Given what’s recently happened in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Indiana, Florida, Arkansas, Utah, and Iowa, I’ve been waiting with considerable anticipation for an update to the Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card.
It will be interesting to see how the rankings change given all the new states that have adopted and/or expanded school choice.
In the meantime, the American Legislative Exchange Council has just released its Index of State Education Freedom, which now gives us another way of measuring the degree to which states are putting students first.
Here’s a map showing grades for all the states. The very best states – Florida, Arkansas, and Indiana – are dark blue.
The worst states are grey. No big surprises, other than North Dakota, Mississippi, and Nebraska.
Here’s a table showing the best to the worst.
Shame on Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York for being the worst of the worst.
The ALEC Index looks at five factors – school choice, charter schools, home schooling, virtual schooling, and open enrollment.
All the factors get equal weighting, but I think school choice is easily the most important one.
Here’s a map showing how states rank on that basis.
Kudos to Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, and Iowa for getting perfect scores in this all-important category (I assume the publication was finalized before North Carolina enacted its choice program, so the Tarheel State obviously no longer deserves an “F”).
And, with any luck, Texas will approve choice later this year and also get rid of its failing grade in this category.
P.S. For those who prefer an international perspective, there are very successful school choice systems in Canada, Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.
