Colleen Hroncich
Colleen Hroncich
Milton and Rose Friedman.
As educational freedom and school choice have spread in recent years, it’s become clear that not all programs are created equal. But how to rank them is tricky. Many organizations, including Cato, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC, have education freedom indices that incorporate a variety of metrics.
The latest—and simplest—ranking was released last month: the EdChoice Friedman Index. It’s named after the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, founder of EdChoice (originally called the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice), who is generally considered the father of the modern school choice movement. It looks exclusively at private school choice, whereas others include things such as charter schools, homeschool regulations, and teacher freedom.
In recent years, there has been tremendous growth in the availability of educational choice programs that allow funding to follow students to educational options beyond their residentially assigned public school. These include vouchers and tax credit scholarships that can be used for private school tuition, education savings accounts, and personal use tax credits that can be used for a variety of educational expenses.
Early programs were targeted to specific groups, such as students with special needs, kids who had been assigned to poor-performing schools, and students from low-income families. In 2021, West Virginia created the Hope Scholarship, an ESA that’s open to almost any student in the state, and Arizona expanded its ESA to universal eligibility the following year. Since then, states are increasingly creating programs that—on paper at least—include universal eligibility. In reality, these programs often have insufficient funding, so thousands of students end up on waitlists even if they’re technically eligible.
That’s where the Friedman Index comes in. “We wanted to create the Index as a tool for policymakers and advocates to get a better, more accurate understanding of how much educational freedom each state has,” says Ben Scafidi, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-feature-edchoice-friedman-index
