In June, the U.S. Supreme Court brought to a close the country's decades-long experiment in affirmative action in a pair of closely watched cases--"Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College" and "Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina"--and overturned the use of racial…

In a plurality opinion in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell held that colleges and universities could consider an applicant's race in the admissions process in order to attain a diverse student body. In a pair of cases that will be decided in the current term, the Supreme Court has…

In New York State, private and religious schools are required to offer a curriculum "substantially equivalent" to what is available in local public schools. Substantial equivalency--which has been law for nearly 130 years--allows parents to direct the education of their children by enrolling them in the school of their choice, while also…

Although most education policy decisions are made at the state level, America has been having a national debate over the future of our schools for the last several years. Arguments have raged over COVID-related closures and the resultant student learning loss, Critical Race Theory, school funding, parental choice, college debt, and more. The 2022…

Over the last two years, seven states have enacted new universal education savings account (ESA) programs or have expanded existing programs to universal or near-universal eligibility. Parental-choice advocates, who have labored for decades to make incremental inroads toward achieving greater educational freedom for families. However, the authors…

Between 1994 and 2014, New York City engaged in a historic overhaul of its publicly funded high schools. This included the opening of charter high schools (made possible by a 1999 state law) and the creation of new, smaller district high schools that would, in time, replace many of the city's large, traditional, comprehensive, and vocational high…

The Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the legality of racial preferences, in part thanks to a lawsuit against Harvard College alleging that the school discriminates against Asian-Americans. Proving discrimination at a specific school is an arduous task, requiring access to private, detailed admissions records--as the legal documents in that…

This report is about the educational borders that have sprung up across America. Some are school district boundaries. They can form an invisible barrier between students and the schools that they might want to attend. Other borders, often aligned with the municipal boundaries of cities, counties, and states, restrict who can teach where, how much…

New York State's system of public elementary and secondary schools is in steep decline, but it is salvageable. The roots of its problems pre-date the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, but the system's response to that challenge accelerated discontent with the schools and harmed students. The damage of those years will not be undone if…

Microschools, small schools that educate five to 15 students, have been among the most interesting recent developments in the K-12 reform world. Neither homeschooling nor traditional schooling, they exist in a hard-to-classify space between formal and informal learning environments. One of the most prominent microschooling networks, Prenda, was…

In this first installment of the series on state-level policy and microschooling, the authors explain Idaho's recent legislative debate over two competing approaches to supporting the creation of small learning communities, known as microschools. Idaho's strong homeschooling community and its low-enrollment rural districts create political…

In this report, the author explains the small-schools environment in New York City. Prior to the pandemic, the Big Apple had a small but growing microschool and learning pod community. New York City's frequent school closures throughout 2020 and 2021 caused many families to look more closely at these education options. New York State's stifling…

Parental-choice debates typically focus on whether private schools should receive public funds "at all." This paper focuses on a question that inevitably follows when schools do receive them--the question of accountability. That is, what regulatory conditions ought to attend private schools' receipt of public funds? This is an enormously…

While a substantial body of research exists to demonstrate the benefits that choice policies such as education savings accounts (ESAs) have on various student, family, community, and societal outcomes, the fiscal impact of these policies is also an important part of the debate. This report examines solely the potential fiscal effects of…

Each year, more than 55,000 students graduate from the public high schools run by the New York City Department of Education (DOE); 58,000 did so in school year 2019-20. In percentage terms, the city's cohort graduation rate--that is, the percentage of entering ninth-graders who graduated within four years--has increased steadily from the early…