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Advocates of a rightwing, billionaire-funded campaign to replace public education with a privatized education marketplace have been candid about their goals and disciplined in pursuing them. A new report from the organization I lead, the Network for Public Education, provides an accounting of how far state lawmakers across the nation, in both red and blue states, have advanced this campaign and have put at grave risk access to the current system of education that is free and available to all families.
For nearly a decade, the Network for Public Education has issued statehouse-by-statehouse report cards holding legislators accountable for how they treat public schools and the children who depend on them. And over the years, we have seen a ramp up in school privatization and continuous neglect of public school students and teachers.
This 2026 Report Card is our most expansive to date, evaluating all fifty states and the District of Columbia across four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning based on thirty-nine factors. Some of those factors include charter school expansion, discrimination, and student-to-teacher ratio.
In 2022, when we issued our second report card, ten states achieved 80 percent or more of a possible 102 points. By 2024, the number of states achieving 80 percent of all possible points had dropped to four. Two years later, only two states, Nebraska and Vermont, hit the 80 percent mark.
Over the past four years, privatization efforts have seen heightened success across the country. Voucher programs (which began in the mid-1990s) have expanded from twenty-seven programs in 2022 to seventy-three programs in thirty-four states as of 2026, with multiple programs in several states. Vouchers pay for tuition at both secular and religious schools, and in some states, the purchase of goods and services by homeschoolers and microschoolers. Schools accepting vouchers also typically face little of the academic, financial, or civil rights accountability required of public schools, and many can reject or expel students based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, or academic record. And because voucher amounts frequently fall short of full private school tuition, the benefits flow disproportionately to families who could already afford private school without public dollars.
Charter schools, which began in 1992 as experimental schools controlled by school districts, have been privatized to include large chains of schools, some of which span across multiple states. Nearly one in five charter school students attends a charter run by a for-profit corporation. It is an unstable sector of schooling, with more than one in four closing by year five.
Only Nebraska and Kentucky are now the only remaining states free of both charter schools and state voucher programs. But the 2026 report card reveals a troubling and consistent pattern beyond the expansion of school privatization. The states most aggressively redirecting public funds toward private alternatives—charter schools, voucher programs, and home schools—are the same states that fund privatization at the direct expense of investment in public schools.
In fact, our analysis found a strong and statistically significant negative relationship between the expansion of privatization and other indicators of public school support. Privatization and public school disinvestment, it turns out, go hand in hand.
Seventeen states earned a grade of F, meaning they failed to meet even 40 percent of the thirty-nine standards we set for responsible stewardship of public schools. Standards that included equitable school funding, teacher satisfaction, protections for homeschooled students, and class size. Florida ranked dead last, scoring just fourteen out of 102 possible points, with Arizona following closely behind. These are not struggling states making hard choices with thin budgets. They are states that have made deliberate decisions to defund neighborhood schools while directing public money toward private alternatives with minimal oversight, weak accountability, and documented records of fraud and mismanagement.
The appeal of “school choice,” in which families are permitted to use state funds that would’ve been otherwise spent on public education on non-traditional programs like charter or private schools, is easy to understand. The promise of options and tailored education sounds reasonable in the abstract. But in practice, choice works best for families with the time, information, and flexibility to navigate it, and whose children the private school is willing to choose. For a family in rural Florida or a child with complex disabilities whose needs most private schools won’t accommodate, the marketplace of options is theoretical. The public school is the only institution legally required to educate every child who walks through the door. When it is weakened through funding cuts, the diversion of students and dollars, or a hollowed-out teaching workforce, the consequences fall hardest on the children least able to find alternatives.
Meanwhile, many of these states that have expanded privatization are the same states that fail to uphold school policies that support teaching and learning.
You cannot systematically eliminate teachers’ job protections, freeze wages, and inject heavy political pressure into classrooms, then be surprised when talented people leave the profession. States like Arizona and Florida, which we rank at the bottom for teacher working conditions, are the same states reporting severe shortages of teachers and the highest rates of underqualified instructors. That is a direct consequence of policy choices, not a demographic inevitability.
The top of the rankings offers a useful counterpoint. States like Nebraska and Vermont demonstrate that it is possible to adequately fund public schools, support teachers as professionals, and resist privatization pressure. The distance between them and the bottom-ranked states reflects not differences in wealth or circumstance, but differences in political priorities.
None of this means public school systems are beyond criticism. They have real failures and persistent inequities worth addressing. But the solution is not to defund the institution and redirect money to private alternatives that face no equivalent accountability. Charter schools limit enrollment. Voucher schools can turn away students. Education savings accounts, which give taxpayer funds to parents to buy private services in lieu of public schooling, can be misused with little consequence. Public schools cannot do any of these things—and that constraint is precisely what makes them worth protecting.
What happens next depends on whether parents, teachers, and the communities built around our public schools engage with the same urgency as forces on the right wing who work to dismantle them.