ABSTRACT

Since the early 1990s when the nation’s first charter school was opened in Minneapolis, the scope and availability of school-based options to parents has steadily expanded. No longer can public education be characterized as a monopoly. Sponsored by the National Center on School Choice (NCSC), this handbook makes readily available the most rigorous and policy-relevant research on K-12 school choice. Coverage includes charters, vouchers, home schooling, magnet schools, cyber schools, and other forms of choice, with the ultimate goal of defining the current state of this evolving field of research, policy, and practice.

Key Features include:

Comprehensive – this is the first book to provide a comprehensive review of what is known about the major forms of school choice from multiple perspectives: historical, political, economic, legal, methodological, and international. It also includes work on the governance, structure, process, effectiveness, and costs of school choice.

Readable – the editors and authors have taken care to translate rigorous research findings into comprehensible prose accessible to a broad range of readers.

International – in addition to thorough coverage of domestic research, the volume also draws on international and comparative studies of choice in foreign countries.

Expertise – the National Center on School Choice (NCSC) is a consortium that is headquartered at Vanderbilt University and includes the following partners: Brookings Institution, Brown University, Harvard University, National Bureau of Economic Research, Northwest Evaluation Association, and Stanford University.

This book is suitable for researchers, faculty and graduate students in education policy studies, politics of education, and social foundations of education. It should also be of interest to inservice administrators and policy makers.