"Zelman's" Evolving Legacy: Selective Funding of Secular Private Schools in State School Choice Programs

School finance analysts need to identify the cost of education programs that work and the costs and structures of teacher salary systems that can find and keep high-quality teachers. Next, says Mr. Odden, they must incorporate these cost findings into school finance structures that provide each district and school with an adequate level of fiscal resources. Schools then need to use the resources for those effective programs. SCHOOL FINANCE is changing fundamentally. Long focused on fiscal equity, school finance is shifting toward fiscal adequacy in the context of standards-based education reform. The new school finance encompasses not only inputs but also educational processes and results, including teacher compensation. For the past five years, a large portion of the finance-related research of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) has been organized around the new school finance issues involved in this shift. The first section of this article describes the two primary factors that require a rethinking of school finance. The second section summarizes five sets of research findings related to these new directions in school finance. Two Major Factors The shift in school finance from equity to adequacy is caused by many factors, but two dominate: the goals and demands of standards-based education reform and the focus of current school finance litigation. Standards-based education reform seeks to educate students to high performance standards. The benchmark of the new school finance is whether it provides adequate per-pupil revenues for districts and schools to employ educational strategies that are successful in educating students to those standards. Determining adequate revenue levels entails first identifying the costs of effective programs and strategies and then translating those costs into appropriate school finance structures. Implementing this approach should also produce gains in fiscal equity because in most states it requires a leveling up of low-spending districts. This new focus for school finance was recommended by the recent report of the National Research Council's Committee on Education Finance Equity, Adequacy, and Productivity.1 These shifts in school finance have already changed the core of school finance litigation from equity to adequacy.2 The legal test for adequacy is whether a state's school finance system provides sufficient revenues for the average school to teach the average student to state- determined performance standards and whether sufficient additional revenues are provided to help special-needs students also achieve at those performance levels. The legal problem is not really whether district A has less than district B but whether both districts - indeed all districts in the state - have revenues that are adequate to pay for the programs and strategies they need in order to educate students to high achievement levels. CPRE Finance Research Findings For the past several years, the CPRE agenda for research on education finance has addressed many of the issues raised by standards-based education reform and the legal shift to adequacy. This next section describes key aspects of the new school finance, and the five sections that follow discuss research findings on those aspects: determining the adequate spending level, formula funding of schools, resource reallocation, teacher compensation, and how to tie new approaches to teacher compensation into the funding structure. Shape of the New School Finance Drawing both from the definition of adequacy in school finance litigation3 and from the implications for finance of standards-based education,4 CPRE has been working to identify the shape of the new school finance. Allowing districts to select their own spending levels is no longer sufficient, because all districts and schools must spend at least at an adequate level to meet the new performance standards. …

Reviewed by: The Dissenting Tradition in American Education Joan Delfattore The Dissenting Tradition in American Education. By James C. Carper and Thomas C. Hunt. (New York: Peter Lang. 2007. Pp. xii, 286. $32.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-820-47920-0.) The central premise of The Dissenting Tradition in American Education is uncompromisingly stated in its introduction: "[T]he public school is the functional equivalent of an established church, buttressed with religious language, expected to embrace all people, legitimating and transmitting an orthodoxy or worldview, and underwritten by compulsory taxation" (p. 4). Beginning with Catholic opposition to the use of the King James Bible in nineteenth-century public schools and continuing through protests against the secularism of contemporary public education, The Dissenting Tradition examines not only challenges to specific viewpoint(s) promoted by publicly funded schools but also opposition to the very notion of state involvement in education. [End Page 861] The authors identify themselves as an evangelical Protestant (Carper) and a Catholic (Hunt)."Despite our differing theological traditions and educational experiences," they write,"we believe that . . . the current structure of public education is incompatible with America's confessional pluralism (citizens embrace different answers to 'first order' questions, such as 'What is the nature of the cosmos?') and our sacred commitment to universal liberty of conscience in matters of education and religion" (p. 5).Through a series of case studies, they demonstrate how America's secularist public-school system arose out of religious differences between Protestants and Catholics in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Faced with the likelihood that a significant proportion of public funding for religious schools would go toward the support of Catholic education, policymakers preferred to allocate tax funding only to state-run secular schools. Moreover, strong popular advocacy of public education as a means of promoting patriotism—most notably by "Americanizing" immigrant children—resulted in restrictions on alternative forms of education, such as parochial schools and home schooling. In recent years, however, attitudes and policies have changed, leading Carper and Hunt to suggest that the time may be ripe for what they describe as "the 'disestablishment' of public education" (p. 9). At the heart of The Dissenting Tradition lies the fundamental question of the state's proper role in education. Four models are discussed: the state supports only secular schools under its own control; the state runs secular schools while funding other schools, which may be religious; the state runs no schools but provides funds for religious or secular schools of the parents'choice;or the state plays no role in either funding or regulating the education of children, leaving that matter entirely in the hands of parents and religious communities. The case studies through which these alternatives are explored are compellingly presented, intertwining summaries of political and philosophical arguments with accounts of real people to whom they represent not abstract ideas, but a worldview on which the very meaning of life depends. As a history of Catholic and Protestant efforts to challenge the ideas promoted by public schools and to advance alternative forms of education, The Dissenting Tradition is highly effective. Its weak point is that even as it describes this long-running conflict clearly and cogently, it assumes that the existence of the controversy is, in itself, sufficient justification for "disestablishing" public education in some manner that includes the funding of alternative schooling, including religious education, but is otherwise unspecified. The book does not refute—or even acknowledge—the main points likely to be raised on the other side of the debate; in particular, it scarcely mentions either the political implications of "disestablishing" the public school system or the constitutional issues involved in state funding of religious education. To be sure, supporters of public education may be viewed as self-interested and wrongheaded, and Supreme Court decisions interpreting the First and Fourteenth Amendments may be deemed faulty. Nevertheless, arguing for a [End Page 862] dramatic change in the existing structure of the public-school system almost exclusively on the basis of longstanding religious opposition to it is unlikely to persuade anyone who was not already predisposed to agree with that premise. The book presents a compelling history of dissent and a ringing justification...

It has been a busy time for the Association of Education Finance and Policy (AEFP). Over the past few years the association has acquired a new name, a new journal, and many new members. The 2012 annual conference, convened in Boston last March, proved to be the largest conference in the association’s thirty-seven-year history, with 556 members in attendance. The theme, selected by incoming president Deborah Cunningham, was “Education Finance, Policy, and Practice: The Role of Evidence in a Dynamic World,” which underscores the contemporary challenge to the association: how to apply an increasing abundance of information and sophisticated analytical tools to produce the evidence needed to guide decision making by educational policy makers and practitioners. The Boston meeting was notable not only for the number in attendance. The unique qualities and strengths of the association were in clear display: papers of unusual methodological rigor; an interdisciplinary mix of academics from the social sciences, public policy schools, and colleges of education; educational finance professionals, policy analysts, and practitioners, a mix rarely found in the same place; and sessions addressing today’s hot topics as well as issues that have endured over the years. Having said this, all indications are that AEFP is what it has always been: a small, diverse group of people tackling some really big problems. Of particular note was a trend that has been growing for years but has clearly come into full flower: the large

The declining economy of the Dutch Republic obliged city governments in the eighteenth century to take measures to undo the effects of the social deterioration. They therefore founded schools for the poor and sometimes gave full financial support. After 1795, the Batavian Revolution proclaimed that primary education was a state affair, but after a contest for hegemony between political elites, funding of schools in particular was left to provinces and communities. The desolate finances of the Batavian Republic made it nearly impossible for the national government to intervene with financial resources. After 1813 the situation did not change much; under King William I the decentralised funding model remained despite his absolutist activity. The constitution from 1848 offered freedom but after the new law of 1857 confessional politicians promoted private education because they found the neutral character of public education unacceptable for their children. Liberals aggravated the demands for primary education and were responsible for the fact that communities received state support to fulfil the demands in the law of 1878. But liberal hegemony broke down and confessional politicians succeeded in gaining state support for private schools in 1889 in exchange for their cooperation with the extension of suffrage. This process was repeated after 1913 when liberals negotiated with Christian politicians concerning general suffrage and equal funding of the private schools. The Dutch state dominated through that result in 1920 primary education but did not gain a monopoly.

School choice is on the rise, and states use various mechanisms to implement it. One prevalent mechanism is also a uniquely problematic one: the tax credit. Tax credits are deficient at equitably distributing a benefit like school choice; they are costly, and they invite fraud. Instead of using tax credits, states opting for school choice programs should use direct funding. Direct funding will more efficiently achieve the goals of school choice because it can be regulated like any other government benefit, even if it ends up subsidizing religious private schools. Tax credits’ prevalence is not inexplicable, of course. It is based on a prior legal understanding that states were constitutionally restricted from directly funding religious schools. Historically, states that wanted to include religious private schools in their school choice programs therefore felt pushed to use tax credits as their only constitutionally viable option. However, the landscape has changed. The Supreme Court held in 2022 that direct funding of religious private schools is not only constitutionally permissible, but it is required if a state funds non-religious private schools and provides no neutral basis for excluding religious ones. The initial reason for tax credits’ popularity therefore no longer exists; both tax credits and direct funding alike are constitutionally acceptable. It is time, therefore, to revisit the merits of tax credits and ask whether, knowing what we know now, it is worth disposing of them in favor of direct funding. This Article answers that question with a resounding yes. Tax credits carry significant disadvantages—specifically, inequitable distribution and difficulties in regulation—that direct funding does not. Now that the law is clear, states choosing to sponsor school choice should discontinue their use of tax credits in favor of direct funding.

The study examined school finance management structure and effective delivery of 21st century secondary education in Cross River State. The aims were to find out the relationship between availability of school finance management structure and the delivery of 21st century education in secondary schools, ascertain whether the structures for the mobilization of school funds, allocation of school funds, school finance accountability exist in secondary schools, and determine the extent of delivery of 21st century education in secondary schools in Cross River State. Descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. 4 research questions and 1 hypothesis were formulated for the study. The population of the study comprised all the 251 Principals from the 251 public secondary schools in the three Educational Zones in Cross River State. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics (simple percentages, mean and standard deviation) were used to answer the research questions, while Pearson Product Moment correlation Statistics (r) was used to analyze the data for the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. Result obtained showed that there is a significant relationship between availability of school finance management structure and effective delivery of 21st century secondary education in Cross River State. It was also found that there are adequate sources of funds available to secondary schools in the State; there are no formal structures for funds allocation and accountability in the schools and the level of delivery of 21st century education in secondary schools is low. Based on this result, it was recommended that there should be formal structures for funds allocation and finance accountability to ensure effective delivery of skilledbased education in the State.Keywords: School finance, finance management, finance accountability, school finance structure, funds mobilization, funds allocation

Caroline Hoxby: Christian A. L. Hilber and Christopher J. Mayer ask an important question: Do school finance laws affect where people live? In other words, if we pass a new school finance law in our state, should we expect a reshuffling of the population so that we will all have new neighbors? Will our state draw in certain people from other states or make certain people depart for other states? The answers to these questions are important because American states regularly revise their school finance laws and sometimes revise them in dramatic ways that might trigger sizable reshuffling. States' school finance formulas allocate $370 billion a year. To see how large an amount this is, compare Medicare at only $245 billion, all federal income support programs combined at only $330 billion, and national defense at a similar $376 billion. The amount of money affected by school finance laws is so large and the laws vary so widely, over time and among states, that school finance could easily be the government policy that affects where people live. This is not to say, of course, that other factors do not affect where people live. It is just that most of those other factors are not in policymakers' control. Lurking in the background of this research is the implicit assertion that where people live matters. If neighbors do not have a causal effect on a person's outcomes, then it is unclear why we should care who is the neighbor of whom. Here it is important to distinguish between neighbors' correlations and neighbors' causal effects. We have a lot of evidence that there are correlations among neighbors; the evidence on neighbors' causal effects is limited. Indeed, some of the best research, based on the Moving to Opportunity experiment, suggests that neighbors' causal [End Page 134] effects are very small.38 The question of neighbor effects is beyond the scope of Hilber and Mayer's study or this comment, but it is important to flag the issue. We know that we care about whether someone is richer or poorer. It is not so obvious that we care about how people reshuffle themselves if there are no causal effects of sorting. After all, John Smith or Jane Doe is always someone's neighbor. Hilber and Mayer test three hypotheses. First, do middle- and upper- income families prefer to live in states where school districts are relatively independent fiscally? The logic is that fiscally independent districts' resources tend to reflect the resources and tastes of the people who live in them. Therefore, an affluent, well-educated person living in a district with affluent, well-educated neighbors can probably obtain public schools that suit his desires. Conversely, if his district cannot spend money on its schools without giving the state a commensurate amount for other districts' schools, or if his district is forced by the state to spend the same amount as every other district, an affluent, well-educated person's local public schools may fall short of his desires. Indeed, he may abandon the expensive and frustrating task of trying to obtain public schools that suit him and may use private schools or move to another state instead. The second hypothesis is that, in states that aggressively redistribute funds among their school districts, middle- and upper-income families and the elderly need not avoid living in districts with poor school-aged children as they might in states with financially independent districts. The logic behind this hypothesis is not so clear. If states that equalized school finance always "leveled up," then districts that served poor children would usually (though not always) look more attractive to middle- and upper-income families than they did before equalization.39 However, more than half of school finance equalizations "level down" because their formulas contain parameters that implicitly penalize districts for higher spending.40 After a leveling-down equalization such as the Serrano II equalization in California, well-off families have more, not less, reason [End Page 135...

