COVID-19 has become one of the greatest health crises ever to face the United States. Among other broad social and economic effects, the pandemic led to the closure of almost all schools to in-person instruction in spring 2020. Heated controversies emerged about whether to reopen schools in person in fall 2020, and the debate around reopening…

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,…

Purpose: This study investigates parental empowerment, involvement, and satisfaction in charter, Catholic, Christian, and district-run public schools. The analyses of these indicators across school types also differentiate parents who chose district-run public schools through residential selection from those who did not. Research Design: A survey…

Schools face social, economic, cultural and technological change that makes the need to address the process of strategic reflection relevant for leaders. Compared to a traditional model of strategic planning, this article proposes a new approach in which the future emerges through the construction of a shared vision. The objective of this study is…

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 questions we asked about families' homeschooling experiences and their opinions about homeschooling during the pandemic. We also include breakouts to show…

In Arizona, individuals can receive a tax credit of up to US$200 per individual taxpayer for donations to public schools. We analyze public school tax credit donations to charter schools and document inequalities in the distribution of donations associated with the percentages of more advantaged students charter schools serve. The differences in…

Students in Puerto Rico need better education options, and the recurring problems in the government school system have made traditional public schools unreliable places for parents to send their children. While federal officials and policymakers in the commonwealth must continue to clean up waste, fraud, and abuse, they should also lift the caps…

Demands for increased school accountability created by No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds legislation has resulted in the implementation of professional development programs in which educators are observers rather than collaborative participants. The problem at a secondary independent charter school in Central Ohio was the lack of a…

New York City has the largest public school district in the U.S., but the city's diverse educational landscape also includes charter, private, and religious schools, all of which have undergone a major transformation in the two years since the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last two school years, overall school enrollment in the city was down by…

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…

This report arrives during a time of heightened scrutiny and civic engagement. While public attention is currently trained primarily on Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), this research encompasses the whole of the city's education system, marking both commonalities and differences between different types of publicly funded schools. It highlights…

Meaningful teacher-student relationships are linked to a range of positive student outcomes. However, there is limited research on how teacher education programs attempt to prepare teachers to form relationships with students. This article employs comparative case methodology to explore how two different teacher residency programs--No Excuses…

School choice allows families to choose schools that are more suited to their children. These choices may affect non-academic outcomes, including students' mental health. We empirically examine the relationship between school choice and mental health using two methods. First, we use difference-in-differences to estimate the effects of state…

I introduce the concept of parental accountability by examining how parents understand and cope with what I characterize are pressures fostered by the long-standing public-school choice market in Arizona. Parental accountability refers to the sensemaking, experiences, and consequences that are related to decision-making in a school choice…

This exploration of Phi Delta Kappan's archives shows how the magazine has covered questions related to the purposes, governance, and funding of the public schools. Articles have discussed the role of schools in a democratic society, how schools should relate to the public, whether public funds should be diverted to private and religious schools,…