Articles

Litigating for school choice

January 26, 2011 | By PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION

Author: Daniel Himebaugh In case you haven’t heard, January 23-29 is National School Choice Week.  According to the organizers, this nationwide event is designed to call attention to the need for “a K-12 education system that provides a wide array of options” to parents and students. As I’ve pointed out before, PLF works di ...

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School Choice Week 2013 : School choice on trial in Texas

January 29, 2013 | By CHRISTINA MARTIN

School choice was on the witness stand in this case out of Texas that I blogged about last fall. A school choice group called TREE is asking the court to declare the Texas school system unconstitutionally “inefficient.” As part of that lawsuit, the Heartland Institute’s Joseph Bast testified that a private scholarship program fun ...

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School Choice Week 2013 : Enabling the choice to home school

January 29, 2013 | By TONY FRANCOIS

Last week my colleague Joshua Thompson posted on New Hampshire’s recently enacted school choice law, passed by the legislature over the governor’s veto.  Using the constitutionally validated means of providing tax credits for donations to school tuition organizations, Section 77-G:2 I(a) of the law allows tuition organizations to provi ...

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School Choice Week 2013 : open the Gates!

January 30, 2013 | By TIMOTHY SANDEFUR

Bill Gates, writing on CNN today, argues that schools could be improved by adopting the “Measures for Effective Teaching,” a project that would “develop reliable measures to identify great teaching.” No doubt teachers, like everyone else in the world, can do their jobs well or badly, and should be subject to some kind of eva ...

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School Choice Week 2013 : School choice week round-up

February 01, 2013 | By PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION

Last year at this time we highlighted 2011’s greatest school choice victory, Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn.  In that case, the United States Supreme Court authorized tax credits for private schools.  By holding that the plaintiffs did not have taxpayer standing to pursue their claim, the Supreme Court basically ensur ...

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Rural school choice : a personal perspective

January 29, 2014 | By JONATHAN WILLIAMS

People across the country are celebrating National School Choice Week. The vast majority of school choice discussions focus on the struggles of kids in failing urban school districts. However, school choice also has a role to play in rural areas. Schools in these communities enroll one of four American students. In these communities four out ̷ ...

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Lawsuit seeks to empower schools to fire bad teachers

January 31, 2014 | By PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION

Should California’s schools be able to fire ineffective teachers? This is the subject of Vergara v. California, which asks the court to declare unconstitutional several California laws that hinder schools’ ability to fire ineffective teachers. For example, one challenged law allows a school to tenure a teacher after only 18 months on th ...

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Welcome to National School Choice Week 2015

January 26, 2015 | By JOSHUA THOMPSON

For the fourth year in a row, PLF is celebrating National School Choice Week. You can see some of our previous celebrations of National School Choice Week here.  PLF is happy to join with so many scholars, organizations, schools, teachers, students, and parents around the country to get the word out in support of school choice.  School choice ...

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National School Choice Week : School Choice stories in North Carolina

January 26, 2015 | By WENCONG FA

Lawyers love to talk to other lawyers about the law. Non-lawyers are usually more interested in how the law will affect them. Here at Liberty Blog, I’ve discussed the legal arguments in two important school choice cases before the North Carolina Supreme Court. PLF filed a brief in support of school choice in those cases: Hart … ...