In 2013, the North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA) passed its first private school voucher legislation with the introduction of the Opportunity Scholarship Program. The program was designed to provide private school tuition assistance to income-eligible families who chose to withdraw their child from public school and it represents a significant…

Arthur Seldon (1916-2005) was a significant British neo-liberal economist in the second half of the twentieth century. From 1957 to 1988, as the "engine room" of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Seldon had been advocating the reform of "free" state education. He vigorously argued for education vouchers, by which each parent…

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…

In the past fifty years, governments across the world have experimented with a variety of market-based reforms to improve public service delivery. Market-based policies have been particularly influential in efforts to reform K-12 education governance in the United States. Prominent examples of these reforms include laws establishing public charter…

Opponents of education choice recycle the same false prophesies of doom without regard to the evidence or the size and scope of the proposals. For decades, the most common objection to education choice policies has been that they will "destroy public education." According to the critics, choice policies will induce the parents most…

Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This essay broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, while prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I provide a…

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…

School choice is a controversial issue in the public discussion of education. In Chile, the new School Admission System (SAE) was recently implemented to gradually reverse the country's high educational segregation. However, this system is facing strong opposition. Voucher and free choice promoters have opposed SAE because they claim it violates…

Influencing major education policies in the US such as school vouchers and charter schools, market theory assumes that organizational autonomy, parental choice, and competition between schools improve the quality of education. However, whether those policies can influence the instructional core of schools is not well understood. Comparing private…

The primary justification for school voucher programs in the United States has revolved around questions of efficacy, especially relative to student achievement outcomes. More recently, however, a series of studies revealed sizable negative impacts on students enrolled in voucher programs. Collectively, these studies presented an evidentiary…

Voucher policies represent a market mechanism to support school choice, with the expected effect of stimulating competition among schools and, in turn, positively benefiting the educational outcomes. As the only Italian region adopting this policy to free private/public school choice, Lombardy is the subject of this study. In particular, we aim at…

Increasing mature-age access to education and training in a way that is responsive to changing labour market needs is a key policy challenge. In this paper we examine the impacts of a unique reform in the Australian state of Victoria that aimed to meet this challenge by introducing a broad-based voucher for those 25 and older. In effect, the…

Private school voucher programs provide government subsidies to eligible students for tuition and other education-related costs. Parents participating in choice programs benefit from a larger and more diverse supply of education providers. Private schools must choose whether or not to participate in a voucher program in their community. In…

In the first half of 2021, 33 states considered new private school choice legislation. Despite this legislative interest, public opinion on private school choice remains varied. In this paper, we examine voter support for private school choice in Missouri, a politically conservative state that lacked a private school choice program until 2021. We…

This implementation guide was developed to assist states that want to give more families access to needed educational opportunities and the ability to customize their children's learning. Surging enthusiasm among voters and policymakers means more states are likely to launch Education Scholarship Account (ESA) programs in the immediate future. The…