Implementation of ESA programs will not be easy. The ESA model is novel and foreign to most state education agencies, which have little to no experience with helping families purchase a wide variety of educational goods and services using government funds. Even if agencies had the relevant experience, ESA programs are complex, involving millions…

This article explores the institutional dynamics that contribute to educational inequality within Nordic cities. The persistent issue of social inequality in education remains a prominent challenge for the Nordic welfare states. By investigating the gaps between educational policies and their practical implementation, this study sheds light on the…

The problem addressed by this study was the academic achievement gap of low-income students. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of educators of low-income students participating in the Florida School Choice program and the perceived challenges they face in bridging the academic achievement…

Research shows that third-grade reading proficiency is the most significant predictor of future success, including graduation rates, earning potential, crime, and health. Mastery of foundational literacy skills during preschool bolsters students' ability to learn to read before fourth grade when the transition from learning to read to reading to…

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ensuring culture wars, the American school choice coalition has almost completely unraveled, but many school choice advocates assert that the coalition can be rebuilt. In this essay, I argue that the school choice coalition dissolved not because of politics or circumstance, but because the…

We leverage a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to private school vouchers across markets as well as students to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. To do this, we estimate several choice models on data only from control markets before turning to the treatment data for model validation. This exercise reveals…

This dissertation examines the perceptions of parents who open enroll their children in an alternative public school by diving into the lived experiences of these individuals. The research is grounded in three theoretical frameworks: Parent Involvement Theory (McCurdy and Daro, 2001), Rational Choice Theory (Adler et al., 2014), and Market Theory…

Since it emerged in the mid-1980s, the school choice phenomenon in China has been the target of severe criticism from all levels of government and the general public. The current nationwide movement of rotating teachers and principals (RTP) is a new attempt to control and eventually eliminate the practice of school choice. Using data from…

Do residential neighbors affect each others' schooling choices? We exploit oversubscription lotteries in Chile's centralized school admission system to identify the effect of close neighbors on application and enrollment decisions. A student is 5-7% more likely to rank a high school as their first preference and to attend that school if their…

Over the past two decades, researchers have spent countless hours studying the impacts of public charter schools--independently-run, tuition-free schools of choice that serve some 3.7 million U.S. students today. Just prior to the pandemic, studies from Ohio and nationally indicated that charters on average delivered superior academic outcomes…

For more than twenty-five years, public charter schools have served Ohio families and communities by providing quality educational options beyond the local school district. But it's no secret that we've also had a long-standing debate over whether increasing school choice impacts students who remain in traditional districts. In important--and…

This study reviewed the college decision of non-first generation Latinx students from the Rio Grande Valley border region. While there is a vast amount of literature on first generation students, there is a gap in literature for non-first generation students overall, with a larger gap for those non-first generation students that may be Latinx from…

Today's society is characterized by high unemployment, a prevailing trust in and demands for an academic degree, and an emphasis on the individual's own responsibility for their educational choices. This study aims to examine adults' vocational education choices, their intentions in connection with municipal adult education (MAE) studies, and how…

In general, controlled school choice policies that aim to integrate schools along the lines of race or ethnicity and socioeconomic status are most often successful in achieving that goal. Unregulated systems of school choice, however, tend to exacerbate school segregation (Cobb & Glass, 2009). This research brief summarizes research about…

Academic freedom and global student mobility are both topics high on the scientific and political agenda. However, the relationship between transnational student mobility and academic freedom in national higher education systems has not yet been investigated cross-nationally. This study intends to answer the question on how a countries' level of…