As the notion of choice becomes increasingly popular, schools are feeling a combination of pressure and freedom to become more distinctive in their learning philosophies and curricular emphases.

While the "neighborhood school" still defines much of America's public education landscape, there's a lot of variety that people are starting to embrace, from the scheduling differences of year-round schools, to subject emphases of magnet schools to the diverse structures and learning philosophies of charter schools.

The growth of the charter school movement has resulted in an incredible variety of "themes" that schools adopt to characterize themselves. These range from specific subject-area emphasis, like science or art, to the appreciation of a particular culture, to schools with themes like "community of learners" or "school of the future."

The most important thing to understand when looking at different types of schools is not simply the "type" or "theme" as a label, but how this designation is actually manifested at the school, and how it affects the experience that students at the school have.