After decades of work, the fight for educational freedom is bearing major fruit. With legislation just passed in Texas, more than half of America’s K–12 students have become eligible for at least one school choice program, shifting control over education to families and educators, where it belongs.

Meanwhile, the federal government is in retreat. Frustration with Washington’s interference has been growing for decades, and the COVID-19 pandemic dispelled any notion that DC knows best. Now the most concerted effort since its birth in 1980 is underway to dismantle the ineffective, blatantly unconstitutional US Department of Education.

This is the Eyes and Brain STEM Center, a private microschool that defies every convention of traditional K–12 education. And it exists because families in West Virginia now have the freedom to choose it.

“Having been a public education teacher, I had to de-school myself,” said Eric Eisenbrey, the school’s founder, at a Cato Institute event last year. “I had to realize that it doesn’t have to be all the subjects broken up and we have to hit on these certain things in a certain amount of time. And really the parents that I have now, the big thing for them is that they’re seeing just how happy their students can be in a different environment where they have more freedom, where they have more choice, and where the education is tailored to them.”

Many of the families at Eyes and Brain STEM Center are able to send their kids to the school because of West Virginia’s education savings account (ESA) program, which gives parents control over the public funding already set aside for their children’s schooling.

“It requires a good amount of funding to be able to have a school and be able to offer the materials and the supplies and the experience to students,” said Eisenbrey. “But it just so happened that at the point that I was just working on launching my school, the state passed our ESA program, which is called Hope Scholarship. And with that passing in the state, it really gave me the opportunity to say, ‘OK, this is something I can do. This is a viable way of parents being able to sign their students up for the school and being able to have enough funding.’”

Eisenbrey’s story is no longer an anomaly. Options like Eyes and Brain STEM Center have exploded across the country in recent years thanks to the increased adoption of school choice, including ESAs, vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and other programs in 34 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC.

This is what Cato has long been fighting for: an education system that enables innovative options to be born and taken to scale because funding follows kids to schools their families choose, not only to public schools to which children are assigned based on their home addresses.

In May, the school choice movement scored its latest and arguably greatest victory. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the country’s newest universal school choice law, moving the country past the point at which more than half of the school-aged population is eligible to participate in private choice programs.

While choice has expanded, the federal government’s interference—basically the opposite of family and educator control—has been in retreat. Fear of misguided edicts from well-meaning bureaucrats preceded the Department of Education’s creation in 1979. By 2015, public exasperation had boiled over thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and Common Core, then reignited during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And in recent months, the Trump administration initiated the most concerted effort yet to dissolve the unconstitutional and ineffective Department of Education. This is the other side of the educational freedom battle: fighting against top-down centralization.

Cato has been on offense and defense in education policy from its early days.

In 1981, Cato published an analysis of a proposed scholarship tax credit for District of Columbia families by economic historian E. G. West. West got right to the heart of the matter, writing:

“For the first time in the twentieth century all families would be given the effective freedom to choose schools for their children. This is a privilege that has been enjoyed before only by those families that can afford to ‘pay twice’ for schooling, once through their conventional tax payments, and once through the direct tuition charge at a private school.”

This was Cato on offense—working to expand freedom.

A few years later, in 1985, Cato founding president Edward Crane appeared on the MacNeil/​Lehrer NewsHour, attacking Washington’s two DoEs—the departments of energy and education. Crane explained that not only did the evidence suggest the Department of Education was not moving the academic achievement needle, it was also simply inappropriate. He responded to the oft-floated “in the national interest” justification for federal overreach:

“The national interest … does not require a national government to be involved. The national interest is individual people at a local level who are concerned about the education of their children and would like to be able to afford to send them to decent alternative schools, to create some competition for the public schools.”

Here, not only did Crane play defense—working to halt centralization with a cabinet-level education department created only six years earlier—but offense as well, explaining that the key to sustainable education improvement was empowering families to make choices for themselves.

The strategy persisted through the 1990s. In 1991, Cato released Liberating Schools: Education in the Inner City edited by David Boaz, which addressed the bureaucratic dysfunction of inner-city public education and the need for choice to empower low-income urban families to break out of failure factories. At the defensive end, Cato scholars opposed such federal initiatives as Goals 2000, which morphed from America 2000, that put the federal government closer to directing the nation’s education system.

By the 2000s, there had been success on the offensive side of the ball. In 1990, the first modern voucher program was launched in Milwaukee. The next year, Minnesota passed the first charter school law, and in 1997 it passed a K–12 education tax credit. By 2010, the country had 25 school choice programs enabling more than 200,000 kids to get private education. It was a tiny sliver of all K–12 enrollment, but it was much more than we had before 1990.

At the same time, the defense was getting pushed around. The federal government was on a centralization roll. Starting with the 1988 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which for the first time required states receiving federal education dollars to show evidence of academic improvement, the trend accelerated. After an unsuccessful attempt to ramp that up in 1994, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) asserted major federal control. It mandated uniform state academic standards and annual standardized testing and demanded “adequate yearly progress” toward full proficiency in math and reading by 2014.

This massive overreach was utterly unconstitutional. Cato scholars fought hard against the law, from David Boaz’s 2001 commentary, “Congress Trashes Local Control of Schools,” to the 2007 publication of my book Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education and policy analysis “End It, Don’t Mend It: What to Do with No Child Left Behind,” which I coauthored with the late Andrew Coulson, who was then the director of the Center for Educational Freedom. Cato scholars also worked with members of Congress to devolve power from the feds to the states—and better still, to taxpayers and families.

But even as we pushed back against NCLB, the federal government pressed forward, blaming state autonomy for NCLB’s failure and doubling down.

