Arm yourself with the Facts
- 12 Myths & Realities About School Choice- Institute for Justice seeks to dispel and disprove 12 of the myths about educational choice programs so that legislators and the public can make well-informed decisions about the merits of giving parents more control over their children’s education.
- 2018 Schooling in America Survey- This annual survey measures public opinion and awareness on a range of K–12 education topics, including parents’ schooling preferences, educational choice policies, the federal government’s role in education and more. This year, our survey includes an additional sample of current public school teachers to gauge whom they trust and how they feel about their profession, accountability, standardized testing and more.
- 2019 Mason-Dixon TN Statewide Education Savings Account Poll- Poll Shows 78% of Tennesseans Support Education Savings Accounts
- A Movement at Risk – A Manifesto- The Center for Education Reform, Author: Jeanne Allen
- A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform- A Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education United States Department of Education by The National Commission on Excellence in Education April 1983
- ABCs of School Choice 2019- A comprehensive guide to every private school choice program in America by the EdChoice.
- AFC Setting the Record Straight on School Choice- American Federation for Children provides a one page summary on school choice research.
- Alternative Teacher Certification- This Independent Women’s Forum Policy Focus Paper by the by Carrie L. Lukas, April 21, 2011, argues the benefits of allowing Alternative Teacher Certifications. Although it is directed towards women, it is applicable to all teachers.
- America's Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being- A working group of 23 Federal agencies collect, analyze, and report data on conditions and trends related to child and family well-being.
- Balancing the equation: Supply and demand in tomorrow’s school choice marketplaces- Understanding how to balance the school choice equation dramatically increases the likelihood that school choice markets will grow, thrive, and help more children access a high-quality education.
- Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves- by James Tooley, 2009
- Case for Education Transformation, Part I: The Disappointing Reality of American Education- by the Center for Education Reform.
- Cato's “Cracking the Books” report- takes a look at spending data that the Tennessee education department makes available to the public on their websites. Cato gives Tennessee a “D”
- CER’s Field Guide to Education Reform: how to spot a real education reformer
- Charter School Authorizers: The Truth About State Commissions- This Center for Education Reform report analyzes the numerous shortcomings of state charter commissions at authorizing quality charter schools.
- Charter School Movement: A State-By-State Analysis” - from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
- Charter School State Law Reform Guide- The Center for Education Reform guide to Model Legislation for States which illustrates a need by a majority of states to overhaul their laws governing charter schools.
- National Charter School Law Ranking & Scorecard- The 2018 Center for Education Reform's National Charter School Law Rankings & Scorecard
- Civic Education in Traditional Public, Charter, and Private Schools: Moving From Comparison to Explanation- David E. Campbell, American Enterprise Institute, October 20, 2011
- Common Core of Data- A program of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics that annually collects fiscal and non-fiscal data about all public schools, public school districts and state education agencies in the United States.
- Comparing Public, Private, and Market Schools: The International Evidence- by Andrew J. Coulson, Cato Institute, Center for Educational Freedom, 2009
- Corporate Income Tax Credit Scholarship Program Saves State Dollars- This report was prepared by the Florida Legislature Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability. It shows Florida’s corporate income tax credit scholarship program produces a net savings to the state.
- Education Choice and Competition Index- Exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform; an interactive web application that scores large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice.
- Education Debit Card II: What Arizona Parents Purchase with Education Savings Accounts- In this follow-up study, authors examine more data from Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, an education savings account (ESA) program.
- Effects of Education Savings Accounts on Teacher Pay in Texas- Education savings accounts could increase teachers’ salaries, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation
- Effects of FL Tax Credit Scholarship Program on College Enrollment & Graduation- Study: Students in FL Private School Choice Program Up to 99% More Likely to Enroll in 4-Year Colleges, Up to 56% More Likely to Earn Bachelor’s Degrees
- Effects of Statewide Private School Choice on College Enrollment and Graduation- Research on the Nation's Largest Private School Choice Program Shows Scholarship Recipients Have Better Long-Term Outcomes; Florida's Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) increased college enrollment for recipients by 15 percent on average compared to public school peers; and up to a 43 percent increase if students are in private schools via the FTC for more than four years.
