In recent years, the Supreme Court has developed a robust antidiscrimination principle rooted in the Free Exercise Clause that commands that generally available public benefits may not be denied to religious organizations because of their religious identity. In St. Isidore v. Drummond ex rel. Oklahoma, school-choice advocates sought to extend this principle to Oklahoma’s public charter school program, arguing that excluding a Catholic...
School Choice
Over the past several years, the landscape of K–12 education policy has shifted dramatically, thanks in part to increasing prevalence of parental-choice policies, including intra- and inter-district public school choice, charter schools, and private-school choice policies like vouchers and (most recently) universal education savings accounts. These policies decouple property and education by delinking students’ educational options from their...
When passed in 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act represented the federal government’s most dramatic foray into the elementary and secondary public school policymaking terrain. While critics emphasized the Act’s overreliance on standardized testing and its reduced school-district and state autonomy, proponents lauded the Act’s goal to close the achievement gap between middle- and upper-middle-class students and students historically ill served...