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…

Students with disabilities across the united states are not achieving at the same rate as their non-disabled peers. With their flexibility and capacity for innovation, charter schools offer an opportunity to improve these outcomes. However, data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), parent focus groups and surveys, and research on schools'…

In response to an education-market demand to provide equitable solutions for underserved populations, the State of Michigan passed legislation that created public school academies (i.e., charter public schools) to leverage marketplace competition that addresses supply and demand among high-quality schools. Detroit, Michigan, has a large number of…

Recent headlines describing the national drop in public school enrollment suggest that this is a shocking crisis brought on or worsened by the pandemic. However, Abbie Cohen argues that the current enrollment decline should not be a surprise. The underlying causes have festered for decades. Among these causes is the tension between the different…

Through an ethnographic case study within one struggling Afrocentric public charter school in the Mid-Atlantic from 2009 to 2011, I show how broader neoliberal reforms and an incomplete attempt at Afrocentric education combined to redefine Blackness as poverty, danger, and failure through the co-optation of school-based practices. Using a Critical…

In California, a half century after the landmark "Serrano v. Priest" decision overturning the state's public school finance system because of the inequality between the state's school districts, a significant amount of wealth-based inequality in per-pupil expenditures continues to exist. One of the sources of this inequality is the…

Silent, single-file lines. Detention for putting a head on a desk. Rules for how to dress, how to applaud, how to complete homework. Walk into some of the most acclaimed urban schools today and you will find similar recipes of behavior, designed to support student achievement. But what do these "scripts" accomplish? Immersing readers…

Access to music education in American schools is not guaranteed. Although national studies have demonstrated disparities based on poverty, race, and other markers, these studies miss a necessary level of local detail in describing access. Additionally, studies that exist are based on self-report surveys and prone to nonresponse bias. The purpose…

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…

In 2018, the Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation issued a report entitled "Grading the States." That report examined America's commitment to democracy by grading each state and the District of Columbia on the number of publicly-funded but privately-governed educational "choice" programs it had and whether…

Since the conception of education in the United States, schools have been the battlegrounds for equal opportunities among African American students. In an effort to improve educational options and achievement for such students, charter schools have emerged as a popular solution for African American parents. Findings from this study shed light on…

There's considerable public debate about charter schools and students with specialized needs, focused mainly on the extent to which charters enroll students who are classified to receive special-education services. A new study by Elizabeth Setren of Tufts University shows that critics, who often charge that charters do not serve as many…

The U.S. is currently experiencing a teacher shortage. Many school districts have been impacted by this issue and want to know: how do we recruit more qualified candidates into the profession, and, more importantly, how do we recruit more Teachers of Color? We may be experiencing a shortage of teachers in general, but there has been a paucity of…

This article examines charter school reform in the midst of gentrifying urban spaces and documents, through extant research and the findings from our research, the role of school choice in perpetuating school segregation in racially diverse neighborhoods. We argue that 65 years after "Brown v. Board of Education," the more the specific…

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…