Critics see the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a network of 141 charter schools, as part of the corporate based school reform movement (e.g., Horn, 2011; Grey, 2011), a view shared by many traditional public school educators. So-called corporate based school reform strategies allegedly exploit students and teachers, employ very narrow metrics…

This article analyzes the ways in which the right to education and freedom of education are expressed in local school choice policies in Finland. We aim to discover the elements that form democratic iterations on the right to education and freedom of education by contrasting their manifestations in three local institutional spaces for parental…

Parent trigger laws have gained momentum nationally under the premise that they will increase local authority by amplifying parental voice in the decision to turn around "failing" schools. Using Hirschman's exit, voice, and loyalty framework we create two conceptual models of voice and evaluate the promise of voice in California,…

From 1982-1997, 35 states adopted legislation, referred to as homeschool rights, that explicitly granted families the right to educate their children at home. Using data from the National Household Education Survey, this article examines the impact that this legislation has had on the decision to homeschool a child versus the alternatives of…

School voucher programs challenge the traditional role of the public school as the builder of citizens, raising the question of whether private schools can provide a civic education of equal quality. In this study, we use survey data from the Milwaukee voucher program to investigate the relative benefits in civic outcomes of attending a voucher…

As charter school waitlists around the United States continue to grow, it is important to analyze the factors that are possibly attracting parents away from the traditional public school setting and into the charter school system. Using waitlist data from Pennsylvania to proxy for parental valuation, the article examines numerous factors that…

The authorizers of charter schools are an understudied piece of the charter reform process. The local school boards, state agencies, and higher education institutions that act as authorizers play a significant role in the market, determining which operators get to enter the market and which are forced to exit. This article provides an…

School choice is presented by some as a panacea to the challenges facing education in the United States. Acceptance of choice as a solution, however, is far from universal. This article examines two possible contributors to choice adoption: ideology and political culture. Political culture was found to better explain the complex phenomenon of…

This article argues that school choice/competition ought to play a central role in determining school discipline policy. Unfortunately, the status quo emphasizes disciplinary rules established by central authorities and school choice is often limited. The author provides an overview of these issues and presents a model of rules- versus…

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…

In the Netherlands, school choice is free and all schools are equally funded by the government. We measured distance from home to school as a proxy for the selectivity of choice and used characteristics of the nearest school to explain the choice of a school other than the nearest school. Almost 89% of all pupils in the 4 largest cities do not…

This article examines the balance found in Portugal between faith-based schools' freedom of educating with a religious perspective and the State's supervisory role of schools that receive state funding (government oversight of religious State funded schools). The research is a case study of four Catholic schools entirely funded by the…

Recent reforms in England include the aim of converting every school into an "independent state funded school," an academy, and giving the strongest schools more responsibility for initial teacher education, offering professional development programs, and supporting the improvement of less successful schools. School leaders are…

Recent research in Rio de Janeiro public schools has brought to light a "Hidden Quasi-Market" that combines purported freedom of choice for parents with school control over their pupil intake. The article analyzes patterns of segregation among schools, from 2004 to 2010, according to three indicators of potentially disadvantaged pupils:…

While choice opponents and proponents tend to focus on how programs impact achievement, the growing body of research indicating a strong relationship between future outcomes and noncognitive skills indicates a need to broaden the basis for assessing programs. This article synthesizes the existing literature on the development of noncognitive…