The Network for Public Education, which I co-founded with science teacher Anthony Cody in 2012-2013, supports the improvement of public schools and opposes privatization of public funding for schooling. Nearly 90% of children in the U.S. are enrolled in public schools. Their schools should be staffed by qualified teachers and fully funded. NPE works with state organizations that share our commitment to the principle: Public funds for public schools.
The following report was produced by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris and staff. Burris retired as a career teacher and award-winning high school principal.
NEW REPORT GIVES 17 STATES FAILING GRADES FOR ABANDONING PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Network for Public Education’s Most Comprehensive Report Card Finds Privatization and Disinvestment Go Hand in Hand
New York, New York
The Network for Public Education (NPE) released Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Public Schools (2026), an expansive state-by-state assessment of support for public education. The report evaluates all 50 states and the District of Columbia across four categories: Privatization, Protections for Homeschooled Students, School Funding, and Conditions for Teaching and Learning. It documents a troubling national pattern: the statehouses most aggressively redirecting public money toward private alternatives are the most neglectful of their public schools, teachers, and students. NPE’s analysis found a strong, statistically significant negative relationship between privatization and policies that support public schools (p < 0.0001).
Only two states — Nebraska and Vermont — earned an A. Seventeen states received an F, failing to meet even 40% of the points allocated across NPE’s 39 standards. Florida ranked last, scoring 14 out of 102 possible points, with Arizona close behind. “The data confirm what we have long suspected: privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand,” said Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author. “These are not states struggling with limited resources. They have made deliberate choices to abandon their public schools while directing billions in public dollars to private alternatives.”
The report draws on original research in addition to research from other organizations — including the Education Law Center, the Learning Policy Institute, and EdChoice — to deliver a comprehensive assessment of public education and privatization across 39 distinct factors. These include teacher-to-student ratios, teacher satisfaction, school funding levels, and the degree to which laws governing vouchers, charter schools, and homeschools protect both taxpayers and students.
Public Schooling in America also provides a roadmap for reform, showing policymakers and advocates exactly where laws and policies must change to better serve students and rein in the serious, well-documented problems created by privatized alternatives.
“Public schools are the only institutions in American life obligated to welcome every child, regardless of circumstance,” NPE President Diane Ravitch added. “They build community and democracy. They are as American as apple pie.”
The full report is available here.
About the Network for Public Education
The Network for Public Education is a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to protecting, preserving, and strengthening public schools for every child in America.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I did not even have to look. Tennessee is in the middle of a boom I could never have imagined, yet its schools are ignored by this cabal of thieves who claim to be the party of Lincoln.
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I wish they would have chosen map colors with better contrast. I have an old box of colored pencils left over from grade school …
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Kudos to Carol Burris, her team and NPE for researching the impact of privatization on public schools because few politicians are asking this important question. Most of the red state governors are deliberately avoiding this question.
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But, does this really mean anything? I ran correlations between the NPE’s overall scores for each state and the state public school students’ results from the 2024 NAEP in Grades 4 and 8 reading and math. The Grade 4 correlations were essentially zero. The Grade 8 correlations were not much better.
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From the report: This report does not rate states based on test scores, nor does it rate individual schools. Rather, we rate statehouses based on the policies and laws we know either strengthen or weaken the public schools that the vast majority of children attend.
This is not about test scores — and it is not meant to be. It is an indicator of support and respect for public education and its ideals. It is a predictor of whether public education will even survive in some states. And it reveals how privatization and disinvestment in public schooling go hand in hand.
On the question of correlation with NAEP:
NAEP Grade 4 scores. I no longer look at NAEP 4th grade results, given the growing number of states with mandatory retention laws in Grade 3. Learning gains and child development go hand in hand, and in my view NAEP should now test by age rather than grade level.
Who is and isn’t tested. Students in homeschools do not participate in NAEP. Private school participation varies, and their scores are reported separately in any case. Online charter schools have extremely low participation rates. In a report that measures the extent of privatization, this would have an impact.
What the factors actually measure. Many of the factors we include are, in my view, critically important to child welfare or taxpayer protection — protections for homeschool students, LGBTQ students, related-party transactions in charter schools, the quality of charter authorizing policies, and so on. None of these would correlate with student achievement scores, but they are meaningful indicators of the values and ethics of a statehouse. Some factors — funding, class size, the percentage of qualified teachers — do relate to achievement, but those represent only a handful of the 39 factors we examine.
The limits of a raw correlation. “Running a correlation” between our report card scores and NAEP scores would not yield valid results even if every included factor had a research basis in academic performance, because such an analysis would not control for variables like family income and the percentage of students living in poverty.
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RE: Grade 4 NAEP and retention. That picture isn’t so blurred, at least for Mississippi, but I did look at Grade 8 as well and the correlations were still very small (0.2 or less).
RE: Those not tested. We are talking about public school “friendliness” and the NAEP scores I looked at were for public school students only.
RE: Variables – I broke scores out by race for white and Black students for NAEP Grade 4 reading and NAEP Grade 8 math and the results were not any different.
Ditto for Grade 8 students with disabilities, including 504 plan students and economically disadvantaged students in NAEP Reading.
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Idaho and Indiana got F’s. Both are red states so I’m not a bit surprised.
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