Public PreK programs are an increasingly popular policy tool to equalize early learning opportunities. Programs can be universally available or targeted to support children's readiness. At the intersection of early childhood and K-12 education, their hybrid status can be difficult for families to negotiate. Based on interviews completed in 2018,…

In many ways, Arizona is on the forefront of school choice: in addition to a state-wide open enrollment law, it was one of the first states to adopt charter school legislation in 1994 and currently has the second-highest percentage of public school students attending charter schools in the nation. Despite the extensive research on school choice,…

Despite a vast literature on school vouchers, less is known about their long-term competitive effects on public schools. The current paper examines the competitive effect of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, the largest single voucher program in the US, on math and ELA proficiency rates in public schools in the last eight years. Exploiting…

Researchers have considered how school choice policies affect student achievement, but less inquiry explores how the organization of schools may change in the presence of choice. This descriptive and exploratory paper analyzes a state representative sample of school mission statements at two time points: before the enactment of choice policies 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…

After decades of market-based education reforms, the landscape of urban school districts across the country have been transformed. Yet, this is neither a sign of the effectiveness of such reforms nor a widespread consensus over the contents and form of urban schooling. Education reform remains a wicked problem, particularly along racial lines,…

In the context of the increased interest in social justice within education policy debates, this article addresses the new justice-oriented school admission system implemented in Chile. Considering the critical role of parents in education policy, we explore families' negotiations about the new school admission system, focusing on the moral…

This study examines the movement of students in suburban Detroit through open enrollment, or inter-district school choice. We examine whether absolute levels and changes in the district enrollment of Black, economically disadvantaged, and nonresident students are perceived as racial threats by suburban families, leading them to exit their local…

School choice policies have become a prominent feature of K-12 education in recent decades, reflecting the broader institutionalization of market-based political ideology in education. In this qualitative multiple case study, we draw on framing theory and interviews with 57 state-level education policy actors to explore the nature of the continued…

As resegregation occurs across the country, some school districts are pursuing voluntary integration. This qualitative case study uses critical policy analysis to explore the political and social contexts surrounding the early stages of developing a voluntary integration plan in Wake County Public School System, North Carolina. Through analysis of…

The American educational policy agenda has been fraught with neoliberal laws that center educational improvement and innovation (Barros, 2012). Neoliberalism operates on the premise that market competition will spur excellence in educational opportunities and decrease the education debt in marginalized communities (Fejes & Salling Olesen,…

The three terms comprising the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an opportunity to understand the evolution of race-conscious education policy in an increasingly multiracial, unequal, and divided society. Through document review and interviews with civil rights lawyers, government officials, congressional staffers, and intermediary organization…

This article presents findings from an analysis of the American Federation for Children Network (AFC) policy network using tools from network ethnography and qualitative content analysis. Specifically, we examined tax forms and carried out extensive web searches to spatialize and map the AFC network, mined text from policy-actors in the AFC…

While parents of students with disabilities (SWD) select schools according to various factors, schools also choose students through different sorting mechanisms. Thus, parents of SWD may need to employ different strategies to enroll their child in their preferred school. We employed an intersectional approach for studying school choice,…

Extant research has emphasized the importance of information to help families of English learner-identified children to navigate school choice structures, and raised critical questions about the information that is made available through school marketing. At a time of increasing tension around school choice and the rapid expansion of certain forms…