Unlike vouchers and tax credit scholarships that do not allow parents to customize their children's education, Education savings accounts (ESAs) provide funding to pay for part-time classes at public and private schools, tutoring, curricula, services for special needs, and more. As navigating the opportunities that come with ESAs can be difficult,…

We examine how low-income parents who apply for North Carolina's Opportunity Scholarship program navigate major obstacles to their full participation in this means-tested private school choice program. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study draws upon administrative data from the state agency that oversees the program, surveys of every…

After "Zelman v. Simmons-Harris" (2002), civil conflict over use of vouchers and taxes to purchase private education, especially in religious schools, largely remained an issue for state courts' jurisprudence. However, in 2010, it returned to the U.S. Supreme Court when Arizona taxpayers challenged the constitutionality of the state's…

Honors colleges and programs often evolve in response to a mandate from boards of regents or trustees. Such mandates can lead to new or accelerated change within the institution, change that in many cases is linked to and represented by honors. Such has been the case at Western Kentucky University (WKU), where the honors program has played a key…

The Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) program was designed to meet the unique needs of the state of Tennessee while also incorporating the hallmark elements of existing merit-based aid programs in other states. Developed through a process involving elected officials and members of the academic community, the TELS program aims to…

Despite being minority religious communities in the Southern African region, Muslims have carved out for themselves a unique identity within a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and a multi-religious region. As a result of the variety of Muslim education programs and institutions that the community had set up over the past few decades its…

The Kalamazoo Promise provides a scholarship for full tuition for any high school graduate from the district who's been accepted to attend a Michigan postsecondary institution. The Promise has changed the attitudes of the students, their parents, and the community and has combined with other efforts to promote successful reform and systemic change…

This article argues that the digital humanities can be seen as a humanities project in a time of significant change in the academy. The background is a number of scholarly, educational and technical challenges, the multiple epistemic traditions linked to the digital humanities, the potential reach of the field across and outside the humanities,…

The past year of a five-year campus-community research project marked the release of a substantive report that details broad and deep racial disparities stretching across institutional practices and outcomes, service access, and economic and social conditions. The report has catalyzed an abundance of advocacy opportunities, as the release has…

Voucher programs and their supporters have had a tough last few years. The Florida Supreme Court declared vouchers in that state unconstitutional in 2006. Three years later, the Arizona Supreme Court did the same. In 2007, voters in Utah handed a resounding defeat to a voucher program there. In 2009, the U.S. Congress refused to continue funding…

The story of Latinas/os in higher education in the United States is often one of exclusion and erasure. In this essay, Arelis Hernandez argues that, from grade school to college, there is rarely an occasion for Latinas/os to learn their history and to produce scholarship based on their communities. Instead, they are pressured to subscribe to a…

This is the second in an occasional series called "Promising Practices: What Works in the Midwest." The series was launched to showcase innovative initiatives and effective ways to address common challenges and unique opportunities in higher education. Promising practices enable educators and policymakers to compare and benchmark…

This report examines a decade's worth of research on school vouchers and concludes that vouchers have had no clear positive effect on student academic achievement, and mixed outcomes for students overall. Effects on graduation rates, parental satisfaction, public school achievement and cost to taxpayers are discussed. The report also notes that…

This issue of Metropolitan Universities includes papers emanating from the work of the Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative, a three-year (2004-2007) initiative designed to build capacity for community-engaged scholarship (CES) in health professional schools. As the core principles and challenges of CES are similar across…

The Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) program was designed to meet the unique needs of the state of Tennessee by incorporating the hallmark elements of existing merit-based aid programs in other states. Developed through a process involving elected officials and members of the academic community, the TELS program aims to address the…