According to Church statistics, 6.9 million children were enrolled in Catholic primary and secondary schools in Europe. Enrolment has remained relatively stable over the last 40 years in comparison to other regions of the world, contributing to education pluralism. This may be in part because in many countries, Catholic and private schools benefit from state funding, which helps in reducing out-of-pocket costs for parents to send their children to the schools. At the same time, public funding for private schools, including Catholic schools, often remains below the level of funding for public schools. This paper discusses enrolment trends in Catholic schools over time, compares the level of public funding for private and public schools, and looks at the relationships (or lack thereof) between such funding and enrolment in Catholic and private schools.

This article discusses the State of New Mexico’s school finance reforms during the 2019 legislative session and the relationship of those reforms to The Essential Building Blocks for State School Finance. The Essential Building Blocks is a 2018 report written by the author for the Learning Policy Institute that provides essential, research-based guidance to policymakers and advocates who write school finance laws to ensure more equitable school finance policies. The legislative reforms follow a state court victory in 2019 by plaintiff families and school districts suing the state on school finance and educational opportunity claims in Martínez v. State of New Mexico and Yazzie v. State of New Mexico. The author examines how the Legislature’s efforts measure up against the guidance articulated in The Essential Building Blocks. The author also interviews the Gallup-McKinley County Schools superintendent to assess the reforms and how they relate to realizing educational opportunity for all students as described in The Essential Building Blocks. The author concludes that while the state made some progress in its school finance reforms, the absence of a strategic, holistic plan grounded in equity will likely leave the state’s underserved children without the educational opportunities they need to succeed. If the state’s leadership can match its strong principles and goals of equity and multiculturalism with a formidable school finance system that appropriately invests in its students and educators as reflected in The Essential Building Blocks, the state will be poised to realize equity and opportunity for all students.

مدارس دارای مسئولیت‌های خطیری در آموزش و پرورش هستند. آن‌ها در پیشرفت و توسعه همه جانبه و ارتقای سرمایه انسانی کشور نقش حائز اهمیتی دارند. لذا رفع مشکلات مدارس به‌خصوص در زمینه تامین مالی ازجمله اهدافی است که باید مورد توجه مسئولین و محققین قرار گیرد. بنابراین هدف از این پژوهش اولویت‌بندی عوامل موثر بر تامین مالی مدارس در استان کردستان است. این پژوهش از نظر هدف کاربردی بوده و بر حسب روش پژوهش، پیمایشی است. داده‌های مورد نیاز این پژوهش با استفاده از پرسشنامه گردآوری شده و ضریب آلفای کرونباخ برای آن 85/0 به دست آمده است. همچنین برای رسیدن به هدف این پژوهش، 30 متغیر مربوط به تامین مالی مدارس در نظر گرفته و به 3 مولفه تقسیم شده است. جامعه آماری این پژوهش شامل مدیران و معاونین مدارس در سطح استان کردستان می‌باشد و روش نمونه‌گیری آن به شکل تصادفی بوده است و تعداد آن با استفاده از فرمول کوکران 100 آزمودنی تعیین گردیده است. همچنین برای تجزیه و تحلیل آماری داده‌ها از نرم‌افزار SPSS استفاده شده است. و با استفاده از روش تحلیل عاملی پرسش‌های پژوهش مورد آزمون قرار گرفته است. نتایج حاصل از پژوهش نشان می‌دهد که خصوصی‌سازی مدارس بیشترین تاثیر و مشارکت مالی اولیا کمترین تاثیر را بر تامین مالی مدارس می‌گذارند.

