This book draws out the critical lessons for U.S. policymakers and shows how freedom to choose schools and healthy competition among schools can create strong academic success.

This volume of essays examines the empirical evidence on school choice in different countries across Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It demonstrates the advantages which choice offers in different institutional contexts, whether it be Free Schools in the UK, voucher systems in Sweden or private-proprietor schools for low-income families in Liberia. Everywhere experience suggests that parents are ‘active choosers’: they make rational and considered decisions, drawing on available evidence and responding to incentives which vary from context to context. Government educators frequently downplay the importance of choice and try to constrain the options parents have. But they face increasing resistance: the evidence is that informed parents drive improvements in school quality. Where state education in some developing countries is particularly bad, private bottom-up provision is preferred even though it costs parents money which they can ill-afford. This book is both a collection of inspiring case studies and a call to action.

This book argues that the structure of public education is a key factor in the failure of America's public education system to fulfill the intellectual, civic, and moral aims for which it was created. The book challenges the philosophical basis for the traditional common school model and defends the educational pluralism that most liberal democracies enjoy. Berner provides a unique theoretical pathway that is neither libertarian nor state-focused and a pragmatic pathway that avoids the winner-takes-all approach of many contemporary debates about education. For the first time in nearly one hundred fifty years, changing the underlying structure of America’s public education system is both plausible and possible, and this book attempts to set out why and how.

The United States is in the midst of historic experiments with publicly funded choice in K-12 education, experiments that recently received a "green light" from the Supreme Court. Other nations have long experience with the funding and regulation of nonpublic schools, including religious schools. This book asks what U.S. policymakers, public officials, and citizens can learn from these experiences. In particular, how do other countries regulate or structure publicly funded educational choice with an eye toward civic values—looking not only for improvements in test scores, but also in tolerance, civic cohesion, and democratic values such as integration across the lines of class, religion, and race? The experience of Europe and Canada with school choice is both extensive and varied. In England and Wales, public school choice is widespread, as parents play a significant role in selecting the school their children will attend. In the Netherlands and much of Belgium, a majority of students attend religious schools at government expense. In Canada, France, and Germany, state-financed school choice is limited to circumstances that serve particular social and governmental needs. In Italy, school choice has just recently arrived on the policy agenda. In spite of the diversity of national experiences, in all of these countries choice is regulated by the government in significant and varied ways to promote civic values. In several of these countries, school choice policy itself appears to have played an important role in promoting social cohesion and integration. This book presents a wealth of experience designed to aid policymakers and citizens as they consider historic changes in American public education policy.

Updated to reflect the latest developments and increasing scope of school-based options, the second edition of the Handbook of Research on School Choice makes readily available the most rigorous and policy-relevant research on K–12 school choice. This comprehensive research handbook begins with scholarly overviews that explore historical, political, economic, legal, methodological, and international perspectives on school choice. In the following sections, experts examine the research and current state of common forms of school choice: charter schools, school vouchers, and magnet schools. The concluding section brings together perspectives on other key topics such as accountability, tax credit scholarships, parent decision-making, and marginalized students. With empirical perspectives on all aspects of this evolving sphere of education, this is a critical resource for researchers, faculty, and students interested in education policy, the politics of education, and educational leadership.

School Choice: The Findings is the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey available, summarizing the research on charter schools, vouchers, and public versus private school effectiveness, from one of the country's most distinguished education scholars. The focus is on rigorous studies—those using randomized control groups (as in medical research), those that monitor achievement changes over time, and those based on large numbers of students. The findings presented here also go beyond academic achievement, covering students’ civic engagement, cost comparisons across school types, and public and parental opinion about schools and school choice. Dr. Walberg reveals how much Americans know about school choice. Do they support it? What about families whose children are enrolled in charter schools or in private schools thanks to a voucher program? Are they happier with the quality of their children’s education than those whose children attend an assigned public school? While acknowledging and discussing some notable exceptions, Dr. Walberg concludes that the consensus of the high-quality international research overwhelmingly favors competition and parental choice in education over the monopoly systems that dominate the United States and many other industrialized countries.

Public-private partnerships in education exist in various forms around the world, in both developed and developing countries. Despite this, and despite the importance of human capital for economic growth, systematic analysis has been limited and scattered, with most scholarly attention going to initiatives in the United States. This volume helps to fill the gap, bringing together recent studies on public-private partnerships in different parts of the world, including Asia, North and South America, and Europe. These initiatives vary significantly in form and structure, and "School Choice International" offers not only comprehensive overviews (including a cross-country analysis of student achievement) but also detailed studies of specific initiatives in particular countries. Two chapters compare public and private schools in India and the relative efficacy of these two sectors in providing education. Other chapters examine the use of publicly funded vouchers in Chile and Colombia, reporting promising results in Colombia but ambiguous findings in Chile; and student outcomes in publicly funded, privately managed schools (similar to American charter schools) in two countries: Colombia's "concession schools" and the United Kingdom's City Academies Programme. Taken together, these studies offer important insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers into the purposes, directions, and effects of different public-private educational initiatives. Contents of this book include: (1) Perspectives in Public-Private Partnerships in Education (Rajashri Chakrabarti and Paul E. Peterson); (2) Public-Private Partnerships and Student Achievement: a Cross-Country Analysis (Ludger Wossmann); (3) Mobilizing the Private Sector in the United States: a Theoretical Overview (Thomas J. Nechyba); (4) The Practice of Public-Private Partnerships (Norman LaRocque); (5) Public-Private Schools in Rural India (Karthik Muralidharan and Michael Kremer); (6) School-Sector Effects on Student Achievement in India (Geeta G. Kingdon); (7) School Vouchers in Colombia (Assisted by Eric Bettinger); (8) The Public-Private School Controversy in Chile (Cristian Bellei); (9) The Concession Schools of Bogota, Colombia (Felipe Barrera-Osorio); (10) Public and Private Schooling Initiatives in England (Stephen Machin and Joan Wilson); and (11) Education Contracting: Scope of Future Research (Harry A. Patrinos). An index is included.