Vouchers have the potential to do many things - improve family satisfaction, reduce racial isolation, and strengthen educational outcomes for both the recipients and the children remaining in public schools - all at little or no net cost to taxpayers. The program described in this paper could provide 10,000 students from low-income families with the choices that other families already possess.

Massachusetts charter schools are among the highest performing in the country, as measured by standardized test results. Despite this, the Commonwealth has created a difficult policy environment for growing new and existing charter schools, one that is defined by a statewide cap on the number of charter schools that can exist and a Smart Cap, enacted in 2010, which raised the cap on charter schools in certain underperforming districts.

Although early childhood education has been on the federal agenda since the 1960s and President Johnson’s War on Poverty, a renewed focus on the value of high-quality early childhood programming, in the form of President Obama’s Preschool for All initiative, has thrust the issue of universal preschool back into the spotlight.

"School Vouchers in Washington, DC: Lessons for Massachusetts" was presented by Patrick Wolf in 2013.

By signing on to national standards and the assessments that will accompany them, participating states have ceded their autonomy to design and oversee the implementation of their own standards and tests. The implications of ceding this autonomy are varied. Not only do some states risk sacrificing high quality standards for national standards that may be less rigorous, but all states are sacrificing their ability to inform what students learn.

Beginning in the late 1930s, the confluence of a number of social, ideological, religious, and demographic factors led to the rise of Orthodox day schools in Boston and elsewhere. In the ensuing decades, the Jewish community migrated to the Boston suburbs and even further to the west.

About four decades ago, Finland introduced major reforms to grades 1-12 and teacher education, with noteworthy results. In 1970, less than 10% of its students graduated from high school. By 2010, most high school-age students attended high school and most of these students graduated.

The first part of this brief presents a detailed description of Rhode Island's Corporate Scholarship Tax Credit (CSTC) program, summarizing the key institutional features of the program. The second part of the brief extracts lessons learned from Rhode Island's tax credit program and assesses the possibility of the adoption of a similar tax credit funded scholarship program in Massachusetts.

The Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability (FERA), based in Albany, New York, has been implementing a school-choice initiative — the Albany Project — that has created high-quality charter schools to serve more than half of the local public school student population in the state's capital city. FERA believes that a district composed of choice schools can better serve students, parents, and the community than the traditional urban school district system. The Albany Project is demonstrating that the charter school model — freedom from state regulations and education bureaucracy, freedom to innovate, and increased accountability—can better serve all students, not just the small segment of the population fortunate enough to win an enrollment lottery or afford a private school.

This paper applies the charter school idea to public higher education. It makes the case that deregulation coupled with a charter or agreement with the state will enable institutions to operate more efficiently and will produce higher quality educational results. The argument is based on research comparing highly regulated institutions with more independent colleges across the country, as well as interviews with a number of educational, public policy, and political leaders in Massachusetts. The authors draw on the history of Michigan as well as the more recent experience in New Jersey.