2025 Education Freedom Report Card Released

K-12 spending has quadrupled since 1960, with no meaningful academic gains

Jan 07, 2026

Heritage Foundation has released their 2025 Education Freedom Report Card.

Note: Prior versions of their webpage were not archived with the Wayback Machine. I have now added educationreportcard.heritage.org to their archived webpages.1 If there are others webpages you would like to add to Wayback Machine’s archives:

Visit web.archive.org/save
Enter the URL of the page you want to archive.
Click “Save Page” and let the Wayback Machine do the rest!

In 2022, The Heritage Foundation released their inaugural “Education Freedom Report Card”. Since then a baseline has been set, their metrics improved, and areas of interest expanded.

Public school teachers make up approximately 47% of all education jobs.

This year’s report focuses on these 5 key points:

Methodology

Education Choice
1. States with more education choice have more educational freedom. “Education Choice” has five sub-categories: (a) Private School Choice, (b) Private School Choice Program Design, (c) Charter Schools, (d) Homeschooling, and (e) Public School Choice.
Teacher Freedom
1. The burden of regulation on education providers limits the innovative options that they can provide. “Teacher Freedom” has four categories of interest: (a) Barriers to Teaching, (b) Chief Diversity Officers, (c) Common Core Testing Requirement, and (d) Praxis Testing Requirement.
Transparency
1. Transparency in the education system gives parents information to make the best decisions about their children’s education. “Transparency” has three subcategories: (a) Strong Critical Race Theory Law, (b) Parental Empowerment, and (c) Accountability.
Return on Investment
1. Education freedom includes the freedom of taxpayers to keep more of their money. Private school choice programs also tend to spend less money for the same or better outcomes. “Return on Investment” has four subcategories and variables: (a) Per-Pupil Spending, (b) NAEP Point per Dollar Spent, (c) Teacher-to-Non-Teacher Ratio, and (d) Unfunded Pension Liability.
Civics Education
1. The Heritage Foundation’s Civics Education score evaluates states’ civics education via five weighted metrics: classical education schools per capita (15%), based on Heritage’s database and NCES student data per 100,000 K-12 pupils; Classical Learning Test acceptance (15%), a yes/no for state colleges/scholarships; civics course requirements (30%), scoring 1 point for full-year or 0.5 for half-year high school courses per Hoover 2024 data; citizenship test (30%), awarding 0-2 points for requiring/passing the U.S. citizenship exam or equivalent at 60%+ for graduation, also from Hoover; and NAEP civics performance (10%), using Annenberg’s 2024 state scores report.

Florida has ranked #1 every year, with Arizona consistently at #2. The reports highlight expanding school choice across the U.S., with the number of K-12 students benefiting from private school choice programs more than doubling from under 600,000 in 2020 to about 1.2 million in 2025. 2025 was a particularly strong year, with new or expanded education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers,2 or tax credits in states including Tennessee, Louisiana, Indiana, New Hampshire, Idaho, Missouri, Wyoming, and Texas—making over half of U.S. students eligible for private choice programs.

Only 22% of eighth graders are proficient in civics.

Texas entered the top 10 for the first time due to its new universal ESA program, while many top-ranked states are in the Midwest and Bible Belt regions. Overall, the reports show steady progress toward greater parental empowerment, limiting DEI initiatives and union influence.

Heritage Foundation: Where Does Your State Rank on Education Freedom?3

September 9, 2025 | Daily Citizen

Since 1950, public school enrollment is up 100%, teacher jobs are up 243%, and administration jobs are up 709%.

Indiana is looking to lead next years charts on literacy proficiency!

3,000 children repeating third grade under new Indiana literacy requirement

Chief Diversity Officers are employed in 48% of school districts with 15,000+ students.

Landmark year for school choice chronicled in Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Education Freedom report4

September 19, 2025 | The Lion

I first posted about Heritage Foundation's Inaugural Education Freedom Report Card in December of 2022. You can read that post below.

Education Freedom Report Card

Schooling Delaware

December 9, 2022

This year, Heritage published their inaugural Education Freedom Report Card to assess education freedom in each state.

Read full story

I can’t speak on behalf of other states, but I can speak to the data I saved from Delaware.

Delaware rankings have PLUMMETED from when I first reported on this back in 2022!5

(Rankings out of all 50 states + D.C.)

Delaware (2022 - 2025 comparison)

•Overall Rank
#31 (2022) 🔻 #44 (2025)

•Education Choice Rank:
#40 (2022) 🔻 #41 (2025)

•Transparency Rank:
#07 (2022) 🔻#37‼️(2025)

•Teacher/Regulatory Freedom:*
#51 (2022) 🔺️ #43 (2025)

•Spending/ROI Rank):
#14 (2022) 🔻 #30 (2025)

•Civic Education Rank
Not Present (2022) 🟥 #41 (2025)

*In 2022, Delaware ranked DEAD LAST in Regulatory Freedom! There is an explanation for this, and it is not as welcomed as some may expect. Due to teacher shortages, Delaware legislators were pushed to apply a worksite band-aid consisting of a napkin and some duct tape.

For this reason, Delaware will now give a provisional certificate for teachers. We are not attracting top high school students into the profession; salary has much to do with that. We need good thinkers and problem solvers in this profession- which Delaware is not producing!

New Jersey is eliminating those same procedural teacher shortage ‘barriers’…

…WITH A 🔥BLOW TORCH!🔥