THE state of American public education has become something of a national obsession. A mournful consensus seems to have formed around two conclusions: (1) American schools have performed poorly in comparison with schools in other countries, and (2) things have gotten worse over time. As my title indicates, this article is more motivated by recent changes in performance than by its average level. It is also motivated by a fact often neglected in discussions of school performance. The overwhelming majority of American elementary and secondary schools are political creatures. They are publicly owned, operated, directed, and funded. I want to see if the political character of the marketplace within which schools operate has something to do with the way they perform. For reasons elaborated subsequently, the data I analyze are incapable of providing a complete explanation of the decline of public school performance. So, even if this decline is entirely a political phenomenon, I could

Private schools and their supporters still receive differential treatment in Canada. The disadvantage they suffer differs from province to province although, as a whole, the region west of Ontario treats them more favourably than does any other. Such disadvantage is accompanied by the dominant viewpoint that parents sending or wishing to send their children to private schools do not deserve government assistance. The need for public education has been perceived to be so compelling that nothing is seen to be wrong in penalizing parents, financially or otherwise, for choosing private schools for their children. Examination of entitlement to human rights can contribute to developing a more sympathetic view of the funding of private schools. Equality or justice, a fundamental human rights principle, requires that everyone be treated fairly or in a non-discriminating way and that any institution or person practising differential treatment prove relevant and over-riding grounds. This leads to the conclusion that acceptance of human rights principles in Canada imposes a prima facie obligation on government to support private-school parents no less than it does their public-school counterparts. This does not mean that the right to equal support may not be over-ridden. It does imply, however, that discriminatory presumptions underlying governmental policy on funding of private schools must now be reversed unless compelling reasons are demonstrated.

What impact have Minnesota's public school choice options had on the state's education system overall? Mr. Nathan and Mr. Boyd report on some unanticipated positive results, some negative predictions that did not come to pass, and a few unfortunate instances that underscore the need for careful monitoring of the programs and the schools participating in them. THE SUPREME Court's voucher decision in July 2002 adds to the importance of understanding the promise and challenges of school choice within the public school system.1 An analysis of Minnesota's experience with school choice programs between 1985 and 2002, conducted by researchers at Penn State University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute, shows that school choice programs can be valuable and can help to stimulate improvement in the broader system. But the research we conducted also makes clear that any school choice plan needs to be carefully monitored and that participating schools should be reviewed regularly.2 Data for this project were gathered in several ways. More than 2,000 students were surveyed, including students who took advantage of the state's Post-Secondary Enrollment Options law and students at six representative alternative schools in rural, urban, and suburban areas. More than 50 individuals, including representatives of key state education, community, and business organizations, were also interviewed. An extensive research and literature review was carried out, and, in cooperation with Minnesota's Department of Children, Families, and Learning (the state education department), information was gathered and analyzed from previously unpublished state records. A Brief Overview of Minnesota's School Choice Laws Minnesota began passing public school choice legislation in 1985 and has enacted four major programs. * Postsecondary options (1985). This program allows high school juniors and seniors to attend a college or university full or part time, with state funds following the students to pay tuition and lab and book fees. Any student admitted by a college or university is eligible, and the decision to apply is left to the student. * Second-chance options (1987). This program allows 12- to 21-year-old students who have not succeeded in traditional schools, according to a variety of measures, to attend smaller alternative schools created by a district, a group of districts, or a private organization that can convince a district to give it a contract. * Open (1988). This program allows K-12 students to move across district lines as long as the receiving district has room and the movement does not harm desegregation efforts. * Charter schools (1991). This program allows educators to create new schools or convert existing public or private nonsectarian schools into public charter schools with no admissions tests. The schools are responsible for improving achievement, or they are closed. These schools must be authorized or sponsored by one of several groups, including local districts, postsecondary institutions, or nonprofit organizations with at least $1 million in assets. Who Participates in School Choice? A great deal of discussion has taken place about enrollment and charter schools. But our research demonstrated that the largest school choice programs in Minnesota -- by far -- were those authorized by the 1987 law allowing students who had not succeeded in traditional school settings to attend a different, often much smaller, alternative school. This program is also the fastest growing. According to state figures, the number of students participating in second-chance programs grew from 4,050 in 1988-89 to more than 100,000 in 2000-01. Meanwhile, participation in the open program grew from 140 in 1988 to just over 28,000 in 2000-01. From 1988 to 2000, overall K-12 grew 17%, but the number of students participating in one of the four statewide choice programs grew more than 1,300%. …

