Alternative education, also known as non-traditional education or educational alternative, includes a number of approaches to teaching and learning other than mainstream or traditional education. Educational alternatives are often rooted in various philosophies that are fundamentally different from those of mainstream or traditional education. Yet there exists scant evidence as to whether or not these ventures actually work or, indeed, as to how they might be evaluated. The paper will concern itself with the dilemmas for research that arouse from the author’s study of a US alternative school and with the implications raised by that study for researching similar innovative structures in Europe, in particular in traditional and new EU countries where alternative education got the chance of appearing only in the 90s when the totalitarian ideas grew weak. The goal of the research in general is to compare alternative education systems in traditional EU countries (represented by France, Germany, Italy) and those joining in two last enlargements (represented by Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia) in terms of political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, class size, relationships between students and teachers, and a sense of community etc. Special attention is paid to the problem of assessment and measuring quality of alternative educational institutions.

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