School Choice Yearbook

February 10, 2011

The Alliance for School Choice has released their annual school choice yearbook.  It is filled with a ton of useful facts, figures, and other resources.  Be sure to check it out.  Here are some of the highlights from the press release:

• More than 190,000 students are enrolled in school choice programs in the United
States, a growth of nearly 100 percent since 2004-05.
• Seven of the 20 school choice programs in America are specifically tailored to
serve children with special needs, benefiting more than 26,000 students.
• Nearly all of America’s school choice programs provide assistance primarily to
children in low- to middle-income families or to children with special needs.
• Florida is home to the greatest number of students who benefit from school
choice, with 54,000 student participants in the state’s two existing programs.
Two states—Arizona and Ohio—have three school choice programs each.
• All 20 school choice programs are non-discriminatory and feature levels of
administrative, financial, and/or academic accountability.
• Despite a turbulent economy, no existing programs saw funding cuts in 2010.
Two new programs—one for students with disabilities in Oklahoma and another
for students with special needs in Louisiana—were enacted last year with
bipartisan support.

Leave a Comment » | charter schools, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New DC Voucher Bill Introduced

July 30, 2009

According to an Alliance for School Choice press release:

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) today unveiled a bipartisan reauthorization bill for the D.C. school voucher program.  Lieberman, along with Susan Collins (R-ME) and four other senators, introduced legislation this morning to reauthorize and strengthen the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) for five years…

 Under Senator Lieberman’s bill, the program would be preserved and strengthened significantly. The Lieberman bill would increase scholarship amounts to $9,000 for K-8 students and $11,000 for high school students­indexing the scholarship amounts to inflation. While these amounts remain significantly below the amounts for the D.C. Public Schools, they provide the necessary increases to account for inflation over the past five years.

The bill would also:

–Give scholarship priority to siblings of students who currently participate in the program
–Require participating schools to have a valid certificate of occupancy
–Require teachers of core subject matters to have bachelor’s degrees
–Require an Institute of Education Sciences annual evaluation of the program
–Require students to take nationally norm-referenced tests

I hear that this bill addresses all of the issues raised by Senator Durbin’s bill without any of the program-killing provisions.  If Durbin is really motivated by the concerns he has expressed, such as teachers having bachelors degrees and schools reporting test results, we may be getting close to a compromise.  Of course, that is a big IF.

3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Briefing on School Choice Research Misscheduled

May 27, 2009

nixon

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

BAEO, the Urban League and ASC are holding a briefing on What the Research Says about School Choice tomorrow afternoon, 2:00, at the National Press Club. It’s open to the public “by RSVP only,” so contact Ashley Ehrenreich at aehrenreich@allianceforschoolchoice.org or 202-280-1986 if you want to attend.

The good news is, you can hear Jay P. Greene’s Blog’s own Jay P. Greene along with an all-star lineup of school choice researchers discussing what the research says about school choice.

The bad news is, due to a horrible scheduling mixup, the sponsors failed to obey the new city ordinance that says all public release of information regarding vouchers within the boundaries of the District must take place late on Friday afternoon. If even the Obama administration couldn’t get itself exempted, why did these guys think they could?

Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster