Last week, the Heritage Foundation released its 2025 Education Freedom Report Card, which ranked all 50 states and the District of Columbia on six metrics that evaluate how successfully states have advanced educational freedom for K-12 students and families.
It’s a pivotal time for education policy in Georgia. This fall, Georgia families are getting their first opportunity to use the state’s Promise Scholarship program, which passed in 2024 after years of debate. This was a huge victory for educational choice, as students previously trapped in the lowest-performing schools now have increased access to higher quality and more personalized education options. Georgia lawmakers have also sought to expand educational freedom in other ways, such as expanding access to charter schools, buoying the state’s tax credit scholarship program and facilitating easier transfers within and between school districts.
Georgia’s performance, at least relative to other states by the Heritage Report Card’s metrics, is lagging a bit from last year. Its overall rank is 14th, which is five spots behind its 2024 ranking. The Heritage ranking for overall education freedom is itself based on rankings for six criteria: education choice, transparency, teacher freedom, return on investment and civic education.
In education choice, Georgia ranks 19th, which is six spots down from the previous year. While Heritage credits Georgia for empowering its K-12 families with private and charter school options, it notes that it could do more in that area by expanding access to the Promise Scholarship beyond those in the bottom 25% of schools, making charter schools easier to open and operate and giving families more choices among traditional public schools beyond their assigned school. It should be noted that some of the states that jumped Georgia in this year’s ranking largely did so by adopting universal eligibility for their school choice programs.
Heritage ranked Georgia 17th in academic transparency, citing an anti-discriminatory bill “which prevents divisive concepts and ideologies from invading the classroom and gives the Georgia High School Association authority to protect fairness in school sports” and the “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” both enacted in 2022. It should be noted that Heritage’s definition of transparency emphasized the strength of a state’s law rejecting Critical Race Theory, in addition to parental empowerment and accountability. While parental knowledge of curriculum is an issue of transparency, the focus on Critical Race Theory likely makes transparency scores more dependent on political affiliations and leanings.
Georgia ranked 13th in teacher freedom. For this placement, the Report Card focused on teacher certification, noting that while 21% of Georgia teachers are alternatively certified, the state does not allow full reciprocity of teacher licenses. To improve this score, Heritage recommends that Georgia allow for more teachers to become certified other than through a university-based college of education, or by ending certification requirements altogether. The Report Card also criticizes the requirement that teachers pass the Praxis test, a certification exam which, according to Heritage, does not meaningfully predict quality or effectiveness among educators.
Georgia’s best showing comes on its return on investment, where Heritage ranks it five spots higher than last year at 6th. This ranking is the most quantitative of the six, as it compares per-pupil spending with National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores, the ratio of public school teachers employed for every non-teacher and the unfunded teacher pension liability as a percentage of the state’s GDP.
Finally, in a new metric for this year’s report card, Georgia ranks 35th in civic education. This was based on Georgia students’ scores on a NAEP Civics Assessment and the lack of a civics or citizenship test requirement to graduate high school in Georgia.
Some of Georgia’s drop in the Report Card rankings can be accounted for by action taken in other states. As referenced earlier, states such as Idaho, Texas and Indiana all jumped Georgia this year, due in large part to their decisions to expand or universalize school choice programs. For the fourth year in a row, Florida and Arizona claimed the number one and two spots, respectively, with Florida landing in 1st for every metric other than ROI. All five states that border Georgia placed in the top 20 overall.
The criteria used in Heritage’s Report Card might not be an exhaustive list of measurables when gauging the quality of education of any state, but Georgia’s ranking is certainly informative. Lawmakers and advocates who have worked tirelessly to pass education reforms that offer greater freedom to students and families should be commended, but as many of Georgia’s peers have demonstrated, there is room for improvement.
We’ve seen that during the implementation and early usage of the Promise Scholarship. The program that rightfully became the centerpiece of school choice in Georgia turned away about 44% of its applicants because they did not meet eligibility requirements. Simply put, demand for educational freedom exceeds what Georgia currently supplies.