- Effects of Teachers Unions on American Education by Andrew Coulson, Cato Institute 2010- Public school employee unions are politically partisan and polarizing institutions. While collective bargaining appears to offer minimal returns within the public school sector, unions nevertheless provide a valuable service to their members.
- ESA Primer- A Primer on Education Savings Accounts: Giving Every Child the Chance to Succeed
- ESAs The Next Step in School Choice- by Jason Bedrick & Lindsey Burke. Explores the administrative, regulatory, and constitutional issues that policymakers will have to address when designing an Education Saving Account law.
- Evidence on Class Size- Author Eric A. Hanushek (1999) in Earning and learning: How schools matter, Susan E. Mayer and Paul E. Peterson (Eds.)
- Future of K–12 Funding- In The Future of K-12 Funding, fiscal experts offer practical ways state policymakers can change their education funding systems so they are more equitable across districts and for all students. They examined three states—Indiana, Mississippi and Texas—and interviewed 13 public and private school officials to get a better understanding of what changes schools might face with such funding reforms.
- Future of Money & Giving Every Child the Chance at a Successful Future- This paper will explain how examples from states like Arkansas and Missouri and from Kenya demonstrate how mobile devices can be utilized to make person-to-person and person-to-business payments possible for thousands—and in Kenya’s case millions—of individuals and businesses. Such methods would make education savings accounts more accessible to families and transparent to taxpayers and lawmakers.
- Global Report Card- Find out how your public school district stacks up compared to the rest of the world.
- Gold Standard Studies- listed at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.
- Academic performance and K-12 spending chang by state over the Past 40 Years- Tennessee on page 48. "Drawing Meaningful Trends from the SAT" a working paper by Andrew J. Coulson, Cato.
- How Teachers in Texas Would Benefit from Expanding School Choice- A Heartland Institute Policy Brief by Joseph L. Bast, Herbert J. Walberg & Bruno Behrend, 5/26/11. Although the paper is written for Texas the arguments put forth are just as valid for Tennessee’s teachers.
- How to Fund Education Savings Accounts through Tax Credits- this paper will explain how legislators can design an ESA that is privately funded through tax-credit-eligible contributions from taxpayers, similar to tax-credit scholarship programs around the country.
- How to Fund Education Savings Accounts through Tax Credits- explains how legislators can design an ESA that is privately funded through tax-credit-eligible contributions from taxpayers, similar to tax-credit scholarship programs around the country.
- Impact of Federal Involvement in America’s Classrooms by Andrew J. Coulson 2/10111 Cato Institute.- After $2 trillion in federal education spending since 1965 (adjusting for inflation) it now costs 3 times as much to provide essentially the same education as we provided in 1970 with outcomes that have remained flat or declined while spending skyrocket.
- Integration Where It Counts: A Study of Racial Integration in Public And Private School Lunchrooms- by Jay Greene & Nicole Mellow 1998. Using a measure called the Index of Integration the authors “analyses suggest that private schools tend to offer a more racially integrated environment than do public schools”
- Just the Facts: Success, Innovation, and Opportunity in Charter Schools- This report from The Center for Education Reform debunks charter school misinformation with the most valid and reliable data to date.
- Market Education: The Unknown History- by Andrew J. Coulson
- Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence- These results discredit the notion that the content of schooling must be overseen by the state in order for schools to achieve optimum performance.
- Measuring Diversity in Charter School Offerings- by American Enterprise Institute July 2015
- Meta-Analysis on the Effects and Contributions of Public, Public Charter, and Religious Schools on Student Outcomes- This meta-analysis of 90 studies on religious private schools, traditional public schools, and charter schools shows that students perform best academically and behaviorally when they attend religious private schools.
- More Than Scores: An Analysis of Why and How Parents Choose Private Schools- Why do parents pick the schools they pick? This report uses the results of a survey administered to Georgia parents of K–12 private school scholarship recipients to address this question.
- Open The Books- 19 million public employee salaries at every level of government across America have been mapped and posted online.