The undertaking was coincidentally timed for federal leverage. In 2007, the country entered the Great Recession, and both the Bush and Obama administrations supported massive “stimulus” and bailout packages to try to jump-start the economy. A part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed under Obama went to education, including $4.35 billion to be spent at the discretion of the secretary of education. That became the “Race to the Top” program. States competed for shares of the pot by meeting various department-dictated criteria, including adopting a set of math and language arts standards common to a “majority of the States” and aligned tests. Secretary Arne Duncan knew there was only one set of standards that met that definition: the Common Core State Standards then only under development by the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association. The department also chose and funded two testing consortia: the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

Washington was on the verge of dictating not just the structure of the education system through NCLB but also what was taught in every public school in the country. Cato raised the alarm with my 2010 policy analysis, “Behind the Curtain: Assessing the Case for National Curriculum Standards,” but it was not until the standards hit school districts, and parents started loudly demanding to know where they had come from and why it was suddenly so hard to teach kids math, that a national outcry occurred.

Due to their early work on the topic, Cato scholars were perfectly placed to be part of this discussion, and a University of Pennsylvania study identified me as a “transcender” in the social media debate—one of “41 actors … present in both the elite transmitter and transceiver networks, sending the highest number of #commoncore tweets and being retweeted and mentioned in the largest number of tweets.”

The federal push became even more forceful when the Obama administration tied not just funding to adoption of the Core and attendant tests but also waivers from NCLB’s 2014 proficiency requirement, which was getting very close and no state was going to hit. But the waivers did not just call for Common Core adoption; they also required that teacher evaluations be tied tightly to students’ state test results. Suddenly, the once unthinkable happened—teacher unions moved from the centralization to the decentralization side, joining a growing grassroots movement sick of federal micromanagement and reduction of education to fill-in-the-bubble tests. And that led to something in happy contradiction to the Thomas Jefferson quote too often balefully invoked by libertarians: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

In 2015, Congress changed the No Child Left Behind Act into the Every Student Succeeds Act, which ended the adequate yearly progress measure that locked all public schools into federal “accountability.” It also explicitly forbade Washington from coercing use of the Common Core. It was very much a fruit of Cato’s defensive labors, from long opposition to any federal involvement in education, to opposition to NCLB, to Cato’s “first-mover advantage” in challenging the national standards insurgence.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which transformed society and its views on the efficacy of government much more deeply than in education policy alone. Whatever aura of expertise and wisdom the federal government might have had was shattered by its failure to acquire COVID-19 tests, produce consistent—even noncontradictory—guidance on masking, and consider ideas different from its own about how to address the pandemic. A major source of frustration was federal resistance to reopening schools quickly when the data became clear that children were at low risk of getting seriously ill and were struggling academically in duct-tape-and-baling-wire online schooling.

As the child health data became clear, private schools were much quicker to reopen, and Cato scholars, as part of Cato’s Pandemics and Policy series, hammered home the limited dangers for children and the need for choice. The latter was an especially important and underdiscussed point as the debate too often devolved into red-blue finger-pointing and one answer for all. The reality was that while in-person education for kids was generally safe, different children, families, communities, and educators faced different levels of medical and educational risk and prioritized health and education needs differently. We clearly needed more choice, just as we always had, because different children learn differently and diverse people have wide-ranging values. That we had hamstrung choice for so long was why far too few people had options, and everyone had to fight to get their preferred policies imposed on everyone else.

The frustration over closures and subsequent policies—social distancing, masking, vaccination requirements—ignited a new parental rights movement. That movement quickly expanded to encompass culture-war battles: library books, bathroom policies, and history curricula. The murder of George Floyd and the resulting nationwide protests accelerated the momentum. School leaders pledged to address “systemic racism,” while others pushed back against what they viewed as “ideological indoctrination.”

Cato scholars, as they had done for years, emphasized the harmonious influence of choice: Letting people freely choose what they think is right for their children is far more peaceful than forcing them into warring political camps to control government schools, as the suddenly enflamed education system made abundantly clear. Even more fundamental, choice is consistent with a free and equal society, and the force inherent in public schooling—especially when it comes to basic questions of values or personal identity—is not.

Indeed, the desire to escape compelled values may be the biggest driver behind the explosion we have seen in school choice programs since the pandemic. Nationally, there were 65 programs serving less than 600,000 students in 2020. Five years later, there were 81 programs serving 1.2 million students. Most of this growth has occurred in red states, where families have been more likely to feel underserved or alienated by public schools.

Cato and the educational freedom movement must continue playing both offense and defense.

Defensively, the federal government may be backpedaling, but it is not beaten. Even though the Trump administration halved the Department of Education’s workforce, its core functions remain. Congress should take the lead in eliminating the department, which never should have been created in the first place. The Constitution gives the federal government no authority to govern in education, much less establish a cabinet-level department. The Department of Education also makes no practical sense: The country provided mass education long before the department was created, and it is much better that decisionmaking be as close to individual children as possible. That means school choice first, federal control not at all.

Offensively, we must solidify our gains and guard against retrenchment. Cato policy analyst Colleen Hroncich is particularly engaged in this work, having coauthored a guide to build up navigation and support services for families and educators in states with school choice programs, and coordinating with allied groups on efforts to protect from regulation, and even elimination, the gains freedom has made.

We also need to press the case for choice in purple and blue states, explaining that school choice is for everyone—a case Cato has made by repeatedly explaining the need for choice for families of all worldviews. Educational freedom is not a partisan cause. It is a moral one. And Cato will keep fighting, on both sides of the issue, to ensure that it becomes the American norm.