The Louisiana Department of Education has three core beliefs: belief in children, belief in educators, and belief in family. Louisiana's charter schools embody these key beliefs. Charter schools give families an opportunity to choose the school environment that is best suited to meet the needs of their children and put educational decisions in the…

School choice is centred on parents deciding where and how their children will be educated, and this issue is similar--to varying degrees--for parents all around the world. Parental school choice is the authority that parents exercise in making decisions about where their children will attend school, and choosing a particular educational pathway…

Legislators considering large scale school choice proposals want information on more than likely schooling outcomes. They look to their fiscal bureaus and economic studies to provide that information. The fiscal notes that must accompany all proposals with revenue or expenditure implications are especially important. Often, fiscal notes must be…

The National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools (the Center) is deeply committed to ensuring that students with disabilities have equal access to charter schools and that charter schools are designed and operated to enable success for all students. To accomplish this goal, the Center conducts analyses and releases a comprehensive…

The decision by ex-Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove to send his daughter to a state school caused much press comment and was discussed in a widely read article by Gove's spouse, the "Daily Mail" columnist Sarah Vine. In this piece, Vine praised non selective state education, drawing on her own personal experience and that of…

Though school choice has proven to be popular, barriers remain in some states as a result of so-called Blaine Amendments and similar policies to prevent education funding from following students to religious schools as a part of school choice options. If left to stand, these ignoble 19th century amendments will remain major impediments to the…

This article contributes to the analysis of the global spread of support for school choice and to the understanding of how a particular form of policy development reflects and cements this support. It maps the growing dominance of school choice within a reconfiguration of politics, policy making, and research. To establish the nature of this…

This article presents the empirical analysis of the effects of a school choice policy in Estonia. The article shows that relying on markets and giving autonomy to the schools over student selection will produce admission tests, even at the elementary school level. This article's contribution is to show that a school choice policy experiment with…

In this article, Bryan R. Warnick explores parents' authority to make educational decisions for their children. In philosophical debates, three types of arguments are typically invoked to justify parents' rights: arguments based on the welfare interests of children, arguments based on the expressive interests of parents, and arguments based on the…

This study examines how access to academic curriculum differs between secondary schools in Australia, a country whose education system is marked by high levels of choice, privatisation and competition. Equitable access to academic curriculum is important for both individual students and their families as well as the larger society. Previous…

Although the school mapping restructure (SMR) program in rural China mainly aims to improve the efficiency of education, this paper aims to show that the principle of educational equity should be given more attention, as evidence suggests that some children lose the opportunity to learn at a local village and rural families have different…

For decades, New York City's high school graduation rates hovered at or below 50 percent. In attempt to turn around these disappointing results, the NYC Department of Education enacted a series of large-scale reforms, including opening hundreds of new "small schools of choice" (SSCs). Recent research by MDRC has shown that these schools…

Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program (MPCP) includes 110 schools today, having experienced both exits and entrants from its roster of 111 schools in the past decade. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), fall 2013 voucher enrollment was 25,820 students, about double the 13,268 enrolled in 2003-2004. Thus, while the…

Given recent budgetary gaps in public education, many civic and educational leaders have relied upon private sources of funding for US public schools, including funds raised by parents. Yet parents' role as economic actors in public education has been largely unexplored. Drawing from a qualitative study of parent engagement, fundraising, and…

The United States Congress' Southern Congressional Delegation promulgated the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto, on March 12, 1956. The Southern Manifesto was the South's primary means to effectively delay implementation of public school desegregation as ordered by the United States Supreme Court…