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…

This article investigates the effect of school autonomy on multiple measures of student achievement, combining the individual data of the students participating in the International Civics and Citizenship Survey with their results in the national high stakes standardized tests at the end of eighth grade administered by the Italian National…

This study explores how the constitutional right to educational freedom penetrates to the schools of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish (Haredi) community in Antwerp, which is one of the largest Haredi communities in the world. The findings indicate that the constitutional educational freedom is altered by various legal rules, social norms, and…

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…

The Open Government Partnership is an international initiative, committing governments to its principles of transparency. This article examines how it can advance the topic of freedom of educational choice, as it emphasizes the importance of parents' involvement in the decision-making process at the school level. The article is based on the…

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…

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:…

This article describes the social and economic "segregation" of students between schools in England, and the likely causes of its levels and changes over time. It involves a re-analysis of the intakes to all schools in England 1989-2011, and shows how strongly clustered the students are in particular schools. The pattern for primary-age schools is…

As governments strive to improve outcomes in education, and respond to the needs of an ever more diverse population, autonomy has gained increased prominence in national and international spheres. In the context of education, autonomy refers to the decision-making capacity of a school, and to the manner and areas over which those decisions can be…

This article introduces the research initiated by Cardus on private religious Protestant and Catholic schools in North America and provides an overview of the succeeding articles presented in this special section of the "Journal of School Choice". Through mixed method study by multiple research teams the inquiry was designed to seek to better…

School sector differences have been the subject of much debate in the literature, but there is limited data that allows careful consideration of differences within the religious school sector. The extensive Catholic school effects literature focuses on issues of school climate, especially an emphasis on persons-in-community, or communal…

This article assesses to what extent and how 18 Protestant and Catholic religiously based high schools in Alberta, British Columbia, and Washington state prepare students for cultural awareness and engagement. All schools claimed to educate students to make constructive and significant differences in culture and society. While this was evident in…