About Us

The Alliance for School Choice is the nation’s vanguard organization for promoting, implementing and enhancing K-12 educational choice. In collaboration with a host of national and state allies, we create opportunities for systemic and sustainable educational reform that puts parents in charge.

What We Do

The Alliance for School Choice works to build support for and implement publicly funded school choice programs that provide low-income families with educational opportunity. In doing so, the Alliance not only protects those programs that are already serving families in need, but also expands and enhances them and -- most importantly -- initiates new, larger and even more effective models.

The Alliance ’s key activities can be broken into two broad realms:

State-based Activities

The Alliance for School Choice regularly assesses the best opportunities for creating and expanding publicly funded school choice programs (such as tuition vouchers and tax credits) across the country. Based on those assessments, it targets states for intensive support.This support includes the direct allocation of financial resources, assistance with public information campaigns and activist training programs. At later stages, our companion organization, Advocates for School Choice, often intervenes with lobbying activities to help pass legislation.

National Activities

The Alliance for School Choice follows an ambitious national agenda, leading the school choice movement through the strategic cultivation of resources and leaders.These activities include:

• Facilitating an innovative development operation to cultivate funding for effective school choice models
• Facilitating leadership development conferences to cultivate state and national leadership on issues such as program design and implementation
• Hosting a series of task force summits to identify solutions to issues critical to the success of the movement.Topics for these task forces include offensive use of litigation, tax credit bill design and accountability
• Sponsoring original research studies, on topics in the movement such as program outcomes, applications of the No Child Left Behind legislation that require critical analysis
• Hosting regular gatherings of allies, activists, scholars and philanthropists in the movement to discuss strategy and to galvanize the movement

What We Believe

• We believe that the United States’ educational system currently faces an unprecedented crisis, demonstrated by multiple facts, including:
• 44% of black students and 46% percent of Hispanic students do not graduate from high school (Public High School Graduation and College Readiness Rates in the United States by Jay P. Greene, Ph.D. and Greg Forster, Ph.D. )
• The average black high school senior graduates four grade levels below the average white high school senior (No Excuses by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom)
• In some cities, as many as 85% of children from low-income families fail to graduate from high school (Voucher Wars by Clint Bolick)
• We believe that it is fundamentally unjust that only certain members of society – determined primarily by their economic status – are able to choose schools or quality for their children, while others – primarily the urban poor – are forced to send their children to schools that frequently destine them to lives of failure
• We believe that the most effective means of creating systemic and sustainable K-12 reform for our educational system is by giving low-income parents the same right to choose the best education for their children that most Americans already enjoy
• We believe that school choice is the most direct and transformational of all existent education reform proposals, as it motivates improvement in student achievement, public school performance, and parental involvement
• We believe that the concept of equal educational opportunity – as articulated in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court decision – is fundamental to the success of our nation