Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice

Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice offers theoretical essays and empirical studies from leading researchers on religion and schooling.

Religious authority and emphasis on fairness and caring provide consistent rules governing the stable family and community relationships needed for individual growth and collective action. Religion is among the most important aspects of human life, likely hard-wired into human beings, and intimately intertwined with schooling. The book addresses key matters regarding religious pluralism in education, including the history of state-faith relationships in schooling, how religious faith can motivate teachers, whether religious education teaches tolerance, and whether practices in Europe and Asia hold lessons for American schools. The works in this volume can guide future scholarship on religious pluralism in education, particularly work related to civic values, character formation and public policy.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of School Choice.

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, edits the Journal of School Choice, and serves on his local school board. With others, he has produced 14 books, including School Choice in The Real World: Lessons from Arizona Charter Schools (Westview, 2001), President Obama and Education Reform (Palgrave, 2012) and Homeschooling in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2018).

M. Danish Shakeel is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. He coedited two special issues of the Journal of School Choice. He was identified as one of the Emerging Education Policy Scholars in US by Thomas B. Fordham Institute and American Enterprise Institute.