The current education system in Indonesia has shown limited success. While it manages to widen participation access to allow primary students and junior secondary students to enjoy basic education, with figures reaching 99% and 94% respectively (BPS, 2015), it is the quality of education that has been of concern. With the budget size available for national education, improving the quality of education is the mandate of all parties concerned. The quality of education is below expectation as attested by a number of education quality measurement indices. There has been a significant drop in the average score in the national examination between 2015 and 2016, from 61.29 to 54.78 (Antaranews, 2016). Student performance in basic school subjects such as Mathematics and Science have also seen a decline as evidenced by research conducted by Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Studies (PIRLS), showing the national student performance lag behind that of other countries in the world. The budget allocation for education has also been under scrutiny, where there is a discrepancy between what is expected in the raising of Indonesian teacher salaries. The raise in salary does not actually correspond to a recorded improvement of teachers as suggested by De Ree J (2012). Findings from the World Bank that suggests most of the government spending on education went to teacher allowances, at $3.5 billion out of the total education spending of $7 billion. One of the possibilities for this discrepancy is identified in the absence of the empowerment of students and their parents. In many of the cases observed, parents are yet to voice their concern over the management of the educational system. Schools do not usually attend to the needs and suggestions of parents, as schools understand that they need only to report to the government agencies responsible for education. On the other hand, parents in private school demonstratemore power to participate in education systems as schools usually recognize their role as significant sources of funding for the school. This paper argues that in order to improve the school management and quality of education, the system of school financing needs to change. Students, represented by their parents, should have the liberty to control their finances and choose the schools deemed relevant to their own needs. By handing the power to choose to the hands of the parents/students, they can be held accountable for their own choice of education. By attaching education financing to the parents/students, it is argued that the students will have more power to choose which schools will give them better services and it will also bring more accountability to students as the real beneficiaries of education (Shah and Braun-Munzinger, 2006; Astle, S. Bryant, and C. Hotham,2011; Sjunnesson, 2012). This system has been implemented in several places with varying degrees of success, in countries such as the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Chile. There are four types school choice programs, namely school vouchers, education saving accounts (ESA), tax credit scholarship and individual tax credits and deduction. This paper will review the advantages and disadvantages of this program, by drawing on someexamples of best practice from some of the countries mentioned above. However, this paper will introduce and discuss the first two forms of school choice; school vouchers and Education Saving Account (ESA), as the tax credit scholarship and individual tax credits and deduction schemes use a tax-based approach which would be difficult to be implement in Indonesia since the Indonesian tax system is not as advanced as developed countries. As a study of school choice programs aimed at providing policy recommendations for the improvement of education performance in Indonesia, this paper will start by discussing the concept of school choice including school voucher and ESA programs and their respective benefits to the education system. The second section will discuss the implementation of school vouchers and ESA program worldwide and analyze success stories as well as the shortcomings in the implementation of both programs as a lesson learned for Indonesia. The last section will present some policy recommendations in order to provide policy frameworks that suit the implementation of school choice programs.

Milwaukee, one of the nation's most segregated metropolitan areas, implemented in 1990 a school choice program aimed at improving the education of inner-city children by enabling them to attend a selection of private schools. The results of this experiment, however, have been overshadowed by the explosion of emotional debate it provoked nationwide. In this book, John Witte provides a broad yet detailed framework for understanding the Milwaukee experiment and its implications for the market approach to American education. In a society supposedly devoted to equality of opportunity, the concept of school choice or voucher programs raises deep issues about liberty versus equality, government versus market, and about our commitment to free and universal education. Witte brings a balanced perspective to the picture by demonstrating why it is wrongheaded to be pro- or anti-school choice in the abstract. He explains why the voucher program seems to be working in the specific case of Milwaukee, but warns that such programs would not necessarily promote equal education--and most likely harm the poor--if applied universally, across the socioeconomic spectrum. The book begins with a theoretical discussion of the provision of education in America. It goes on to situate the issue of school choice historically and politically, to describe the program and private schools in Milwaukee, and to provide statistical analyses of the outcomes for children and their parents in the experiment. Witte concludes with some persuasive arguments about the importance of specifying the structural details of any choice program and with a call supporting vouchers for poor inner-city children, but not a universal program for all private schools. Voucher programs continue to be the most controversial approach to educational reform . The Market Approach to Education provides a thorough review of where the choice debate stands through 1998. It not only includes the "Milwaukee story" but also provides an analysis of the role, history, and politics of court decisions in this most important First Amendment area.