Modern forms

A wide variety of educational alternatives exist at the elementary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education. These generally fall into four major categories: school choice, alternative school, independent school, and home-based education. These general categories can be further broken down into more specific practices and methodologies.

School choice

The public school options include entirely separate schools in their own settings as well as classes, programs, and even semi-autonomous "schools within schools." Public school choice options are open to all students in their communities, though some have waiting lists. Among these are charter schools, combining private initiatives and state funding; and magnet schools, which attract students to particular themes, such as performing arts.

Alternative school

An alternative school is an educational establishment with a curriculum and methods that are nontraditional.

Many such schools were founded in the United States in the 1970s as an alternative to mainstream or traditional classroom structure. A wide range of philosophies and teaching methods are offered by alternative schools; some have strong political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, while others are more ad-hoc assemblies of teachers and students dissatisfied with some aspect of mainstream or traditional education. In 2003 there were approximately 70 alternative schools in the United Kingdom. In the UK public funding is not available for alternative schools and therefore alternative schools are usually fee-paying institutions. In the USA an increasing number of public school systems are offering alternative streams (language-immersion, Montessori, Waldorf), but the majority of alternative schools are still independent and thus without governmental support. In many states of the United States alternative schools are used differently, in particular to house students who have had discipline or legal problems, and in those states alternative schools are organized to have a strong punitive aspect emphasizing discipline and providing a greatly inferior education. It is common in those states for children found to be delinquent by courts to be sentenced to alternative school as a punishment. It is also common in the United States for public school systems to operate alternative schools as a place to segregate special needs students, such as students with emotional disabilities. In such cases they are often mixed with delinquents.