In The States

BRIEF: School Choice in the States – August 2020

LEGISLATION Virginia Virginia lawmakers have filed three bills to expand educational choice during the pandemic or similar health crises: • SB 5020 would require any district school operating on a “reduced schedule” to deposit any “unused funds” (i.e., savings from being closed down) into specially established education savings accounts for each student. The ESAs could […]

Cool Schools: Season Three Roundup

It’s that time again. We’re recapping each episode in the latest season of our Cool Schools podcast. In this series, EdChoice Director of National Research Mike McShane spotlights some—you guessed it—cool schools across the country. He gets in the weeds, asking school leaders all the burning questions we education geeks care about. For those of […]

BRIEF: School Choice in the States – July 2020

Federal Senators introduced the School Choice Now Act, a bill that would provide a one-time emergency appropriation for state scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) to maintain scholarship amounts likely to be affected by a decrease in donations from the pandemic. The bill provides a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to SGOs, capped at $5 billion per […]

What the Espinoza Ruling Means for Blaine Amendments and School Choice

EdChoice is celebrating a landmark VICTORY for families and children! Discriminatory Blaine Amendments found in state constitutions can no longer be used to prohibit families participating in school choice programs from accessing religiously affiliated private schools for their children, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Espinoza v. Montana Dept of Revenue. Chief Justice […]

BRIEF: School Choice in the States – June 2020

LEGISLATION   Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 7067, a bill that significantly expands the state’s Family Empowerment Scholarship program. The bill expands income-eligibility from 185 percent of the federal poverty line ($47,638 for a family of four in 2019–20) to 300 percent of the federal poverty line ($77,250 for a family of four in 2019–20). Students from […]

EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker: Top Takeaways May 2020

A lot of major public developments are unfolding right now. We are truly living in historic times.  Schooling questions and issues may not be top of mind for many of you, but if they are, we have new monthly tracking polling results and downloadable files on our Public Opinion Tracker. In this blog post, I […]

Update on Tennessee ESA Litigation

UPDATED (JUNE 4): On June 4, the Supreme Court of Tennessee denied requests for that court to accept jurisdiction of The Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County et. al. vs. Tennessee Department of Education et. al., No. M2020-00683-COA-R9-CV, the case against Tennessee’s new Education Savings Account Pilot Program (ESA Pilot), That case is currently before the […]

BRIEF: School Choice in the States – May 2020

LEGISLATION AND LITIGATION   National In March, Congress passed The CARES Act, a multi-billion dollar COVID-19 relief stimulus bill that provided emergency relief block grants to states. These funds continued to be processed by states and school districts. In May, U.S. Department of Education guidance enabled governors to appropriate the law’s Education Stabilization Funds to best fit the […]

EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker: Top Takeaways April 2020

We released a lot of data when we launched the EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker yesterday. And we mean a lot. In this blog post, I share eight key takeaways based on our January-to-April polling waves. We will update this tracker with new results by the first Tuesday each month. Subscribe to our email list or […]

What You Need to Know About the EdChoice Public Opinion Tracker

Today, we launch EdChoice’s Public Opinion Tracker, a monthly survey of public opinion about K–12 education in America, conducted by national polling and data intelligence firm Morning Consult. Starting this past January, we began conducting monthly polls of the general public and parents. We are also surveying teachers on a quarterly basis. We are fielding […]