A recent Heritage report warns that parents can’t trust charter schools because so many of them are just as “woke” as public schools. Some are even more woke than public schools.

The report, written by Jay Greene, Ian Kingsbury, and Jason Bedrick, asserts that the major philanthropic foundations supporting charter schools—the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation—are also woke. This is where it gets crazy. Walton is woke? The anti-union, rightwing Waltons?

The solution the authors prefer is a fully funded voucher system, where schools are not regulated by the state and do not need money from woke philanthropies like Walton or Gates. That way, parents who are racist, homophobic, and sexist can find a school that teaches their values.

They begin:

There is a loose set of political and social values that can succinctly be labeled as “woke.” These woke values tend to be characterized by a departure from traditional American and classical-liberal values of individual responsibility and equal treatment in favor of emphasizing differentiated treatment by group identity and social rather than individual justice. Of course, there is a constituency of parents who favor an education infused with these woke values—but they tend to be a distinct minority. As past research suggests, when parents have more control over the education of their own children, that education tends to be less woke.

Given that parental empowerment is associated with less woke education, one might expect that charter schools—which are chosen by parents rather than strictly assigned based on the location of a family’s home—are less woke than nearby public schools operated by school districts. But school choice could produce more woke options if those choices are highly regulated and controlled by distant regulators and philanthropists. School districts still retain a fair amount of responsiveness to the preferences of the communities they serve given their democratic governance.

Charter schools, on the other hand, might become less responsive to the preferences of local parents if they have to please state authorizers to be established and remain open and if they are overly dependent on national philanthropies to subsidize their operations. Those charter schools may have to adopt woke values to gain permission to open from the public authorities that grant them their charter and to receive funding, especially for capital expenses, from large donors with progressive values.

Parents may nevertheless choose woke charter schools, either because they are among the minority that hold those values or because safety and quality of instruction may induce parents to select a school that is otherwise at odds with their values. By contrast, policies that permit private school choice with vouchers or K–12 education savings accounts do not require permission from an authorizer for schools to open their doors and therefore are less likely to require capital funds from donors since they often already have school buildings. That means that private schools are typically more directly accountable to parents than charter schools and so are more likely to reflect the values of the families they serve.

It is an open question whether highly constrained and regulated types of school choice, like charter schools, are actually less responsive to parental preferences regarding values than are public district schools, which are also regulated and insulated from parental control by unions and the imperfections of democratic governance.

The purpose of this Backgrounder is to examine whether, on average, charter schools embrace a woke education more strongly than do nearby public schools operated by school districts. By analyzing key words in student handbooks as a proxy for wokeness, the authors find that charter schools actually tend to be more woke than traditional district schools. The authors consider how regulatory and donor capture of charter schools could be reduced so that this type of school choice could be more responsive to parental preferences regarding the values emphasized in the education of their own children.

They conclude:

School choice should empower parents to obtain an education for their own children that is consistent with their values. That is still occurring with private school choice, but with charter school choice it is falling short. Regulatory and financial constraints need to be removed from charter schools so they can better align with the values preferences of parents. In states and localities where charter schools have not been able to be more responsive to parents, private school choice is the better path for avoiding the woke capture of school choice.