Aug 21, 2025

Dear Colleague,

Welcome back. We are excited to share the latest from The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

School choice didn't close Arizona schools

Washington Examiner, Jason Bedrick

The Washington Post’s recent article on Arizona school closures offers a textbook example of how to tell a compelling story while omitting the most important — and inconvenient — facts. The piece focuses on the Roosevelt Elementary School District’s decision to close five schools, painting it as a cautionary tale about the dangers of school choice, particularly the expansion of eligibility for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to all children in 2022...

Arizona's $20 Billion School District Surplus: Empty Buildings, Full Bank Accounts

AZ Free News, Jason Bedrick, and Matthew Ladner

Every year, a horde of school district officials and their lobbyists come before the state legislature, rattling their tin cups, begging for more money for their supposedly underfunded schools. They tell sob stories about crumbling buildings and underpaid teachers who had to pay for school supplies from their own pockets. Their schools, they say, are financially starved. Hogwash. School bureaucrats don’t want you to know it, but school spending is at an all-time high, and Arizona’s school districts are sitting on more than $20 billion in cash reserves and buildings they don’t need while student achievement craters...

Why School Choice Gives Families Options and More

The Washington Post, Jason Bedrick, and Matthew Ladner

The real issue behind the closure of five schools in Arizona’s Roosevelt Elementary School District isn’t funding or school choice — it’s academic failure. Only 13 percent of Roosevelt students passed state math assessments compared with 32 percent statewide and 20 percent in districts with similar demographics. Parent reviews on GreatSchools average just 2.1 out of 5 stars, citing rampant bullying and inadequate supervision...

Exposing the ‘Weapons of Mass Deception’: How State Grading Systems Obscure School Performance

The Daily Signal, Jason Bedrick 

For decades, American education reformers have promised that technocratic accountability systems would transform our schools. We’ve spent billions implementing standardized tests, creating elaborate school-rating systems, and demanding “data-driven” improvements. Yet two new reports reveal an uncomfortable truth: These government accountability systems aren’t just ineffective—they’re actively misleading parents and policymakers while failing the students they claim to serve...

Congress Needs To Stop Preserving the Education Department

The Daily Signal, Jonathan Butcher 

Like a teacher cleaning the classroom before school opens, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is sweeping out the inefficiencies in her agency—but instead of helping, some in the U.S. Senate want to shove dust under the rug. Education department officials are doing just what was promised in an executive order earlier this year calling on the secretary to downsize and begin to close operations: removing federal rules and allowing local officials to make more decisions to help students. To wit, last week, the education agency approved a proposal from Missouri to give educators there more flexibility with new approaches to student testing...

Arizona’s $7.8 Billion Question: Why Are School Districts Hoarding Cash While Criticizing ESA Balances?

Arizona Daily Independent, Matthew Ladner and Jason Bedrick 

A man with a beam in his own eye should certainly address that before seeking out motes in others’ eyes. School-choice critics obsessed with the motes in Arizona’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program would do well to heed that advice, especially when there is a gigantic beam in the public school system. Arizona’s school district lobbyists and their media/ political allies have been criticizing Arizona’s ESA program for having $440 million in funds that families have yet to utilize—equivalent to about $5,000 per each of the nearly 85,000 students in the program. Meanwhile, Arizona school districts continue to carry growing financial balances of unspent funds—north of $7.8 billion or $7,000 per student—which dwarf those in the ESA program...

Conservatives, Stop Funding Radical Leftists

The Daily Signal, Jay Greene and Jason Bedrick 

Stop giving money to your adversaries. This should seem like an obvious rule of politics. But until the Trump administration went after funding for NPR, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other leftist organizations, conservatives couldn’t seem to stop handing taxpayer dollars to activists determined to undermine their principles. While President Donald Trump has made a significant dent in this foolish habit, conservatives, especially in state governments, continue to fund their political opponents. Case in point? Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits graduates from selective universities to serve as teachers in challenging urban and rural settings...

