This book examines the likely promise and pitfalls of many of the most controversial forms of school choice as well as the introduction of greater competition into the recruitment and compensation of teachers and principals. In a group of essays originally published in Education Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research, these essays paint the picture of an education landscape that will be greatly shaped by choice and competition in the 21st century. Visit our website for sample chapters!
This insightful look at American education explores difficult but realistic solutions to the education dilemma. Focusing on parent/student choice and the privatization/deregulation of public schools, Rinehart and Lee suggest that the lack of these two vital ingredients is the root cause of poor school performance. Any reform effort within the government-controlled education monopoly will inevitably fail because the present system ignores basic laws of human behavior--people want to operate in their own best interest and value most that over which they have direct control. The authors set out to prove that increased choice and unencumbered competition among schools result in dramatic educational improvement. Writing for the professional educator and the general reader, Rinehart and Lee view the American educational system from a provocative and new perspective. The book reveals many of the current problems with public schools and explores different types of choice systems. Rinehart and Lee achieve three main goals. They first demonstrate that public school systems consistently fail because of their failure to adhere to certain fundamental laws of human behavior. Second, they make a case that the current reform movement in education will fail or fall short of expectations. Finally, they propose challenging, realistic solutions that focus on educational choice and privatization of public schools. The authors point out that as a rule the more choice, the better. American Education and the Dynamics of Choice maintains that all public schools should be sold and parents should be given vouchers by the government permitting them to enroll their children in any private school they wish.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these questions, investigating the ways in which school choice affects a wide range of issues. Combining the results of empirical research with analyses of the basic economic forces underlying local education markets, The Economics of School Choice presents evidence concerning the impact of school choice on student achievement, school productivity, teachers, and special education. It also tackles difficult questions such as whether school choice affects where people decide to live and how choice can be integrated into a system of school financing that gives children from different backgrounds equal access to resources. Contributors discuss the latest findings on Florida's school choice program as well as voucher programs and charter schools in several other states. The resulting volume not only reveals the promise of school choice, but examines its pitfalls as well, showing how programs can be designed that exploit the idea's potential but avoid its worst effects. With school choice programs gradually becoming both more possible and more popular, this book stands out as an essential exploration of the effects such programs will have, and a necessary resource for anyone interested in the idea of school choice.
The school choice reform movement believes parents should have a choice of where they send their children to school. In this book the author, an educational sociologist, discusses the practice and politics of school choice objectively and comprehensively.
School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.
Leading intellectual figures in the school reform movement, all of them favoring approaches centered around the value of competition and choice, outline different visions for the goal of choice-oriented educational reform and the best means for achieving it. This volume takes the reader inside the movement to empower parents with choice, airing the more interesting debates that the reformers have with one another over the direction and strategy of their movement.
Updated to reflect the latest developments and increasing scope of school-based options, the second edition of the Handbook of Research on School Choice makes readily available the most rigorous and policy-relevant research on K–12 school choice. This comprehensive research handbook begins with scholarly overviews that explore historical, political, economic, legal, methodological, and international perspectives on school choice. In the following sections, experts examine the research and current state of common forms of school choice: charter schools, school vouchers, and magnet schools. The concluding section brings together perspectives on other key topics such as accountability, tax credit scholarships, parent decision-making, and marginalized students. With empirical perspectives on all aspects of this evolving sphere of education, this is a critical resource for researchers, faculty, and students interested in education policy, the politics of education, and educational leadership.
Seeing the consequences of competitive school choice policy through students’ eyes While policymakers often justify school choice as a means to alleviate opportunity and achievement gaps, an unanticipated effect is increased competition over access to coveted, high-performing schools. In A Contest without Winners, Kate Phillippo follows a diverse group of Chicago students through the processes of researching, applying to, and enrolling in public high school. Throughout this journey, students prove themselves powerful policy actors who carry out and redefine competitive choice. Phillippo’s work amplifies the voices of students—rather than the parents, educators, public intellectuals, and policymakers who so often inform school choice research—and investigates how students interact with and emerge from competitive choice academically, developmentally, and civically. Through students’ experiences, she shows how competitive choice legitimates and exacerbates existing social inequalities; collides with students’ developmental vulnerability to messages about their ability, merit, and potential; and encourages young people’s individualistic actions as they come to feel that they must earn their educational rights. From urban infrastructure to income inequality to racial segregation, Phillippo examines the factors that shape students’ policy enactment and interpretation, as policymakers and educators ask students to compete for access to public resources. With competitive choice, even the winners—the lucky few admitted to their dream schools—don’t outright win. A Contest without Winners challenges meritocratic and market-driven notions of opportunity creation for young people and raises critical questions about the goals we have for public schooling.
Exploring the School Choice Universe: Evidence and Recommendations gives readers a comprehensive, complete picture of choice policies and issues. In doing so, it offers cross-cutting insights that are obscured when one looks only at single issue or a single approach to choice. The book examines choice in its various forms: charter schools, home schooling, online schooling, voucher plans that allow students to use taxpayer funds to attend private schools, tuition tax credit plans that provide a public subsidy for private school tuition, and magnet schools and other forms of public school intra- and interdistrict choice. It brings together some of the top researchers in the field, presenting a comprehensive overview of the best current knowledge of these important policies. The questions addressed in Exploring the School Choice Universe are of most importance to researchers and policy makers. What do choice programs actually do? What forms do they take? Who participates, and why? What are the funding implications? What are the results of different forms of school choice on outcomes that matter, like student performance, segregation, and competition effects? Do they affect teachers’ working conditions? Do they drive innovation? The contents of this book offer reason to believe that choice policies can further some educational goals. But they also suggest many reasons for caution. If choice policies are to be evidence-based, a re-examination is in order. The information, insights and recommendations facilitate a more nuanced understanding of school choice and provide the basis for designing sensible school choice reforms that can pursue a range of desirable outcomes.
Expanding school choice and competition is the single most important action we can take to improve America's schools. Although school choice faces strong opposition from powerful teacher unions and their entrenched political allies, expanding choice via vouchers, charters, and tax credits has repeatedly been shown to improve student achievement, reduce segregation, promote civic values, and facilitate other productive reforms. This eloquent Broadside outlines the case for school choice and shows how it is the most appealing strategy for anyone serious about educational reform.
