Tag Archives: School Choice

In celebration of National School Choice Week, we are pleased to release our latest school profile about Liberty Common Charter School.

Today, in a long-awaited ruling on state Blaine Amendments, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of three Montana mothers who wished to enroll their children in religious schools with the assistance of a scholarship.

Educators of all types, including parents, have a tremendous challenge before them.

Today, in fact right now, the United States Supreme Court is scheduled to finally hear the oral arguments in the case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which the Court agreed to hear back in June of last year. In 2015, lawmakers in Montana passed a school choice program that provided a state tax credit for private donations made to non-profit K-12 scholarship granting organizations. The following year, the program was halted by overzealous regulators at the state’s department of revenue who invoked the Montana constitution’s Blaine Amendment to bar scholarship recipients from using these funds at religious schools. A group of plaintiffs comprised of three mothers wishing to send their children to religious private schools challenged the Department of Revenue rule and so began the case now before the Supreme Court. The parents’ argument was that the rule that effectively invalidate the program was unconstitutional under both the Montana and the United States Constitutions as it violated their right to free exercise of religion. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer not long prior, the Montana State Supreme Court ended the program. The case being heard today aims to answer the issue of whether […]

Colorado has been a leader in public school choice for decades. Legislative bills to allow students to cross neighborhood school zones and school district boundaries were first introduced in the late 1980s. Legislation passed in 1990 and 1994 to open the doors to a new public school choice frontier.

Ready Colorado, an education reform organization, recently published a first-of-its-kind report about Colorado’s public school open enrollment system.

After nearly ten years of service, education leader Tom Boasberg has resigned from his role as superintendent of Denver Public Schools (DPS). Under his leadership DPS has thrived and gained national attention and respect.

Colorado’s charter schools are no rookies when it comes to setting school choice standards–so it’s no surprise that the Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) charter school network received this year’s Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, an award given to the country’s best public charter school network.

The newly released paper Rethinking Regulation by Michael McShane is a fundamental analysis of the effects regulation has on the rapidly evolving school choice market. Rethinking Regulation emphasizes the basic economic effects of deregulation and expounds the regulatory process that controls our educational system.

The new federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 expands the qualified distributions to include K-12 education. Colorado provides a state tax deduction for contributions to the accounts, but only for college expenses. This becomes very complicated and is already showing to be confusing to families. Federal law and state law are not aligned.

Does money equate to intelligence?