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LEGISLATION AND LITIGATION Arizona – Michael Chartier @mchart1 The Arizona Auditor General released a performance audit on the nation’s first education savings accounts (ESAs): Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. The auditor’s main findings were that the Arizona Department of Education established methods for distributing the accounts and found a way to prevent and resolve fraud. Visit the Goldwater Institute’s […]
School choice opponents have no shortage of unfounded arguments aimed at blocking parents from choosing the best educational fit for their own kids. One of their favorite talking points is that researchers “cherry-pick” data-driven reports that highlight only the most positive effects from school choice. Time and again, the Friedman Foundation and other choice advocates […]
Maine legislator and presidential hopeful James G. Blaine (1830–1893) was a member of Congress in the mid- to late 1800s, a time when Catholic immigrants were flooding into the country and public schools were overwhelmingly Protestant. Catholic immigrant students were encouraged to assimilate in public schools. Desiring an educational option that was consistent with their […]
As educational choice grows, so does the evidence proving it works. In today’s release of the fourth edition of a Friedman Foundation flagship report—A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice—author Dr. Greg Forster says, “Twenty years ago, before this body of evidence existed, there was some excuse for making policy based on speculation, […]
An Analysis of the Louisiana Scholarship Program Achievement Findings “The approach has been to regard any market failure, however minor, as a sufficient excuse for government intervention. The market has failed, therefore the government should step in. But this is a basic error, because it involves a double standard. There is not only such a […]
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss recently published an opinion piece, “The ‘Walmartization’ of public education,” in which she derides the Friedman Foundation for our work to empower families to choose the best educational setting for their children. Strauss’s arguments are ones we hear repeatedly from those who would prefer a one-size-fits-most, system-centered approach to K–12 […]
The Friedman Foundation team put in our votes for this year’s school choice yearbook superlatives, and these are our winners. Check them out and tell us how you would have voted in the comments. Most Empowering Nevada Education Savings Accounts Our team weighed purchasing power and the ability of parents to use their funds […]
We are introducing a new calculation to our school choice program rankings this year: educational choice share, or “edchoice share.” The calculations behind this ranking seek to answer one question: Which states have the highest and lowest percentage of students exercising their educational freedom through private school choice programs? To get this number, we divided […]
We’ve given our readers an overview of school choice programs across the nation this week with rankings based on eligibility and family participation. But one major question still remains: How well are these programs funded? The best school choice policies make as many children as possible eligible to participate, but also empower participants to truly afford […]
Which of America’s school choice programs has the most participants? Which has the least? The latest edition of The ABCs of School Choice gives the most up-to-date information we have on program participation. Here, we’ve ranked the programs by how many participants they have. Eligibility, regulations, and funding also play important roles in how people […]