Michael Q. McShane

Dr. Michael McShane is Director of National Research at EdChoice. He is the author, editor, co-author, or co-editor eleven books on education policy, including his most recent Hybrid Homeschooling: A Guide to the Future of Education (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) He is currently an opinion contributor to Forbes, and his analyses and commentary have been published widely in the media, including in USA Today, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He has also been featured in education-specific outlets such as Teachers College Record, Education Week, Phi Delta Kappan, and Education Next. In addition to authoring numerous white papers, McShane has had academic work published in Education Finance and Policy, The Handbook of Education Politics and Policy, and the Journal of School Choice. A former high school teacher, he earned a Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Arkansas, an M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame, and a B.A. in English from St. Louis University.

Florida Families Overwhelming Satisfied with School Choice Despite Complexity of Programs

Just as news broke that the Florida legislature was sending massive changes to the state’s school choice program to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s desk, researchers from Boston University and the University of Arkansas released a new study of Florida families’ experiences with two of the state’s private school choice programs. This legislative session, Florida lawmakers combined […]

U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey Shows Homeschooling Is Booming

On March 22, the U.S. Census Bureau released data from its Household Pulse Survey, a 20-minute online survey designed to assess the impact of the coronavirus on American households. It found that in the spring of 2020, about 5.4 percent of U.S. households with children reported homeschooling. By fall, that number had more than doubled, […]

What You Should Know About the New IES Study of Indiana’s Voucher Program

The federal Institute for Education Sciences, through the Regional Education Laboratory Midwest, recently published a study of educational attainment in Indiana, comparing results of students who attended traditional public schools, public charter schools, private schools via the Indiana Choice Voucher Program, and private schools without a voucher. The researchers used student-level data from the state […]

Will Hybrid Homeschooling Continue After the Pandemic Ends?

My new book, Hybrid Homeschooling: A Guide to the Future of Education, releases March 14. I wrote the vast majority of it before the pandemic, when hybrid homeschooling was confined to a small but dedicated group of educators and families in private, charter and traditional public school districts across the country. The coronavirus completely changed […]

Unbundling: Three Policies That Would Improve Schools’ Core Education Services

Up to this point, we’ve talked about unbundling what we might call “ancillary” school services like transportation, food, professional development, and remedial education. Now, it is fair to note that thinking of these as ancillary is probably insufficient because if kids can’t get to school, they can’t do anything else. Seems pretty essential. But that […]