The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "State Education Policy Impact." Contents include: (1) Texas Legislature Fails…

Milton Friedman is widely considered the intellectual father of the school choice movement. While Friedman deserves much credit, Father Virgil Blum stands out as an influential figure in the nascent school choice movement. Using archival research, this paper examines Blum's contributions to the movement. From his 1954 doctoral dissertation, which…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore the academic experiences and resilience of postsecondary education foster youth, who received the McKinney-Vento voucher, in terms of their experienced barriers and successful practices in academic engagement, and their academic outcomes experienced during enrollment in postsecondary…

The coronavirus pandemic has and will continue to change many aspects of life. Higher education is no exception, which raises the question of how the conservative approach to higher education should change in response to the pandemic. A conservative response to the coronavirus should include liability protection from virus-related lawsuits,…

The article re-imagines the current developments of Swedish education into a possible future. Historically, education was organized and funded by the state; however, reforms towards privatization in the 1990s implemented school choice, private schools and a tax-financed voucher system with the option of turning profits on education. A new judicial…

Washington, DC's Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), the only federally funded school voucher program in the United States, has provided private school scholarships to low-income students in DC since 2004. From its inception, the program has received significant attention in national debates and has been the subject of rigorous evaluations…

K-12 public education is a state responsibility and a federal interest, which means that state lawmakers have the primary responsibility for adopting and revising the laws governing public schools as well as scholarships, education savings accounts, and other private learning options. State officials also have significant authority over the laws…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly funded vouchers to moderate- and low-income students in low-performing public schools to enroll in participating private schools. Established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP expanded statewide in 2012. Drawing upon the random lotteries that placed students in LSP schools,…

Young people with foster care history need financial support to attain their educational goals. Are these young people getting the financial support they need for college? How do their financial aid packages compare with those of their peers? To answer these questions, the authors used data from the National Center for Education Statistics,…

In this dissertation, I examine various factors shaping students' trajectories and opportunities later in life. In Chapter 1, I explore the role of grade retention policies. Grade retention as a remedial policy is controversial because the benefits of extra instruction time may not outweigh its costs. Previous research has primarily examined…

Young people with foster care history need financial support to attain their educational goals. Are these young people getting the financial support they need for college? How do their financial aid packages compare with those of their peers? Does the Education and Training Voucher program meet their needs? If not, how can it be improved? To…

This dissertation contains three essays discussing government policy in higher education, the effects of online social networks during college on students after graduating, and how to use search data as a tool to recover characteristics of both products and customers to estimate demand. In the first chapter, co-authored with Shengmao Cao, we study…

This essay queries how ideas about school choice traversed the Pacific in the late twentieth century. Specifically, it reconstructs and deconstructs the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice, Annette "Polly" Williams and Howard Fuller, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s. Drawing…

Youths who have been in foster care face many challenges in accessing and completing postsecondary education. The Chafee Education and Training Vouchers (ETV) program is a federally funded program that assists current and former foster youths in accessing postsecondary learning opportunities by providing scholarship money for their education. This…

In this dissertation, I use data from Chile to study the determinants of schooling trajectories. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on higher education, Chapter 3 on secondary education, and Chapter 4 on teachers. Chapter 1 explores the role of a socio-emotional ability, self-efficacy, in understanding why students with comparable qualifications transit…