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It may seem obvious—people want to live near the best schools. But have you ever thought about the problems created when families flee weak school districts? Recently, while visiting Atlanta, I came face-to-face with a disheartening reality: the sight of neighborhoods in deep poverty sitting in the shadows of gleaming skyscrapers. These mammoth buildings contain […]
Empirical evidence is information that researchers generate to help uncover answers to questions that can have significant implications for our society. Take seatbelts. Prior to their invention, people were killed or maimed in what today we would think of as minor traffic accidents. So smart engineers put their heads together to try to do something […]
Based on recent media coverage, you might get the impression that the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) Scholarship Program operates in some kind of Mad Max free-for-all, where families are routinely exploited by ne’er-do-well school operators. An editorial in the Orlando Sentinel decried “your tax dollars” being “whisked away” to private schools and called for an […]
In September, Matt Di Carlo and Kinga Wysienska-Di Carlo published an interesting research brief for the Albert Shanker Institute, wherein they used data from the Common Core of Data and the Private School Universe Survey (both administered by the US Department of Education) to track levels of segregation in public, private and charter schools in […]
As someone who has been working with private school data for nearly five years, I am always looking for more tools to help us fill in the information gaps. To that end, I took a handful of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) courses to get a Graduate Certificate that gave me the skills and ability to […]
School choice programs received high marks from Americans in 2017. Five national, highly discussed polls detailed a wide range of public opinion results regarding American education this year. Gallup, the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center (AP-NORC), Education Next (EdNext), Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) and EdChoice all measured what the public thinks about education and […]
In 1921, Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach published Pscychodiagnostik, wherein he produced 10 cards blotted with ink that he believed were a window into an individual’s subconscious. In the nearly 100 years since, the term “Rorschach Test” has come to denote a phenomenon whose interpretation is derived entirely by the observer. In recent years, the research […]
Tell me if you’ve heard this chestnut before: “We can’t let parents choose their child’s school because they don’t have enough information to make a good choice.” Lord knows I have. Like many old adages that have a kernel of truth suffocating under a pile of manure, this statement does have some merit. Insofar as […]
As the school choice debate ramps up around the country, one of the most commonly used phrases by choice opponents, and some advocates, is that voucher schools are “unaccountable.” This conceptualization stems from the fact that most voucher programs face different accountability regulations than traditional public schools, some of which may be less transparent. On […]
Opponents of educational choice worry that empowering parents and students to attend private schools will lead to a Wild West of schools wrought with teachers who lack “certification,” a puzzling position to take considering public schools are increasing their employment of “uncertified” teachers. Take Oklahoma as one example. With the passage of Senate Bill 498 […]