It’s more than just a hopeful outlook.
“I’ve never been so optimistic about the future of education freedom,” former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said this week during a fireside chat hosted by the Goldwater Institute in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Secretary DeVos has long been one of the nation’s most influential advocates for policies that promote education freedom—policies that she championed during her four years leading the Department of Education. On Wednesday, she told a packed house how the one-size-fits-all public school system has failed children—and credited the Goldwater Institute for its national leadership in empowering parents to take charge of their kids’ education. She praised Goldwater’s work to enact a first-in-the-nation universal school choice reform in Arizona, and she highlighted the importance of Goldwater’s landmark Academic Transparency Act, which protects parents’ right to know what their children are learning.
“Goldwater has been on the forefront of all of these innovations, and has been really, really awesome in championing things that others haven’t yet thought of,” Secretary DeVos said in an exclusive Goldwater Institute video. “And I fully expect that you’re going to continue to innovate and create around education and kids’ experiences around education.”
Read more at In Defense of Liberty.
It shouldn’t be a crime to parent your child. Yet the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) treated Tucson mom Sarra L. like a criminal, putting her name on a secret government blacklist for child abusers, even though she hadn’t done anything wrong. The Goldwater Institute and Pacific Legal Foundation are defending Sarra’s due process rights—and this week, we filed a brief explaining how DCS violated her rights at every turn.
Sarra’s only “crime” was to let her 7-year-old son and his 5-year-old friend play at a safe neighborhood park while she made a quick trip to the grocery store—and while an adult friend at the park kept an eye on the children. But DCS insisted on investigating and decided Sarra should be placed on the state’s Central Registry of neglectful and abusive parents for 25 years.
“It’s shocking that Arizona bureaucrats are empowered to put a mother’s name on the state’s ‘do not hire’ list—labeling her a child abuser, for as long as 25 years—without going through an actual court process, and under rules that courts in several other states have already declared unconstitutional,” Goldwater Institute Vice President for Legal Affairs Timothy Sandefur told The Arizona Sun Times.
Read more in The Arizona Sun Times.
It’s parents, not bureaucrats, who are best equipped to make decisions about their children’s education. But parents can’t exercise fully informed school choice unless they know what their children are going to be learning before they make an enrollment decision.
That’s why yet another nationally renowned leader is calling on states to adopt the Goldwater Institute’s academic transparency reform, which the Institute is promoting in states around the nation. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI)—an organization widely regarded for advancing ideas that defend individual freedom—has released a new policy blueprint for “American renewal” that calls on states to adopt Goldwater’s reform.
“An appealing model is the Academic Transparency Act model legislation developed by the Goldwater Institute, which would require public schools to share a list of the actual instructional materials they used during the previous school year on a publicly accessible portion of their website by each July,” AEI’s Frederick M. Hess writes. “If parents could view curricular materials in the same way that they can access graduation and dropout rates online, they would be empowered to respond appropriately.”
Across the country, woke bureaucrats are trying to keep parents in the dark—but academic transparency stops them in their tracks.
Read more from Hess at AmericanRenewalBook.com.
