The neoliberal turn in public education positions the parent as a consumer within an expanding educational marketplace. This shift is premised on the notion that the free market is best suited to promote equity. Critics of this claim highlight how a larger choice arena creates additional opportunities for privileged parents to mobilize their…

This research set out to investigate how, in a post-conflict area, parental preferences and household characteristics affect school choice for their children. A multinomial logit is used to model the relationship between education preferences and the selection of schools for 954 households in Freetown and neighboring districts, Western Area,…

This research offers insights into the options available to individuals as they navigate the vocational education and training (VET) market. Importantly, this study directly represents the voice of students, asking how their choices were made and whether their choice was sufficiently "informed." The student voice is contrasted with…

The total number of students in the United States attending online and blended schools is unknown. A reasonable estimate is between one and two million students, or roughly 2-4% of all students in the country. More than half of all states allow online schools that draw students across district boundaries; perhaps 350,000 students attend these…

This report is the result of a year-long exploration of the effects of charter schools and the issues that surround them. Each of its eleven issues-based stories tells what the Network for Public Education (NPE) has learned not only from research, but also from talking with parents, community members, teachers, and school leaders around the nation…

School choice is a research topic that is often associated with public funds supporting educational alternatives. While much of the school choice research literature focuses on this category, additional types of school choice merit examination. This study examines how Catholic parents chose high schools for their children within the geographic…

School choice policies are often based on the idea that competition will generate better outcomes for all students. Yet there is limited empirical research about how school leaders actually perceive competition and whom they view as rivals. Drawing on concepts from economic sociology, I study principals' competitive networks and the sets of…

This paper examines the discursive strategies employed by advocates of Parent Trigger laws in the United States which allow parents of children in "failing" schools, in some states, to call for interventions in the operation of the schools via petition. The paper reviews the genesis of Parent Trigger laws, the network of conservative…

As more state legislatures join the debate on school-choice and parent-trigger legislation, their discussions draw attention to an evolving landscape outside school walls where parental action shapes educational opportunity. Parents wield their political, social, economic, and cultural capital to secure the best educational outcomes for their…

In this paper Merry examines in detail the continued--and curious--popularity of religious schools in an otherwise "secular" twenty-first century Europe. To do this he considers a number of motivations underwriting the decision to place one's child in a religious school and delineates what are likely the best empirically supported…

This paper draws attention to a subtle, but concerning, empirical challenge common in panel data models that seek to estimate the relationship between student transfers and district academic performance. Specifically, if such models have a dynamic element, and if the estimator controls for unobserved traits by including district-level effects,…

Dutch comprehensive education eventually failed on a political level, despite support from many politicians, labour unions and branches in the educational practice. In the early 1970s denominational political parties strove for a Middle School to provide equal opportunities of all children by postponing school choice. From 1973 onwards, however,…

This article brings two black intellectual traditions to bear on the question of charter schools: black Marxism and black nationalism. The authors examine the theoretical and rhetorical devices used to talk about charters schools by focusing on how notions of "black liberation" are deployed by the charter movement, and to what end. The…

In "Redefining the School District in America," Nelson Smith reexamines existing recovery school districts (RSDs)--entities in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan charged with running and turning around their state's worst schools--and assembles the most comprehensive catalog of similar initiatives underway and under consideration…

This article presents some unexpected findings from a study of the upper secondary school voucher system in Sweden. This publicly funded but relatively unregulated quasi-market offers a large number of alternatives to teenagers choosing an education. The choice situation is relatively complex and the stakes are high, but the youths themselves find…