Public Schooling in America: Our 2026 Report Card on the States

From teacher qualifications and satisfaction, to lack of student protections in charter and voucher schools, our new national report examines the state laws and policies that support or undermine each state’s public schools and the students who attend them.

We don’t evaluate the performance of students and teachers. We evaluate the statehouses that either support or undermine them.

What the data revealed is a troubling and consistent pattern. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives — charter schools, voucher programs, and education savings accounts — are the same states most neglectful of their public schools, their teachers, and their students.

We rate states on:

• Privatization: The expansion of charter schools and vouchers, as well as the guardrails and limits on them to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
• Protections for Homeschooled Students: Laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
• School Funding: Sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
• Conditions for Teaching and Learning: Whether state laws create the conditions that allow students and teachers to thrive. 

Our analysis found a strong, statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and public school support (p < 0.0001). Privatization and disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.