The Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that opposes school vouchers, graded every state on 39 factors covering privatization, funding, homeschool protections, and teacher conditions, and found a strong link between a state's embrace of private alternatives and weak…
The Network for Public Education released a 50-state index on Monday that grades every state and the District of Columbia on its treatment of public education, and the picture it draws is harsh at the bottom: 17 states received an F, only Nebraska and Vermont earned an A, and Florida finished last at 14 of 102 possible points (NPE report via PRNewswire).
NPE is a nonprofit advocacy organization with a stated pro-public-school mission, and "Public Schooling in America: 2026 Report Card" is its assessment using its own grading framework. The index sorts 39 distinct standards into four categories: Privatization, Protections for Homeschooled Students, School Funding, and Conditions for Teaching and Learning. Each state's score rolls up to one of five letter grades, with an F set at below 40% of the 102 possible points. Arizona finished second-to-last, and the rest of the F-tier states are listed in the full report PDF.
The report's most cited empirical claim is a correlation. NPE's analysis of the state-level data found a strong, statistically significant negative relationship between a state's embrace of private school alternatives and its support for traditional public schools (p < 0.0001). The direction of the relationship, more privatization alongside less public-school support, is the report's load-bearing finding, and the framing around it is NPE's. The organization describes the pattern as a deliberate set of policy choices to redirect public money away from public schools; that interpretation is NPE's advocacy position, not a neutral description, and the correlation itself does not establish that one set of policies caused the other.
The methodology draws on outside research. NPE says its dataset incorporates work from the Education Law Center, the Learning Policy Institute, and EdChoice. That mix is notable: ELC and LPI are typically associated with traditional public-school advocacy, while EdChoice is a school-choice organization. Readers auditing the 39 factors will see the imprint of those sources on the indicators NPE chose to score.
The report was written by Carol Burris, NPE's executive director, and NPE president Diane Ravitch is quoted in the release framing the fight over public education in civil-rights terms. Neither author is a neutral voice in the school-choice debate, and the standards they applied are theirs to define. The NPE report landing page makes both the summary and the full PDF available for readers who want to weigh the framework on its own terms.
The 39 factors and the four-category framework are the part a reader can pressure-test most directly. Whether the 17-F distribution is a verdict on state policy or a verdict on NPE's choice of standards depends on what one thinks of those factors, and the full PDF is where that argument has to happen.