Nearly 70 years after Milton Friedman first proposed K-12 education vouchers, students in Arizona, Iowa, Utah, West Virginia, and other states can customize their education using education savings accounts (ESAs). ESAs allow parents to spend public education funding on expenses such as private school tuition, tutoring, and homeschooling curricula.…

The American Enterprise Institute, EducationCounsel, and The Century Foundation undertook a joint process to examine--across ideological lines--the nature of the existing system that finances graduate education, including its benefits and downsides, and to design a framework that should guide the improvement of federal policy regarding graduate…

A long overdue, much needed transformation is underway in the higher education system. It started a decade ago, when federal and state policy­makers first began to collect data on what students earn after pursuing a postsecondary education. But new data are fundamentally differ­ent. Unlike broad-based national statistics, such as how much someone…

Due to the recent wave of momentum behind universal vouchers and education savings accounts, charter schools have become an afterthought for some conservative school choice advocates. There is a progressive and a conservative vision for charter schooling. The progressive approach to charter school authorization fails to achieve its stated goals…

Despite a growing chorus among conservatives about the problem of politics in the classroom, those on the right have struggled to advance long-term solutions to it. Indeed, up to now, state lawmakers concerned about politics in the classroom have typically faced a binary choice. The following three options to protect students from radical politics…

The higher education system does not work well for taxpayers, students, or higher education institutions. Student loans were expected to be such a good deal for taxpayers that their projected revenues were used to offset costs associated with the Affordable Care Act and increasing the size of Pell Grants. Less than a decade ago, the federal…

The newly created Conservative Education Reform Network (CERN) at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) invited a group of conservative education thinkers to sketch policy proposals that they would like to see in a new education agenda. The only requirement was that they offer suggestions that would complement the traditional conservative…

In education policy, conservatives have often been more identifiable by what they are against than what they are for. Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 promising to eliminate the Department of Education, and since then, numerous conservative politicians have stated they wish to do the same. At times, conservatives have been known to support school choice…

Education reformers have spent decades doggedly working to improve student outcomes in K-12 education by championing policies spanning federal, state, and local jurisdictions. Higher education is a much different story. Policy ideas at the federal level are plentiful; however, state- or institution-level policies are examined and implemented far…

A founding purpose of public education is to adequately prepare children for thoughtful self-government, citizenship, and independent adult life. This end is served by having educators teach students not what to think about controversial or contested public matters but how to think such issues through. When educators fail in this essential duty,…

The "Wall Street Journal" declared 2011 the "year of school choice" after 13 states enacted new choice policies or expanded existing ones. This brief discusses coalitions as the secret ingredient of the choice movement's success and shares lessons learned from the most effective coalitions. Key points include: (1) parental…

In their quest for broad support for school choice, proponents have conceded to Democrats' policy demands, including limited student eligibility and regulations, therefore weakening the options available to families. However these concessions have not won Democratic policymakers' support and may have alienated Republican policymakers. School…

COVID-19 caused the most dramatic disruption of elementary and secondary education in our lifetime. By late March 2020, every US state had closed public schools in an effort to flatten the curve. Delays in reopening schools have coincided with the emergence of sharp divisions among parents in their willingness to send their children back to…

Whether and how to hold schools accountable for their performance has been a topic of debate in education circles for decades, and the use of standardized achievement test scores for accountability has been particularly contentious. One proposed strategy for reducing reliance on test scores is to incorporate non-test measures into accountability…

In July 2021, the US Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held confirmation hearings for Catherine E. Lhamon, President Joe Biden's nominee for assistant secretary for civil rights at the US Department of Education (ED). Lhamon served in the same role during the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. During her hearing,…