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America began the process of funding public education beyond the military colleges and American Indian School in 1965 with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). ESEA has evolved over the past 40 years to be called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB has had three major evaluations in which I participated in the last two evaluations by the U.S. Department of Education and each evaluation found that NCLB did not make a difference in the education lives of the students who received services from the program; but it did not harm. This chapter explored all the school choice options available to k-12 students in public and private schools; and reviewed the evaluation of these school choice options. Research reveals that for disadvantaged students, traditional public schools outperform private schools and charter schools. Voucher programs are also reviewed. This chapter concludes that educational equity is not adequately addressed by NCLB, school choice programs, charter schools or the traditional public schools.

This chapter attempts to untangle the complex arena of private sector engagement in education by discussing the definitional challenges associated with understanding the non-state sector and by introducing some conceptual frameworks employed in research on private education. A thematic review of research from the field of Comparative International Education is provided to give the reader an understanding of the diversity that characterizes private involvement as well as the interconnectedness of private actors, specifically drawing attention to findings that grapple with equity implications. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for developing a framework for research via posing questions that ought to be asked when designing, conducting and analyzing findings from studies into private sector engagement in education.

The pattern of racial segregation in U.S. elementary and secondary schools has changed significantly over the last 25 years. This chapter examines the relationship between the racial composition of schools and the choices white parents make concerning the schools their children attend. Restricted access files at the Bureau of the Census allow us to identify each household's Census block of residence and, in turn, suburban public school districts and urban public school attendance areas. We find that the racial composition of schools and neighborhoods are very important in the school and location decisions of white families.

The basic structure of Korea's formal education system is 6-3-3-4. This school system, which was established soon after its independence from Japan after World War II, has not been changed very much until recently. Primary education covers grades 1–6. Kindergarten has not been a part of the official school system until now, although making it a part of the pubic school system has been under discussion for some years. In the secondary education sector, there are two levels of schools: middle schools covering grades 7–9, and high schools covering grades 10–12. After 12 years of formal education, students advance to higher education. Typically, undergraduate degree (B.A. or B.S.) takes four years.

School choice is a global phenomenon with significant variations in terms of conception, design, and viability. In the city of Buenos Aires, State funding to the private sector of education allows for free choice. The purpose of this study is to analyze the values that are at stake in the family process of school choice. I draw on the theory of cultural evolution (Inglehart, 2018) to analyze the interviews. I interviewed 30 parents who live in the city of Buenos Aires and had to choose school for their children. It was possible to infer four categories that condense the materialistic and post-materialistic values: preeminence of materialistic values relative to security and protection; preeminence of materialistic values relative to academic achievement; preeminence of post-materialistic values relative to socialization and preeminence of post-materialistic values relative to political concerns.

With many countries having reached universal primary and secondary education, parents are increasingly investing in private tutoring as a means of ensuring that their children attend the best schools and universities. However, unlike the returns to years of schooling and effects of school quality on student achievement, the effects of spending on private tutoring have received limited attention. This chapter studies the impact of tutoring on higher educational outcomes using exogenous variation in tutoring expenditure caused by the imposition of a curfew on the operating hours of tutoring institutes in Korea. The estimated effects of the curfew highlight the severity of the college entrance rat race, with a 10 p.m. curfew constraining tutoring expenditure and increasing sleeping hours. I find diminishing marginal effects of tutoring on college entrance and positive effects on degree completion while the impact on college major followed varies across disciplines.

In Turkey, almost all high school graduates take private courses in order to be successful in the university entrance examination. The application of students for entering an institution of higher education is decided based on their rank in the examination results. One of the unintended outcomes of this measurement process is that high school education is overshadowed by the “examination event” and becomes for all intents and purposes dysfunctional. This chapter discusses the contradictions arising from an increasing dependency on private university preparatory institutions within the framework of public responsibility where education is conceptualized as a fundamental right. Turkish “private preparation courses” are analyzed in terms of their characteristics, which deepen the preexisting inequalities of the educational system and as a result their function as an instrument of “normalizing judgment.”

One of the biggest public school reform movements in the past decade has been the passage of charter school laws. Forty states and Washington, DC have approved legislation that allows charter schools to operate within their jurisdictional boundaries. The academic research thus far has focused on where charter schools have been located and the achievement consequences of the schools. This paper addresses a direct effect of charter schools by examining their enrollment consequences. We find that in Michigan approximately 17 percent of the students who enroll in charter schools were previously enrolled in private schools and approximately 83 percent move from the traditional public schools.

This chapter aims to provide the recent developments on the supplementary education system in Turkey. The national examinations for advancing to higher levels of schooling are believed to fuel the demand for Supplementary Education Centers (SECs). Further, we aim to understand the distribution of the SECs and of the secondary schools across the provinces of Turkey in order to evaluate the spacial equity considerations.

The evolution of the SECs and of the secondary schools over time are described and compared. The provincial distribution of the SECs, secondary schools, and the high school age population are compared. The characteristics of these distributions are evaluated to inform about spatial equity issues. The distribution of high school age population that attend secondary schools and the distribution of the secondary school students that attend SECs across the provinces are compared.

The evidence points out to significant provincial variations in various characteristics of SECs and the secondary schools. The distribution of the SECs is more unequal than that of the secondary schools. The provinces located mostly in the east and south east of the country have lower quality SECs and secondary schools. Further, the SEC participation among the secondary school students and the secondary school participation among the relevant age group are lower in some of the provinces indicating major disadvantages.

The review of the most recent developments about the SECs, examination and comparison of provincial distributions of the SECs and of the secondary schools are novelties in this chapter.