- PARCC Data Dashboards- Friends of Choice in Urban Schools provides a dashboard tool that includes 2017 results on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness in College and Careers Assessment. A resource that allows one to filter results by sector, school, year, grade, and subgroup and actually understand the meaning behind the numbers.
- Parental rights and responsibilities in school choice laws- A survey by the American Enterprise Institute
- Personalizing Education; How Florida families use education savings accounts (ESAs)- By Lindsey Burke & Jason Bedrick
- Personalizing Learning Through Education Savings Accounts- by the Independent Women’s Forum
- Private School Choice and Character: More Evidence from Milwaukee- An evaluation of the longest-running modern school voucher program in the United States, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), shows it reduces the incidence of both criminal activity and paternity disputes for young adults. Specifically, it finds that participating in the program in 8th or 9th grade is associated with a statistically significant reduction of around 53 percent in drug-related convictions, 86 percent in property damage convictions, and 38 percent in paternity disputes.
- Private School Landscape- The Effects of School Choice on Student Capacity and Composition
- Private Schools Boost College Degrees for Black Males- Study shows high-achieving African-American boys are much more likely to get a bachelor’s degree if they attended a private high school
- Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)- PISA is a system of international assessments that allows countries to compare outcomes of learning as students near the end of compulsory schooling.
- Annual Survey of School System Finances- Education finance data include revenues, expenditures, debt, and assets [cash and security holdings] of elementary and secondary public school systems. Statistics cover school systems in all states, and include the District of Columbia. Data are available in viewable tables and downloadable files.
- Public Rules on Private Schools- The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice measures the Regulatory Impact of State Statutes and School Choice Programs
- Pursing Innovation; How Can Educational Choice Transform K–12 Education in the U.S.?- Which competition-driving policies improve student learning most effectively? Dr. Patrick J. Wolf and Dr. Anna J. Egalite examine the current performance of America’s K–12 education system, identify the market share of different types of educational choice options and analyze how effective open enrollment, charters, and educational choice programs are at improving student outcomes.
- Reading Instruction in Kindergarten- In the United States there is a widespread belief that teaching children to read early — in kindergarten or even prekindergarten — will help them be better readers in the long-run. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence that this is so. How then did this idea take hold so strongly?
- Recalibrating Accountability: Education Savings Accounts as Vehicles of Choice and Innovation- This Special Report explores how ESAs expand educational opportunity and hold education providers directly accountable to parents; it also explains several common types of regulations that can undermine the effectiveness of the program and how they can be avoided.
- School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP)- an educational research project devoted to the rigorous and unbiased evaluation of school choice programs and other school improvement efforts across the country.
- Rise of K–12 Blended Learning- An informative look at blended learning.
- School Choice Report Card 2016/2017- The American Federation for Children released its first ever Report Card, a comprehensive ranking of general education, private school choice programs across the country, which analyzes programs, assigns a ranking and provides suggestions for how programs can better serve students.
- School Choice: The Findings- a comprehensive survey summarizing the research on charter schools, vouchers, and public versus private school effectiveness.
- School Choice Yearbook for 2016-17- Created by American Federation for Children. You can find fast facts about: individual program data, eligibility requirements, enrollment and funding, legal updates, accountability measures, and more!
- School Inc.: The Price of Excellence - Full Video- Video: Andrew Coulson’s School Inc. takes viewers on a worldwide personal quest for an answer to the question — if you build a better way to teach a subject, why doesn’t the world beat a path to your door?
- School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools- This report analyzes the rise in public school personnel relative to the increase in students since FY 1992. Analyses are provided for the nation as a whole and for each state.
- School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools, Part II- The report, a sequel to last fall’s “The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools,” examines states’ hiring patterns.
- School Voucher Audit: Do Publicly Funded Private School Choice Programs Save Money?- This paper presents a cautious, rational estimate of the overall fiscal effects of school voucher programs that have been established over the past 24 years.
- SchoolGrades.org- uses an international standard of excellence to grade how well America’s schools prepare students in core subjects.
- Charter Schools FAQs- The Center for Education Reform's guide to charter schools.
