equitable access. This report explores the perceptions and experiences of families of students with disabilities enrolled in charter and traditional district schools in…