The students (n = 117) in this quantitative study were enrolled at a campus housing both an alternative and charter school. Using a survey assessing student perceptions of improvement in three domains--academic, behavioral, and social--this study examined the difference in responses between students with and without disabilities. Compared to the…

Since the development of magnet schools in the 1960s--and more recently, the proliferation of charter schools in the last fifteen years--school choice has been a pervasive element on the education reform landscape. With this growth has come the need for information tools to help site-based educators manage, grow, and improve their schools. This is…

Many expect that charter schools will produce innovations, but it is unclear what kinds and how much innovation is desirable. This paper summarizes the research evidence on charter school innovation to date and suggests ways to more productively pursue future research and development in the charter sector. The paper addresses three main questions:…

Charter school reforms are predicated on the existence of motivated groups or individuals that create these public schools of choice. Rhetoric concerning charter schools largely takes for granted the supply side and assumes that market forces will compel educational entrepreneurs to open schools. We argue that the motivations of charter school…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine nine states' policy responses to the Unsafe School Choice Option between 2002 and 2007. These states had 199 schools designated as "persistently dangerous schools" since 2002. Unsafe School Choice Option is one of the school choice options of the No Child Left Behind law that required states to…

Some parents choose to send their children to military-style boarding schools for a variety of reasons. Abundant scholarly literature addresses traditional boarding schools. Far less is available addressing the choice of military boarding schools as an educational option. This qualitative study investigates why parents send their sons to military…

This article gives an update on school choice in Canada. Currently, school choice in Canada is stable. Provincialism, in both senses of the word, is a major factor in Canadian political life. There is no contradiction between Ontario's recent electoral rejection of the extension of funding to non-Catholic religious schools, and the strong support…

Many educational researchers have identified issues on classifying schools and some have made use of ad-hoc classification systems in their analyses; however, these solutions are generally one-dimensional, which prohibits them from capturing the full breadth of variation among schools. To understand the amount of variation that exist in schools…

One of the key claims of choice advocates is that it will take diverse schooling options to engage all children in learning. In a school system truly open to new providers of instruction and diverse schooling options, private schools and public schools of choice can vie for customers by trying different subject themes and pedagogies. If a school's…

Diversity was and remains a central feature of charter schools, but some question if this is possible in an environment of standards, assessment, and accountability. Using a newly created charter school typology, this article examines charter diversity, measured by new school creation, from 1994 to 2002. Results indicate the charter landscape grew…

Pressing questions about the merits of full-fledged market accountability in K-12 education, and more limited choice programs, have spawned a large scholarly literature. This article assesses what we know from the most prominent studies and the importance of those findings to school system reform discussions. The studies most widely cited in the…

The paper approaches the issue of school choice in an indirect manner by investigating the effectiveness of public, private government-dependent and private independent schools in 19 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries selected from the PISA 2000 survey for this purpose. In a multilevel approach we estimate these…

In this paper I develop indices capturing business/market and nonprofit/mission characteristics of charter schools that can be used to explain many of their observed operational and political choices. This improves on earlier research using only a binary variable classifying charter schools as market or mission rather than letting them take on…

School choice is one of the most frequent recommendations for education reform in the United States today. Unfortunately, the debates are hindered by the lack of a common taxonomy or framework for discussing and evaluating the wide variety of school choice programs available in the United States. Furthermore, there is little information on the…

School empowerment and weighted student formula programs continue to grow across the United States. This article explores the key components of school empowerment programs and describes several existing programs from Baltimore to San Francisco. The article examines some of the anecdotal outcomes for these types of public school choice programs.…