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Dear Colleagues:

I am thrilled to be joining the outstanding education team at Heritage. For those of you who don’t know me, I was previously a Distinguished Professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, where I founded and led the Department of Education Reform for the last 16 years. Prior to that I was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. I have a Ph.D in political science from Harvard and a B.A in history from Tufts University.

I’ve been studying and writing about education for more than a quarter century now. During that time I have seen enormous progress in the expansion of education freedom. When I graduated college there were only two, century-old, private school choice programs in the country with a few thousand students enrolled in them. Charter schools did not exist yet. No modern voucher, tax-credit, or education savings account (ESA) programs to assist families in choosing private schools had been adopted.

As of January 2021, there were 67 public programs supporting families who chose to enroll their children in private schools with more than 600,000 students using a voucher, ESA, or tax-credit scholarship, and another 300,000 subsidized by tax credits or deductions. During the current legislative session, which is being called “the year of school choice,” 7 new private school choice programs were adopted and 21 existing programs were expanded. If we include charter schools, another 3.3 million students are participating in school choice. So, we have gone from roughly zero students able to access choice schools to more than 4 million students currently. And the rate of increase is accelerating.

The chart below from EdChoice shows just how great that growth has been.

This is an incredible improvement in family control over the education of their children during my professional career. But it is important to remember that we have more than 50 million students currently enrolled in public schools, so 4 million is still a modest percentage of the total even if it is an enormous leap from near zero over the last three decades.

It is also important to note the extent to which control over the content of education and operation of schools has been centralized in state and federal departments of education, restricting family and local community control over the education of their children. Distant and largely unaccountable bureaucrats increasingly determine what students are taught, how they are disciplined, what bathrooms they should use, and on what sports teams they should play.

The effort to put families and communities in charge of the education of their children has been two steps forward and one step back. Appreciating the progress we have made while understanding the challenges we continue to face makes me all the more convinced of how important our work in the Center for Education Policy is. Together we can make big strides forward and prevent further backsliding.

Here's What Else We've Been Working On. Over at the Daily Signal, Lindsey Burke walks through some of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers' recent and past resolutions considered at their annual conventions. As she explains, this year's resolutions are just the most recent examples of progressive positions taken and promoted by these special interest groups. She highlights one resolution approved at the NEA convention that took place earlier this month which reads:

"The Association will further convey that...it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory."

Burke goes on to note that "contrary to those who claim 'teaching critical race theory isn't happening in classrooms,' as stated in a recent NBC headline, the NEA resolution promotes the use of the doctrine in 14,000 school districts across the country."

Interested in joining our team? Apply to be our new Research Associate and Project Coordinator. Warmly, Jay P. Greene Senior Research Fellow Center for Education Policy Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity The Heritage Foundation

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