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Most Western democracies have long provided public funding to non-government schools, but the reasons for these arrangements differ with significant practical consequences.

LIBERAL STATES, AUTHORITARIAN FAMILIES: CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION IN EARLY MODERN THOUGHT By Rita Koganzon OXFORD, 224 PAGES, $74 PARENTAL AUTHORITY has been an issue of lively and often bitter public [...]

Almost all Western democracies other than the United States provide public support to parents who wish to send their children to private schools with a distinctive religious character. In the [...]

Adoption of policies supporting school choice, in most Western democracies, has served to settle social and political conflicts related to religion. Conflicts related to racial integration played a similar role more recently in the United States where, contrary to other countries, religion has served to retard rather than to advance public support for school choice. Schools with a religious character established by groups immigrating to the United States functioned as alternatives alongside the common public school; only with the post-war adoption of choice as a remedy to racial segregation, and the diverse challenge to public schools by religious conservatives and secular progressives, has public support for school choice become widespread.

AI offer first-hand account of a key stage in the development of parental choice in American public schooling, when Massachusetts state officials, concerned not to repeat the trauma and disruption resulting from mandatory reassignment of students to achieve desegregation in Boston, persuaded and helped more than a dozen other cities to adopt plans based upon guided parental choice. By 1993 over 200,000 students (25% of the state's public school enrollment) were attending schools in communities relying on parental choice to address the isolation of minority students; most of these had abandoned residence-based assignments altogether. This account describes the means by which this was achieved. This essay does not discuss charter schools, vouchers, tuition tax credits, faith-based schools or educational savings accounts; those came in the future. It is reasonable to believe, however, that the widespread and successful adoption of parental choice of local public schools in Massachusetts helped to prepare the way for such further developments nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There's a book I keep in the bathroom at home, a big blue volume of 750 pages titled, somewhat ironically, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes. A terrific book to [...]

Paul Rowan Brian ('Muslims in American Politics,' November) has deftly laid bare the source of Muslims' predicament in the United States: their profound anxiety over being accepted as 'real' Americans, [...]

Steven D. Smith can try to return prayer to public schools ('Why School Prayer Matters,' May), but the horse is out of the barn. Many public schools have voluntary prayer--See [...]

Several related questions underpin much of the discussion about the growing presence of Muslim immigrants and their children in the United States. Will these immigrants and their children become loyal [...]

Researchers assessed through quantitative and qualitative methods the relationships among high school students of different racial/ethnic groups in two high-performing urban high schools, one Evangelical and the other Catholic, and explored with students and staff the effect of the distinctive mission and religious worldview of each school on student self-understanding and those relationships. This investigation suggests that the students at the Catholic school place a stronger emphasis upon "making it" in professional careers, while those at the Evangelical school were relatively more focused upon being a transforming influence upon society.