Education is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. When looking at preschool or K-12 education, having a diversity of options is essential. Yet there continue to be calls for the federal government to pass a universal preschool program like the one in President Biden's Build Back Better Act. The author states that this is clearly unconstitutional: the…

As COVID-19 struck the United States in March 2020, sending the nation into lockdown, worry about the fate of private schools was high. These schools, which only survive if people can pay for them, seemed to face deep trouble. To gauge how the private schooling sector has fared amid the coronavirus pandemic, Cato's Center for Educational Freedom…

Programs using public funds for children to attend private schools of their choice are on the rise in the United States. As of 2019, 25 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, had voucher or scholarship programs, many of them targeted to specific populations, such as students with disabilities or low-income students. Numerous other…

Immigrants play a vital role in innovation activities and entrepreneurship. Given the substantial contribution of immigrants in these areas, a set of natural questions arise: What are the pathways that high-skilled immigrants take to arrive in the United States, and how has the importance of these pathways changed over time? What are important…

There has been clamor and dismay at the expected future economic and social costs for children affected by school closures from COVID-19. A New York Times editorial, for example, stated: "A learning reversal of this magnitude could hobble an entire generation." However, the nearly universal belief in the substantial social and economic…

In 2016, Maryland adopted the Broadening Options and Opportunities for Students Today (BOOST) voucher program that helps pay K-12 private school expenses for low-income households. BOOST vouchers target low-income families. Funds are available to public school students as well as children in private schools and homeschools who qualify for free or…

The federal government has been heavily involved in education since the mid-1960s, intervening in everything from early childhood education to graduate schooling. This paper lays out the principles that should govern federal involvement in seven specific areas and briefly examines the effects of Washington's policies. The areas are elementary and…

Over the past 50 years, homeschooling has grown from a fringe act to a widely accepted education model reflective of a diverse American population. Many parents choose homeschooling to avoid the constraints of the conventional classroom and to embrace education in a broader, often more pluralistic way. According to the National Center for…

Following a 2007 Supreme Court decision restricting the use of race for school assignments, school boards desiring greater diversity turned to economic integration, meaning equalizing the proportion of low-income students in each school in a district. Among other claimed benefits, most advocates believe economic integration will reduce the…

What determines student achievement? The usual approach is to think of achievement as the output of an educational production function. Inputs into this educational production function include teacher quality, class size, resources, peer effects (possibly positive spillover effects and negative disruption effects), and past achievement, since…

Is public schooling a public good, a merit good, or a demerit good? Public schooling fails both conditions specified in the standard economic definition of a public good. In order to place public schooling into one of the remaining two categories, I first assess all of the theoretical positive and negative externalities resulting from public…

The potential benefits of increased access to private school choice programs in the United States remain a hot topic in educational policy. According to economic theory, private schooling should improve student achievement by increasing competitive pressures on educators to provide high-quality educational experiences. In addition, since children…

Teachers are one of the most important inputs in the production of student achievement, and their impact persists throughout adulthood. Attracting and retaining high-quality teachers to the profession is thus a policy issue of highest importance. More attractive compensation packages are often proposed as a possible tool to achieve this goal. In…

State education rankings published by "U.S. News & World Report," "Education Week," and others are based partly on achievement tests, which measure student learning, and partly on other factors not directly related to student learning. These rankings are aggregated in a way that provide misleading results by: (1) ignoring…

Teacher industrial action is a prevalent feature of public education systems across the globe. During the past few years teacher strikes have been observed in Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico, Russia, and the United States. A shared belief among policymakers across several of these countries is that…