Charter schools are publicly funded schools that have considerable independence from public school districts in their curriculum development and staffing decisions, and their enrollments have increased substantially over the past two decades. Charter schools are changing public and private school enrollment patterns across the United States. This…

There is a persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than do small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large, centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more…

Would large-scale, free-market reforms improve educational outcomes for American children? That question cannot be answered by looking at domestic evidence alone. Though innumerable "school choice" programs have been implemented around the United States, none has created a truly free and competitive education marketplace. Existing programs are too…

The looming expiration of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has prompted a flood of commission reports, studies, and punditry. Virtually all of those analyses have assumed that the law should and will be reauthorized, disagreeing only over how it should be revised. They have accepted the law's premises without argument: that…

In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2003 decision upholding admissions preferences, affirmative action remains a deeply divisive issue. This tendency to frame the argument over preferences in terms of fundamental values is common to both sides of the debate. Because the nation's history with respect to race is so painful, the resulting argument is…