Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) leads the top state on the Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Education Freedom Report Card.

Photo: Luis Santana/Associated Press

Historic declines in math and reading scores during the lockdown era plus an embrace of anti-American propaganda by the educational establishment have left many U.S. parents desperate for new school options. They want public funding to go to the schools they choose for their children, rather than being automatically routed to local government monopolies. With impeccable timing, the Heritage Foundation is launching a new ranking of educational freedom among the states. Heritage’s inaugural report card, due out on Friday, finds that Florida, Arizona, Idaho and Indiana are America’s most parent-friendly jurisdictions across a number of measurements. Taxpayers may also find these states appealing.

The Heritage report, edited by Lindsey Burke, Jay Greene, Jonathan Butcher and Jason Bedrick, plainly states the problems with U.S. K-12 education:

Parents are rightly upset when schools indoctrinate their kids with woke racial and gender ideologies that do not reflect their values and contradict the ideals that make our republic great. School lockdowns contributed to greater mental health problems among students and forced masking disrupted learning. Parents are fed up with these oppressive and divisive policies coupled with lower achievement...
The pandemic made it abundantly clear that families need more education options than our rigid district school systems offer or education elitists allow.

The U.S. Department of Education’s recent release of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that American 9-year-olds are posting the worst math and reading scores since the 1990s. Meanwhile, the teaching that still occurs is often highly politicized. The Journal’s Nicole Ault and Megan Keller recently offered a chilling report on the destructive ideology embedded in a training program at a Pennsylvania school district.

Fortunately there is hope that competition for education funding can do for learning what competition does in every other sphere of human activity: put the customer in charge. Heritage reports that an eminently sensible idea from the late great economist Milton Friedman continues to win new fans:

Education choice options are gaining momentum . . .  In his seminal essay, The Role of Government in Education (1955), Friedman argued that government-administered schooling should be viewed as incompatible with a society that otherwise “takes freedom of the individual, or more realistically the family, as its ultimate objective, and seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on voluntary exchange among individuals for the organization of economic activity”—as the United States does.
It was in this essay that Friedman formalized his idea of separating the financing of education from the administration of schooling through school vouchers. As he explained: “[T]he administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society.”
It took 35 years for Friedman’s vision to come to fruition. In 1990, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, launched the first modern-day school voucher program. Today, 32 states and the District of Columbia operate 76 private-school-choice programs.

Vouchers that allow parents to pay for the schools they choose represent enormous reform. Potentially even better are education savings accounts, now statewide in Arizona, allowing for the a la carte purchase of educational services. Heritage quotes Friedman from an interview shortly before his death in 2006:

[T]here’s no reason to expect that the future market will have the shape or form that our present market has. How do we know how education will develop? Why is it sensible for a child to get all his or her schooling in one brick building? Why not add partial vouchers? Why not let them spend part of a voucher for math in one place and English or science somewhere else? Why should schooling have to be in one building? Why can’t a student take some lessons at home, especially now, with the availability of the Internet?

The new Heritage report card on educational freedom considers not just the availability of choice programs and the ability to freely compete with government schools but also measurements of transparency and return on educational investment, so that parents can make informed decisions. Even taxpayers without children are bound to be interested in the spotlight on education budgets. Heritage reports:

We consider nominal and cost-of-living-adjusted (COLA) spending per pupil, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) outcomes and dollars spent per NAEP point, teacher-to-non-teacher staff ratios, and unfunded teacher pension liabilities as a proportion of state gross domestic product.
Idaho took first place in this category, providing a high ROI for taxpayer spending on K–12 education.

The report describes the overall winners:

The top-ranked state across the board in our 2022 Education Freedom Report Card is Florida. The Sunshine State embraces education freedom across the board. Florida does exceptionally well in allowing parents to choose among private, charter, and district schools, is home to a strong ESA program, and ranks third overall for education choice. Florida ranks first among states for academic transparency. Among other protections, state lawmakers set a high standard for academic transparency, and reject critical race theory’s pernicious ideas.
The Sunshine State ranks second in regulatory freedom, making it one of the freest states for teachers and students to pursue education largely devoid of red tape. Although there is room for improvement, Florida ranks a respectable seventh overall in ROI for education spending. Families looking for a state that embraces education freedom, respects parents’ rights, and provides a decent ROI for taxpayers should look no further than Florida.
In second place overall this year is Arizona, a state that will certainly give Florida a run for its money next year in light of its recently expanded, now-universal ESA program. Idaho takes third place overall, thanks in large part to a strong ROI for taxpayer dollars and high levels of transparency to parents.
At the other end of the spectrum, New Jersey, New York, and the District of Columbia came in 49th, 50th, and 51st, respectively, doing little to provide transparency, accountability, and choice to families.

As for the losers, parents and taxpayers in New Jersey and New York will probably not be surprised to learn that their states finished 49th and 50th, respectively. Perhaps the new report card can serve as a relocation guide.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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