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Sue Kingery Woltanski: #1 in Education Freedom Is Not #1 in Education

The Heritage Foundation has ranked Florida first in educational freedom. Sue Kingery Woltanski explains why this is no reason to celebrate. Reposted with permission. 

Heritage’s ranking rewards a particular set of education policies. It tells us far less about how Florida’s students are actually performing.

When the Heritage Foundation ranks Florida #1 for Education Freedom (for the 5th year in a row), before anyone starts celebrating, it is important to understand what Heritage is actually measuring.

This is a ranking of education policy, not educational performance.

The Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card does not primarily measure whether students can read, whether they are proficient in math, whether they graduate from high school, or whether they are prepared for college or careers.

Instead, it evaluates states according to Heritage’s definition of “education freedom” — essentially, how closely a state’s education policies align with the policies Heritage favors.

That distinction matters.

A state can rise in this ranking by expanding vouchers, reducing regulation of charters, private schools and homeschooling, lowering barriers to entering teaching, adopting Heritage-preferred policies involving curriculum, pronouns and parental rights, expanding classical education, or spending less per pupil — without demonstrating that its students are learning more.

The Education Freedom Report Card ranks states in five categories:

Education Choice

Measures how extensively families can choose alternatives to their assigned district school and how lightly those alternatives are regulated.

Heritage rewards states for:

Heritage’s methodology is explicit that states lose points when voucher programs require participating private schools to administer certain standardized tests, use open enrollment, accept the voucher as full tuition, or obtain accreditation. Heritage describes such requirements as “burdensome regulations.”

In short: This category primarily measures the availability, funding and deregulation of alternatives to assigned public schools.

Florida ranks #1 here for the second year in a row. Heritage applauds Florida for “empowering families to choose among private, charter, and district schools, as well as other learning environments.” Florida also receives credit for universal K–12 education savings accounts and for what Heritage considers the autonomy of homeschooling families.

None of those measures asks whether Florida students are performing better academically because of these policies. The state earns points for having adopted and expanded the policies themselves.

Teacher Freedom

Measures barriers to entering the teaching profession and selected state or district policies that Heritage views as restricting teacher autonomy.

Heritage rewards states for:

Heritage says traditional teacher licensing represents a “major barrier” to entering the profession and awards states points for creating more alternative routes into teaching.

In short: This category rewards states for reducing state regulation of who may teach and for adopting other personnel and curriculum policies favored by Heritage.

Florida ranks second here, behind Arizona, and Heritage calls it “one of the freest states for teachers and students to pursue education largely devoid of red tape.” Forty-three percent of Florida’s teachers are alternatively certified, meaning they entered teaching through a route other than a traditional university-based teacher-preparation program. Florida also receives credit for license reciprocity, not requiring the Praxis examination, and moving away from Common Core-aligned testing.

But Heritage would go considerably further.

The organization explicitly says it wants states to “eliminate teacher certification requirements altogether.” Heritage argues that traditional certification prevents otherwise qualified people from entering classrooms and says it will work with governors and state policymakers either to expand alternative certification or eliminate certification requirements.

Heritage has also published model teacher-certification legislation expanding pathways into teaching beyond traditional teacher-preparation programs.

So “Teacher Freedom” does not measure whether Florida has better-prepared teachers, more experienced teachers, higher teacher retention, or more effective teachers.

It measures whether Florida has reduced the credentialing and regulatory requirements Heritage considers barriers to entering the profession.

That raises a legitimate policy question hidden inside the word freedom:

What minimum preparation should the public reasonably expect from someone entrusted with a classroom of children?

Heritage’s answer is considerably less state regulation than exists today.

Academic Transparency

Despite its name, this category measures considerably more than whether parents and taxpayers can see what is being taught.

It includes parental authority, curriculum and culture-war policies, public access to school information, and school-governance practices.

Heritage rewards states for:

Those measures are explicitly incorporated into Heritage’s methodology.

In short: This category measures a particular conception of parental control, school governance and education policy, along with more conventional transparency measures.

It is not surprising that Florida ranks #1 here because, after all, Florida is where Governor Ron DeSantis famously declared “woke goes to die.”

Florida earns points because its Legislature and state government have enacted policies that correspond closely with Heritage’s positions on CRT, parental rights, pronouns, curriculum access and school governance.

Again, this is fundamentally a policy score.

The category does not measure whether those policies have improved reading, mathematics, attendance, graduation rates or any other student outcome.

Civic Education

Measures a combination of classical-education policies, civics requirements and student performance in civics.

Heritage rewards states for:

Here the weighting is particularly revealing.

Only 10% of the Civic Education score is based on how students actually perform on the NAEP Civics assessment.The remaining 90% reflects policies and institutional choices.

That may be the clearest illustration of what this report card is actually doing.

A category called “Civic Education” is overwhelmingly a measure of what policies a state has adopted rather than what its students actually know about civics.

Florida ranks second in civic education, behind Louisiana. Florida receives credit for its classical schools, acceptance of the Classic Learning Test, its civics-course requirement and its civics assessment.

Florida high-school students must earn a half-credit in U.S. Government and take the Florida Civic Literacy Examination, but Heritage appears to overstate Florida’s requirement when it describes passing the test as necessary for high-school graduation.

That matters because Heritage awards substantially more points to states that require students to pass a citizenship or civics examination than to states that merely require students to take one.

Return on Investment

Measures public-school spending in relation to selected academic outcomes, with lower spending generally improving a state’s standing when outcomes are similar.

Heritage considers:

Heritage describes this category as reflecting taxpayers’ “freedom” to keep more of their money and calculates academic return by dividing average fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP reading and math scores by per-pupil spending.

In short: This category does not simply ask how well students perform. It asks how much academic performance a state gets for each dollar spent.

This is where Florida does considerably worse, ranking 16th.

Florida already spends comparatively little per pupil, but its combined fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP reading and mathematics performance is much closer to the middle of the states.

Heritage’s own prescription is revealing: Florida can improve its ranking by limiting the growth of non-teaching staff, reducing pension liabilities and improving NAEP performance.

In other words:

When conventional student academic performance finally enters the ranking in a meaningful way, Florida’s standing drops.

So What Does “#1 in Education Freedom” Actually Mean?

Heritage combines these five areas into its overall Education Freedom ranking:

Its methodology standardizes the underlying variables and combines them to determine state rankings.

So consider what can improve a state’s Education Freedom score:

But consider what is not independently measured as an indication of overall educational quality:

And even in Civic Education, actual student performance on NAEP accounts for only 10% of that score.

That is why the distinction between policy and performance is so important.

When Heritage says Florida is #1 in Education Freedom, it is not saying Florida has America’s highest-performing education system.

It is saying that Florida has done more than other states to enact the collection of education policies Heritage defines as “freedom.”

Those policies include universal school choice and deregulation, culture-war measures Heritage places under academic transparency, reduced barriers to entering teaching, and an emphasis on obtaining academic results at relatively low public cost.

People can debate whether those are good policies.

But before Florida’s leaders hold up this ranking as evidence of educational success, Floridians should understand what was actually graded.

Heritage is grading the policies. It is not grading the performance of Florida’s schools or students.

And “#1 in Education Freedom” should not be confused with “#1 in education.”