For more than a century, public education in the U.S. has been defined as schools that are funded, regulated, and exclusively delivered by government. The past 25 years have brought some diversified forms of delivery through charter schools and various private-school scholarship mechanisms. Nevertheless, most discussions and debates over school…

The Center for Public Education has been examining the research and data related to school choice in hopes of informing the conversation about effective policies. This report turns from looking at the impact of school choice to examining access to options within the public education system. It first estimates how many students are able to choose…

Economic growth typically results when businesses, workers, investors, and entrepreneurs are free to compete, innovate, and work to better serve consumers by supplying new or improved goods and services. These incentives govern the marketplace, and when built upon a sound foundation of property rights, the rule of law, open trade, minimal…

Given state cuts to US public education, overcrowding and underfunding in urban district schools continue to grow. Yet, how parents understand the role of state disinvestment on underfunded and overcrowded public schools remains relatively unexamined. Drawing from an ethnographic study of school choice in Arizona, I explore how a group of white…

Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates' promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century (e.g. "Brown v. Board," "Lau v. Nichols") and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement…

A rising proportion of four-year-olds now attend formal, or center-based, early childhood education (ECE) programs. Formal settings, such as Head Start, public preschool, and subsidized child care centers vary significantly in regulation, funding, and service provision. As these differences may have substantial implications for child development…

The Public School Forum of North Carolina is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on improving educational outcomes for all North Carolina children. As they do each year, they have released a list of the "Top 10 Education Issues" they believe will be the top issues for the year, as well as issues they believe should be on the…

This paper uses school choice policy as an example to demonstrate how local actors adopt, mediate, translate, and reformulate "choice" as neo-liberal rhetoric informing education reform. Complex processes exist between global policy about school choice and the local practice of school choice. Based on the theoretical sensibility of…

The marketization of K-12 education has led to an increase in school-based marketing efforts. Relatively little research, however, has examined how public schools market themselves, who is involved in marketing, and how these marketing efforts impact key stakeholders, including school administrators, teachers, students, and parents.We explore…

In this article, "Education Next" talks with Matthew Ladner and Nelson Smith on the topic of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). ESAs apply the logic of school choice to the ever-expanding realm of education offerings. Rather than simply empowering families to select the school of their choice, ESAs provide families with most or all of…

In this paper we examine the public charter school movement in the Province of Alberta, Canada over the past 20 years to determine how charter school policy and regulations have limited and controlled the impact of charter schools on public education. Specifically we focus on the extent to which charter schools in Alberta fulfilled the aims and…

The strength and effectiveness of the American public school system has risen to the top of our national agenda in a way not seen since the Cold War. In short, the civic health of communities, the states, and the nation is inextricably entwined with the capacity and the potency of public schools. In this brief, the authors argue that mayors, as…

Social scientists have begun to document the stratifying effects of over a decade of unprecedented charter growth in urban districts. An exodus of students from traditional neighborhood schools to charter schools has attended this growth, creating troubling numbers of vacant seats in neighborhood schools as well as concentrating larger percentages…

In this paper we contend neo-liberal education policy which supports the creation of schooling choices in public education systems is reshaping, conflating and branding ethnicity. We make these points in reference to school choice in Toronto, Canada, and the establishment of an Africentric ethno-centric school. We argue that one of the registers…

The Rhode Island Education Policy Primer provides an overview of how public education operates in Rhode Island. The Introduction offers context on the inequitable origins of Rhode Island's public school system, as well as the role that activism has played in expanding educational opportunities. The At a Glance section provides a quick look at…