As Ashley Berner’s No One Way to School (see review in this issue) establishes, educational pluralism and its antecedent, school choice, rests on civil society rather than statist models of schooling. In most societies, faith-based organizations are the most influential and enduring institutions of civil society, playing key roles in most successful social movements; thus educational pluralism goes hand and hand with religious activity and religious diversity. Ironically, relatively secular, social democratic nation states in Europe (as well as Canadian provinces) for the most part recognize this and thus offer a range of state funded religious schooling options; relatively religious, free-market-oriented America does not.
With the notable, and arguably heroic exception of Charles Glenn, remarkably few researchers tackle this topic. Accordingly, the area has numerous unfounded assumptions, unanswered (or wrongly answered) research questions, and analytic and philosophical puzzles. Why have different nation states pursued different paths regarding the state, religion, and schooling? What are the short and long term implications of those policy paths regarding student outcomes and social cohesion? What lessons can the experiences of diverse nations provide, and will those lessons apply elsewhere? What determines how elites and publics in different nation-states view these issues? How do relationships between the state, faiths, and schools work in developing nations?
Accordingly, Robert Maranto, Danish Shakeel, and Patrick Wolf invite your proposal for inclusion in a special issue of the Journal of School Choice addressing Religion and School Choice, to be published in Fall 2018 in Volume 12, issue 3. Please feel free to send your 500–1,000 word manuscript proposal to Robert Maranto ([email protected]) at any time; the final deadline for proposals is January 16, 2018, right after the Journal of School Choice Annual Conference (see call for conference proposals at http://iscrweb.org/). Manuscripts should run from 3,000 to 7,000 words, be in APA style, and come in two files, one with full affiliation and contact information and a second with author names and references scrubbed off. We seek a mix of empirical pieces and conceptual, legal, or historical essays. Submissions are due on March 2, 2018, to allow time for peer review and revisions: We stress that invitation does not guarantee acceptance. Final papers come due on or about May 25, 2018.