- Taking Credit for Education: How to Fund Education Savings Accounts through Tax Credits- This Cato paper draws from the experiences of educational choice policies in three states and offers suggestions to policymakers for how to design a tax-credit-funded ESA.
- Tax-Credit Scholarship Audit 2016- This report analyzes savings from tax-credit scholarship programs, which allow individuals and businesses to reduce their state tax liability by making a private donation to a nonprofit organization that provides scholarships for children to attend private schools of their choice; looks at 10 tax-credit scholarship programs operating in seven states between 1997 and 2014. These 10 programs cover 93 percent of total scholarships awarded to students participating in tax-credit scholarship programs nationwide.
- Tennessee Charter School Center Impact Report 2018- provides an overview of the Tennessee charter school movement and highlights ways charters are promoting excellence and innovation in K-12 education.
- The Case For Education Transformation, Part II: Opportunity- by the Center for Education Reform.
- The difference a year makes- When starting school, younger children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD
- Integration Anomaly: Comparing the Effects of K–12 Education Delivery Models on Segregation in Schools- examines existing evidence to answer several questions. How have race and income segregation changed in public schools over time? How have school choice programs affected integration in schools—both public and private? Historically, how has government-compelled integration had an impact on schools and neighborhoods? And how can policymakers design education systems that will result in healthy race and income integration in schools?
- School Choice Voucher: A “Get Out of Jail” Card?- discusses the effects of school choice on a participant's likelihood to engage in criminal activity. Their analysis found that students who participate in a school choice program persistently were less likely to participate in criminal activity, especially male students.
- The Split Screen Strategy: How to Turn Education Into a Self-Improving System- 2015 by Ted Kolderie, This book is about applying that thinking to the problem in public education—where current strategy has long been caught ‘inside the box’,trying to reach the nation’s objectives while remaining within the traditional concepts of system and school and within the traditional concept of system change
- They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools by Adam Schaeffer policy analyst with Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom- Public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, however reported figures often leave out major costs of education and thus understate what is actually spent-on average, per-pupil spending is 44% higher. Published 3/10/10
- Time to Act 2017: Put Data in the Hands of People- summarizes states’ efforts to act on DQC’s previously released Four Policy Priorities and provides a clear set of actions that must be taken to fully realize the power of data to support all students & provides recommendations for policymakers to help transform the use of data in education and ensure that people have the information they need to answer questions and take action to support student success.
- TN Report Card 2017-18- Tennessee Department of Education provides data about schools and districts on its state report card using a numerical system to provide a rating on up to six metrics for each school.
- Universal Preschool May Do More Harm than Good- A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that universal preschool programs fail to improve a range of outcomes for participants. New studies of large-scale preschool programs in Quebec and Tennessee show that vastly expanding access to free or subsidized preschool may worsen behavioral and emotional outcomes.
- Unleashing Greatness Nine Plays to Spark Innovation in Education- How to spark innovation in education systems trapped by tradition and paralyzed by layers of policy and politics? That’s the question addressed by a short paper by two noted experts on the topic. Drafted by Michael Barber, Chief Education Adviser at Pearson, and former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein.
- Views from Private Schools, Attitudes about School Choice Programs in Three States- As school choice programs expand in the United States, it is crucial to consider how the design of these programs shapes the supply and demand of parents’educational offerings.
- Way of The Future, Education Savings Accounts for Every American Family- Under such accounts—managed by parents with state supervision to ensure accountability—parents can use their children’s education funding to choose among public and private schools, online education programs, certified private tutors, community colleges, and even universities.
- What is an Education Savings Account?
- What is Empirical Evidence?- Check out this simple guide to empirical evidence and how to identify high-quality research from poor-quality research, using examples from the auto and education industries.
- Why America Needs School Choice- is pocket sized, 51 pages. Think of this book as Spark notes for debating school choice. The purpose of this Broadside is to consider and rebut the major objections that are raised to expanding choice and competition in education.
- Why We Fight How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict- To end the fighting caused by state-run schooling, we should transform our system to one in which individual parents are empowered to select schools that share their moral values and educational goals for their children.
- Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice 2016- This fourth edition brings together 100 empirical studies on each of these essential questions in one comprehensive report.