Open enrollment in public schools is a form of school choice that allows students to attend schools other than the one assigned to them by their school district. Though often less visible than policies such as charter schools, vouchers, and education savings accounts, K-12 open enrollment is rising in popularity across the nation, and 73 percent…

Is there a shortage of special education teachers in America's public schools? If so, why? And how can policymakers fix it? The first question sounds like an easy one. Yes, there is a shortage of special education teachers. In 2023-24, more than half of districts and 80 percent of states reported such a shortage. If you doubt the self-reported…

In low- and middle-income countries, private schools account for 20 percent of all primary enrollment and are rapidly gaining ground. In Pakistan, the number of private schools rose to more than 70,000 by 2015, up from 3,000 in 1982; by 2015, these schools educated 34 percent of Pakistani children enrolled in primary schools. This growth in…

How does reassigning students to create schools that are more socioeconomically and academically diverse affect the distribution of educational opportunity? What are the impacts on students who switch schools as a result of these policies? And how do changes in school assignments affect the students who don't switch schools, but who experience…

The 15th annual "Education Next" survey investigates how Americans are responding to the worst pandemic since the influenza pandemic of 1919. In the realm of education, a desire for sweeping reform might well be expected, given the pandemic's particularly severe toll on K-12 schooling. While few children suffered serious illnesses, the…

In September, President Biden declared that "the pandemic is over," but parents with school-age children will not soon forget the struggles of the prior two years. Starting in March 2020, nearly all school buildings nationwide closed and remained shuttered for the rest of that school year. These closures upended families' routines,…

Many public charter schools in the state of Hawaii are explicitly religious. For more than two decades, students at Hawaiian-focused schools have offered chants and prayers to the pantheon of gods who rule over skies, seas, and earth, including to the volcanic god, Pelehonuamea ("she who shapes the sacred land"), popularly known as Madam…

Advocates for taxpayer-funded school-choice programs cite the potential of market competition to spur educational improvement and promote equity for low-income students. Meanwhile, school-choice critics lament the exodus of talent and resources from public schools, which they argue such programs necessarily cause. Most research on publicly funded…

These are the results of the 16th annual "Education Next" survey, conducted in May 2022 with a nationally representative sample of 1,784 American adults. While last year's survey revealed sharp changes in support for a variety of education reforms (EJ1348128), public opinion on most issues has since rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.…

Bridge International Academies, the largest network of elementary schools in the developing world operates both low-cost private schools, and public-private partnership schools. More than 800,000 students are enrolled in 2,026 schools in five countries. Bridge tries lots of different ideas and initiatives, many of which are backed up by research…

A joint report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education concluded that children and youth were 87 times more likely to die by murder or suicide outside of school than in it. How does the country weigh their awareness of the overall safe character of U.S. schools against the compelling desire to prevent…

This article evaluates the applicability at the state and district level of web scraping--an automated data-extraction technique that regularly exports and refreshes data from the Internet--to provide a low-cost way to get a close-to-real-time snapshot of the demand side of the teacher labor market. Once set up, web scraping can quickly build and…

On a warm December evening in Anaheim, California, in 2015, an out-of-town lawyer stood for public comment at a local school-board meeting and urged members to deny a proposed charter school. Magnolia Public Schools, which operates 10 charters in California, was hoping to open a new science academy. The attorney, John Martin of Amsterdam &…

Today, nearly three quarters of Miami-Dade students are enrolled in choice programs. That makes Miami-Dade the most choice-rich district in arguably the most choice-rich state. Parents and teachers who live in Miami-Dade now access more than 500 non-district schools that didn't exist or weren't accessible 20 years ago, and everybody knows even…

The 15th annual "Education Next" survey, conducted in June 2021, yields a host of specific results that reveal one large fact about the current state of public opinion on American education: The public is cautious--extremely cautious. In the presence of a still-circulating COVID-19 virus, a large percentage of parents and the broader…