Can I Use a 529 Plan for K–12 Expenses?

529 Tax Plan

If you’ve done much research into how to save for your child’s college education, you’ve probably heard of 529 plans. These plans, created as part of the Small Business Job Protection Act in 1996, were originally meant to give parents a tax-advantaged way to save for college expenses. Parents could get federal income tax benefits […]

The Next 200 Years: Studying the Long-Term Effects of Catholic-to-Charter “Conversion”

In 2014, Andrew Kelly and I wrote Sector Switchers: Why Catholic Schools Convert to Charters and What Happens Next, an examination of 18 formerly Catholic schools that had “converted” (sorry, we couldn’t help ourselves) into charter schools. With the recent news that the much-vaunted Jubilee Catholic schools in Memphis were looking to pursue the Catholic-to-charter […]

What You Actually Need to Know About the Two New School Choice Attainment Studies

School choice research has increasingly focused on educational attainment—that is, measuring the impact on high school and college graduation, higher education enrollment, employment status and income rather than standardized test scores. Two new high-quality studies released recently continue this trend. In this post, we’ll break down those studies, highlight the results and contextualize them within […]

Mapping Indiana’s K–12 Student Transfers

Earlier this year, the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) released its first ever Public Corporation Transfer Report showing how many students in each district exercised public school choice in Fall 2017. I’ve used the data in that report to create maps that show districts where students have left their schools to attend a different district […]

BRIEF: School Choice in the States, February 2018

February State Brief

LEGISLATION AND LITIGATION California Lawmakers in California proposed two school choice-related bills in February. AB 2480 would create a tax-credit scholarship program for personal and business taxes. Students from families earning 250 percent of the federal free and reduced-price lunch program would qualify. The credit value of donations to scholarship-granting organizations is listed as 100 […]

How Do You Build a School Choice Coalition?

In today’s episode, EdChoice’s President and CEO Robert Enlow moderates a conversation with two of our team’s long-time coalition builders, Vice President of Training and Outreach Keri Hunter and Senior Director of State Relations Michael Chartier. The three talk about their past experiences in coalition building and which states have strong school choice coalitions today. […]

The Next 200 Years: A New EdChoice Series

Almost any article on Catholic schooling today will have at least one paragraph in it describing the last five decades’ decline in both the number of Catholic schools and the number of students attending them. At this point, the factors are well known: fewer priests and religious staff working in schools, Catholics becoming wealthier and […]