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The past few weeks have been a whirlwind for education in Puerto Rico. On April 30, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced a $589 million congressional package to aid Puerto Rico’s Department of Education following the destruction of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Then, thousands of protestors—including a large contingent of teachers—demonstrated in May Day […]
LEGISLATION AND LITIGATION California A proposed education savings account in the Golden State, SB 1344, failed in committee. It was granted reconsideration April 4. Colorado Colorado’s HB 18-083, an income tax credit for private school tuition as well as for the funding of private school scholarships, passed the Senate. The credit amount is […]
In case you didn’t know, Chile has what we call a universal school voucher system. That is, it funds public education by allowing public funds to follow students to whatever public or private schools they choose, and it has operated this way since 1981. As school choice programs gain steam across the United States, it’s […]
When the diocese in Memphis shut down the once promising Jubilee Catholic Schools, I was surprised like many others in the Catholic education community. What happened, and what can we learn from it? There is a range of views, but a diagnosis of lessons learned from what we can see from outside Memphis is in […]
LEGISLATION AND LITIGATION California California’s proposed tax-credit scholarship, AB 2480, saw amendments and was re-referred to the Standing Committee on Revenue and Taxation. The state’s proposed education savings account, SB 1344, was referred to various committees and is set for a hearing. Connecticut Connecticut introduced HB 5340, an act to study the creation of education savings […]
South Carolina already has a tax-credit scholarship and individual tax credit for families of students with special needs, and existing South Carolina private schools seem open to participating in a general education savings account (ESA) program, another form of flexible private school choice. But where exactly are South Carolina private schools located? Which communities have […]
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 […]
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 […]
Collin Hitt of Southern Illinois School of Medicine, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas and I have a new working paper out with the American Enterprise Institute that challenges some fundamental assumptions about how we evaluate school choice programs. One of the advantages research on school choice programs has is that we have data […]
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 […]