ALEC — Index of State Education Freedom (2025, 2nd edition)
alec-state-education-freedom-index · cited by 3 nodes
Source. American Legislative Exchange Council, 2025 ALEC Index of State Education Freedom: A
50-State Guide to Parental Empowerment, second edition. Author: Andrew Handel, Director of the
Education and Workforce Development Task Force. Managing editors: Jonathan Williams, Lee Schalk.
Published with support from the Allegheny Foundation.
Type. Secondary source — advocacy scorecard ranking states on the availability of school
choice programs.
Location. alec.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ALEC_EdFreedomIndex2025_final.pdf.
What it contains. A 100-point score per state across five weighted categories, reflecting “all programs and policies that were signed into law as of June 1st, 2024”:
| Category | Points |
|---|---|
| Education Freedom Programs | 40 |
| Charter Schools | 15 |
| Homeschooling | 15 |
| Virtual Schooling | 15 |
| Open Enrollment | 15 |
Ohio’s result: rank 10 of 50, total 63.79, grade B+. verified The top five are Florida (89.87, A+), Arizona (79.62, A), Arkansas (77.12, A), Oklahoma (72.93, A) and Iowa (72.78, A); the bottom five are Kentucky (19.57, F), Rhode Island (15.23, F), Oregon (15.02, F), Massachusetts (14.47, F) and New York (9.96, F). Fifty states are scored; the District of Columbia is not.
Why it is cataloged, and the single most useful thing about it. The index has no spending category at all. Its 100 points measure whether programs exist and how accessible they are; nothing in it scores funding level, adequacy, or distribution. That is not a defect — it is what the document is for — but it means the index cannot be cited for any claim about whether Ohio funds its schools well, only for where Ohio stands on program availability under the scoring of an organization that advocates for those programs. It is the cleanest available statement of what a choice-availability measure does and does not see, and this corpus’s subject is precisely the part it does not see.
Its point of view is stated on its own front matter: ALEC advances “limited government, free markets, and federalism”, is a membership organization of more than 2,000 state legislators, and publishes the model bills whose adoption this index scores. A scorecard that ranks states on uptake of its publisher’s own model policies is an advocacy instrument measuring its own program, and should be read that way.
Underlying data are third-party and mostly also advocacy-aligned. The index credits EdChoice, the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Center for Education Reform, the Digital Learning Collaborative and the Reason Foundation as the backbone of its data. None of those is inspected here, so Ohio’s 63.79 is reproducible from the published category scoring but not from primary sources this repository holds. open
Access constraints. Freely available as a static PDF. Retrieved and read directly; not pinned by digest and not fetched by a connector.
Caveat — do not put this rank beside Heritage’s. Ohio ranks 10th here and 29th overall on the Heritage report card. The two are not in conflict and the gap is not a finding: the editions are two years apart across Ohio’s universal EdChoice expansion, the jurisdiction counts differ (50 against 51), and Heritage scores spending and teacher regulation while this index scores neither. Reporting the two ranks as a discrepancy would manufacture one.