Family Resources

1,000 True School Choice Supporters

More than a decade ago, Kevin Kelly, founding executive of Wired magazine, published a blog post titled 1,000 True Fans. It has become an incredibly influential resource for upstart technology entrepreneurs, artists and do-it-yourselfers looking to start their own business. The premise is simple. To be a successful business, you don’t need millions of customers, […]

School Choice Opponents Defend the Indefensible

If your child was viciously bullied at school every day to the point that they wanted to harm themselves, what would you do? If your child was sexually assaulted at school and then told by an administrator that she had to go back to class with the student who brutalized her, what would you do? […]

Times Like These: Why You Should Build A Real, Committed Grassroots Army

By Jennifer Wagner Buying a domain name, launching a website and making a public announcement are the first steps toward building a grassroots network of supporters. They also happen to be the easiest steps. The community commitment or engagement curve. This one is designed for an online community, but the same basic principles apply to grassroots organizing: […]

The 2020 EdChoice Yearbook Superlatives

We caffeinated. We debated. We declared this year’s yearbook superlatives, including most likely to succeed in 2020. It’s National School Choice Week, and that means it’s time for the EdChoice team to dig into the states’ school choice policies and efforts. What was the movement’s biggest setback? What was the most inspiring development of the […]

Who Should Hybrid Home-school?

We present four profiles of potential hybrid home-schoolers.   In Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, he recommends that purveyors of new technologies create libraries of “customer characterizations,” profiles of potential users of their technology. Who might use our product? How might they use it? What problems do they need to have solved? Moore recommends that […]

Cool Schools: Season One Roundup

Cool Schools Podcast

In our Cool Schools podcast series, EdChoice’s Director of National Research Mike McShane spotlights some—you guessed it—cool schools across the country. This series isn’t just a celebration of innovation. McShane gets in the weeds, asking school leaders all the burning questions we education geeks care about. Season One of the series wrapped last month, so […]

Four Ways Evidence Shows School Choice Can Help Teachers

From the 11-day teacher’s strike in Chicago, the nation’s third largest public school district, to a looming Statehouse protest in Indiana, teachers and their working conditions are making headlines. Teachers’ unions tend to oppose educational choice policies, but there are several ways expanding choice could actually help teachers. Here are the four big ones.   […]

Top Five Questions About Teacher Pay

Teacher pay has made lots of headlines the last couple years, with educators in Illinois and Indiana among the latest to take action to up their salaries. Because K-12 funding is so complicated, we thought it would be a good time to throw out the Top Five questions we get asked about pay. Some of […]

Where the “Funding Competing Systems” Argument Falls Completely Apart

The new “gotcha” argument from school choice opponents is that school choice is inefficient. Charter schools and private schools create redundancies by duplicating the services, systems and governing structure of public schools. Some even take it a step further and argue that choice robs from traditional systems, and if it would go away, all that […]

Cool Schools: Season Two Roundup

In our Cool Schools podcast series, EdChoice’s Director of National Research Mike McShane spotlights some—you guessed it—cool schools across the country. McShane gets in the weeds, asking school leaders all the burning questions we education geeks care about. Season two of the series just wrapped, so if you’d like to binge those seven episodes and […]