Revive Civics Education for America's 250th

The Washington Examiner, Madison Marino Doan, and Jonathan Butcher

“America is not perfect, but perfection is not its promise. Opportunity is. And as long as we remain faithful to that idea, the American Dream will endure.” So wrote a high school student from Illinois, one of the winners of the 2025 America’s Field Trip contest. Sponsored by the U.S. Semiquincentennial, or the America 250 Commission, the contest invited students to reflect on a simple yet powerful question: “What does America mean to you?”...

The Great Grade Giveaway

The Daily Signal, Madison Marino Doan

You get an A! And you get an A! On campuses this fall, some students might feel like they’ve wandered into their own Oprah episode, except the prize is a transcript filled with top marks. For decades, the share of As has been swelling like a balloon. At Harvard, nearly 80% of grades in the 2020-2021 school year were in the “A” range. Back in 2001, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield called this out, warning that grade inflation “devalues the currency of the academic realm” and turns grades into “worthless tokens of self-esteem.” Two decades later, his point is looking uncomfortably prophetic...

George Washington University's Indifference to Antisemitism

The Daily Signal, Jonathan Butcher

How many students must be harassed before a university tries to stop the offenses? Jewish students at George Washington University are still counting, but in the meantime, the U.S. Department of Justice is stepping in. If the recent examples of civil rights-related settlements at Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania are any indication, George Washington officials will likely face requirements to realign with federal civil rights laws and perhaps even a hefty fine for years of inaction...

FIRE Goes Off the Rails

The Daily Signal, Jay P. Greene, and Simon Hankinson

Like many an institution that started with a clear, legitimate purpose and drifted left, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has a new name—and, with it, a new and distorted set of priorities. Rebranding as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression allowed it to keep the acronym, FIRE, but to abandon its tight focus on protecting free speech and ideological diversity on university campuses...

University Systems Create Accreditor Focused on Merit and Outcomes

The Daily Signal, Adam Kissel

Today’s higher education accreditors let colleges and universities get away with mediocrity: low graduation rates, highly negative return on investment, and activism that looks little like scholarship. Accreditors are meant to vouch for college quality and to recommend improvements—but they rarely hold institutions accountable for such travesties as a four-year graduation rate under 15%, a negative return on investment in six figures, and pervasive antisemitism...

The Time for a Civil-Rights Audit Is Now

The James G. Martin Center, Adam Kissel

The best time for a university to perform a civil-rights audit was two full years ago, right after the Supreme Court announced its decisions in the Students for Fair Admissions cases. The next best time is now.

In short, the Supreme Court wrote in 2023, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” That means ending discrimination not only in admissions but across the entire university. Furthermore, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has long been interpreted to ban racial discrimination across all of a university’s programs and activities. Even the Biden administration’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education regularly found, for example, that so much as alerting students to an external discriminatory scholarship was a Title VI violation...

From Mass Deception to Meaningful Accountability: A Brighter Future for K–12 Education

The Heritage Foundation, Matthew Ladner

A bipartisan coalition in the late 20th century intended to spur improvement of the K–12 education system through test-based accountability and public-school choice. The ability of this coalition to institute meaningful accountability proved extremely limited. State accountability systems morphed into hollow bureaucratic compliance rituals delivering participation trophies rather than real consequences. Now, a brighter future beckons. Private organizations have supplanted state school ratings. The guardians of the education status quo cannot easily subvert private organizations, and the public has a greater degree of trust in them. The broadening of choice from an exclusive focus on schools to a broader universe of education methods liberates choice from conventional supply constraints. Accordingly, growth in formula-funded, universally available, and multi-use programs, such as those in Arizona and Florida, have exceeded that of previous education choice programs.

The SCOTUS ruling on Trump's reduction in force will streamline Department of Education operations | Jonathan Butcher on Real America's Voice 

The Heritage Foundation has opened a second round of applications for Innovation Prizes related to America's 250th Anniversary. Applications for the Prizes are now open through September 2nd!

We welcome bold, innovative projects that focus on the following:

• Building civic awareness and encouraging Americans to engage in civic life
• Celebrating America’s 250th anniversary
• Educating citizens about America’s founding principles
• Inspiring patriotism, particularly among the younger generations
• Sharing our history and founders’ stories in creative ways
• Teaching Americans about our government’s foundational tenets

For more information and to apply, please visit our website.