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.

Hybrid Home Schooling’s “Whole Product” Problem

We present three steps to making hybrid homeschool work. In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore applies the “whole product” concept to his technology adoption lifecycle. Because products never fully live up to the promises of salespeople or the expectations of consumers, innovators must augment their products with services and supplementary products that make it do […]

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 […]

Can Hybrid Home Schooling “Cross the Chasm?”

Hybrid home schooling proponents must tackle three questions to grow beyond early adopters and into the mainstream.   In 1991, Geoffrey Moore published Crossing the Chasm, a book about how new technologies get adopted. It would go on to become a massive international bestseller, selling more than 1 million print copies worldwide. In it, Moore […]

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 […]

What You Need to Know from the Massive NCES School Choice Report

Last week, the National Center for Education Statistics released School Choice in the United States: 2019, a helpful collection of data on school choice patterns across the nation. As the report indicates, more and more families are making an active choice as to where to send their children to school, both within and outside the […]

New UVA Study of Limited Help in Understanding School Vouchers

I know y’all are going to find this hard to believe, but a press release touting a recent study was over the top and could lead casual readers to misunderstand the paper’s findings. Since this never happens, I’ll give you a moment to take a few deep breaths and come to grips with what happened. […]

How to Afford Private School

Can I Afford Private School

Parents choose private schools for a lot of reasons. Maybe their local public school is not meeting their needs. Maybe they want a religious education for their child. Maybe they prefer a different instructional approach for their child. Does one of these describe your situation? Maybe sending your child to private school is the right […]

The Next 200 Years: Studying the Long-Term Effects of Catholic-to-Charter “Conversion”

In 2014, Andrew Kelly and I wrote Sector Switchers: Why Catholic Schools Convert to Charters and What Happens Next, an examination of 18 formerly Catholic schools that had “converted” (sorry, we couldn’t help ourselves) into charter schools. With the recent news that the much-vaunted Jubilee Catholic schools in Memphis were looking to pursue the Catholic-to-charter […]