At its most basic and uncontroversial, school choice is a reform movement focused on affording parents the right to choose which school their child attends. That said, the concept and the issues surrounding choice are anything but uncontroversial.

Private school choice—which allows parents to use government-funded vouchers to send their children to private schools—touches on an array of tough questions about parents’ and students’ rights, church-state separation, and, as some people see it, the very survival of public schools. By comparison, public school choice, in its various forms, gives parents the option of transferring their children out of lower-performing public schools to higher-performing public schools.