The Goldwater Institute is a leading free-market public policy research and litigation organization that is dedicated to empowering all Americans to live freer, happier lives. We accomplish real results for liberty by working in state courts, legislatures, and communities nationwide to advance, defend, and strengthen the freedom guaranteed by the constitutions of the United States and the fifty states.
The following column is by The Goldwater Institute's Director of Education Policy, Matt Beienburg.
Those who love liberty and those who despise it agree on one thing: liberty’s survival depends on the education of our children. Indeed, nowhere are the stakes higher, and nowhere is the fight more furious than in the realm of educating our nation’s youth. Fortunately, the sweeping victories of school choice, parental rights, and reinvigorated instruction in our nation’s founding ideals are poised to protect the pillars of liberty and unite more Americans under the principles of Freedom Conservatism.
As Vladimir Lenin, the father of one of the world’s most repressive regimes in human history, is said to have proclaimed, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
Ronald Regan understood precisely these stakes, declaring:
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free."
Reagan’s words are no less true today than when he spoke them four decades ago. While scourges like the Soviet Union have since crumbled, the authoritarian impulse to control and indoctrinate a generation of students runs through the heart of many institutions of American elementary, secondary, and higher education.
But in the wake of government-ordered school shutdowns, student mask mandates, curricular activism, and academic malpractice by America’s union-dominated education establishment, a new birth of Freedom Conservatism has ignited previously unimaginable opportunity for students.
In 2021 and 2022, Arizona and West Virginia became the first states to offer virtually universal access to education savings accounts (ESAs)—which give families roughly $7,000 per student in Arizona, for instance, to put toward tutoring, private school tuition, at-home instructional materials, and more. In barely a year since, the number of states with such programs has swelled to nearly double digits. At the same time, lawmakers are empowering families with parents’ bill of rights and academic (curriculum) transparency legislation, ending state-sanctioned racial discrimination in education, and building new institutions to promote instruction in America’s constitutional framework of limited government and individual liberty.
As the recently released statement of principles of Freedom Conservatism affirms, “The best way to unify a large and diverse nation like the United States is to transfer as many public policy choices as possible to families and communities. Much of the discord in America today comes from the fact that too many decisions are made for us by centralized authorities.”
For years, these authorities have come in the form of groups like the National Education Association (which issues annual marching orders to millions of government employees) and the National School Boards Association (which infamously slandered parents as agents of “domestic terrorism”), as well as attempts by the federal government to dictate educational programming.
But now, America’s system of federalism—that is, decentralizing control of policymaking to the states, rather than Washington D.C.—has already reasserted its importance. Consider states like Florida and Georgia, which, under the leadership of Govs. Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp, respectively, bucked the pressures of federal politicians and bureaucrats to swiftly reopen their schools amid COVID 19.
As educational freedom now surges across the country, it threatens to further erode the influence of radically leftist teachers unions, replacing their monopolistic control over our nation’s education system with direct parental empowerment and accountability. In place of government-assigned schooling options and state-sanctioned racism in the form of Critical Race Theory, these new school choice opportunities advance the principles of Freedom Conservatism, which likewise declare, “we commit to expanding opportunity for those who face challenges due to past government restrictions on individual and economic freedom. We adamantly oppose racial discrimination in all its forms.”
Older forms of school choice—including public charter schools—have already demonstrated that free market principles breed not only competitive pressure, but improved academic excellence. The latest wave of educational freedom now stands to harness these same principles, already attracting the nations’ highest performing charter school networks to expand their operations into private education, and making this option affordable and accessible to all families.
Revitalizing our nation’s education system will not alone solve all the challenges facing the United States today, and these reforms will take time to bear fruit. But if we are to preserve the foundations of a free republic and empower our citizens to live prosperous and fulfilling lives, there is no task more urgent.
Matt Beienburg is the director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute. He also serves as director of the institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.