Choice and Competition in American Education PDF Download

Author: Paul E. Peterson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742545816
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book examines the likely promise and pitfalls of many of the most controversial forms of school choice as well as the introduction of greater competition into the recruitment and compensation of teachers and principals. In a group of essays originally published in Education Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research, these essays paint the picture of an education landscape that will be greatly shaped by choice and competition in the 21st century. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Author: Paul E. Peterson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742545809
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This book examines the likely promise and pitfalls of many of the most controversial forms of school choice as well as the introduction of greater competition into the recruitment and compensation of teachers and principals. In a group of essays originally published in Education Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research, these essays paint the picture of an education landscape that will be greatly shaped by choice and competition in the 21st century. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Author: Caroline M. Hoxby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226355349
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared school voucher programs constitutional, the many unanswered questions concerning the potential effects of school choice will become especially pressing. Contributors to this volume draw on state-of-the-art economic methods to answer some of these questions, investigating the ways in which school choice affects a wide range of issues. Combining the results of empirical research with analyses of the basic economic forces underlying local education markets, The Economics of School Choice presents evidence concerning the impact of school choice on student achievement, school productivity, teachers, and special education. It also tackles difficult questions such as whether school choice affects where people decide to live and how choice can be integrated into a system of school financing that gives children from different backgrounds equal access to resources. Contributors discuss the latest findings on Florida's school choice program as well as voucher programs and charter schools in several other states. The resulting volume not only reveals the promise of school choice, but examines its pitfalls as well, showing how programs can be designed that exploit the idea's potential but avoid its worst effects. With school choice programs gradually becoming both more possible and more popular, this book stands out as an essential exploration of the effects such programs will have, and a necessary resource for anyone interested in the idea of school choice.

Author: James Rinehart
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This insightful look at American education explores difficult but realistic solutions to the education dilemma. Focusing on parent/student choice and the privatization/deregulation of public schools, Rinehart and Lee suggest that the lack of these two vital ingredients is the root cause of poor school performance. Any reform effort within the government-controlled education monopoly will inevitably fail because the present system ignores basic laws of human behavior--people want to operate in their own best interest and value most that over which they have direct control. The authors set out to prove that increased choice and unencumbered competition among schools result in dramatic educational improvement. Writing for the professional educator and the general reader, Rinehart and Lee view the American educational system from a provocative and new perspective. The book reveals many of the current problems with public schools and explores different types of choice systems. Rinehart and Lee achieve three main goals. They first demonstrate that public school systems consistently fail because of their failure to adhere to certain fundamental laws of human behavior. Second, they make a case that the current reform movement in education will fail or fall short of expectations. Finally, they propose challenging, realistic solutions that focus on educational choice and privatization of public schools. The authors point out that as a rule the more choice, the better. American Education and the Dynamics of Choice maintains that all public schools should be sold and parents should be given vouchers by the government permitting them to enroll their children in any private school they wish.

Author: Christopher A. Lubienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608907X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

Author: Mark Schneider
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691225680
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
School choice seeks to create a competitive arena in which public schools will attain academic excellence, encourage individual student performance, and achieve social balance. In debating the feasibility of this market approach to improving school systems, analysts have focused primarily on schools as suppliers of education, but an important question remains: Will parents be able to function as "smart consumers" on behalf of their children? Here a highly respected team of social scientists provides extensive empirical evidence on how parents currently do make these choices. Drawn from four different types of school districts in New York City and suburban New Jersey, their findings not only stress the importance of parental decision-making and involvement to school performance but also clarify the issues of school choice in ways that bring much-needed balance to the ongoing debate. The authors analyze what parents value in education, how much they know about schools, how well they can match what they say they want in schools with what their children get, how satisfied they are with their children's schools, and how their involvement in the schools is affected by the opportunity to choose. They discover, most notably, that low-income parents value education as much as, if not more than, high-income parents, but do not have access to the same quality of school information. This problem comes under sensitive, thorough scrutiny as do a host of other important topics, from school performance to segregation to children at risk of being left behind.

Author: Peter W. Cookson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300064995
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The school choice reform movement believes parents should have a choice of where they send their children to school. In this book the author, an educational sociologist, discusses the practice and politics of school choice objectively and comprehensively.

Author: G. Forster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230119271
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Leading intellectual figures in the school reform movement, all of them favoring approaches centered around the value of competition and choice, outline different visions for the goal of choice-oriented educational reform and the best means for achieving it. This volume takes the reader inside the movement to empower parents with choice, airing the more interesting debates that the reformers have with one another over the direction and strategy of their movement.

Author: Kevin G. Welner
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623960452
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Exploring the School Choice Universe: Evidence and Recommendations gives readers a comprehensive, complete picture of choice policies and issues. In doing so, it offers cross-cutting insights that are obscured when one looks only at single issue or a single approach to choice. The book examines choice in its various forms: charter schools, home schooling, online schooling, voucher plans that allow students to use taxpayer funds to attend private schools, tuition tax credit plans that provide a public subsidy for private school tuition, and magnet schools and other forms of public school intra- and interdistrict choice. It brings together some of the top researchers in the field, presenting a comprehensive overview of the best current knowledge of these important policies. The questions addressed in Exploring the School Choice Universe are of most importance to researchers and policy makers. What do choice programs actually do? What forms do they take? Who participates, and why? What are the funding implications? What are the results of different forms of school choice on outcomes that matter, like student performance, segregation, and competition effects? Do they affect teachers’ working conditions? Do they drive innovation? The contents of this book offer reason to believe that choice policies can further some educational goals. But they also suggest many reasons for caution. If choice policies are to be evidence-based, a re-examination is in order. The information, insights and recommendations facilitate a more nuanced understanding of school choice and provide the basis for designing sensible school choice reforms that can pursue a range of desirable outcomes.

Author: Mark Berends
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351210432
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
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.