For most families, nothing is more important than securing a hopeful future for their children via a solid education. Yet, here in the Ocean State, families are under assault – educationally – by their own government.

Because of compromised politicians and education officials, Rhode Island finished 50th out of 51 in the Heritage Foundation’s 2026 Education Freedom Report Card—one slot above last-place Maine and well behind nearly every other state. That ranking is not a statistical quirk: It is the predictable result of policies that treat parents as afterthoughts and treat teacher unions and the education bureaucracy as the default decision-maker … when it should be the parents’ choice.

Policies affect families; under-privileged students especially. It is undeniable that education policies that empower parents to make education choices best for their children … result in higher student achievement and outcomes.

Heritage scores states on five pillars: education choice programs actually available to families, academic transparency, teacher freedom, return on investment from taxpayer dollars, and civic education. Rhode Island lands near the bottom on most of them: 34th in choice, 50th in transparency, 50th in teacher freedom, 39th in ROI, and 47th in civics. Contrast that with Florida, first overall for the fifth straight year, first in both choice and transparency, and second in teacher freedom and civics.

However, our Ocean State fails where other states are succeeding. Louisiana leads the nation in civic education by requiring a full-year high-school civics course and a citizenship test to graduate. Idaho leads in ROI. Arizona leads in teacher freedom. These states did not stumble into those results. They expanded education savings accounts, protected parental access to curriculum, reduced licensing barriers that keep good teachers out of classrooms, and refused to treat every extra dollar spent as proof of progress.

Rhode Island has done the opposite. Families still lack a robust, portable choice program that follows the child. Transparency remains weak; parents too often cannot see what is actually being taught until after the fact. Teacher-freedom scores suffer when certification rules and district-level ideology crowd out professional judgment. Spending is high relative to outcomes. Civic education lags at a moment when only 22 percent of American eighth-graders are proficient in civics. The pattern is familiar: more money, more administrators, fewer real options for the people who actually live with the results.

Heritage’s premise is simple and correct: education decisions belong with the people closest to the child. When states treat that principle as optional, they produce rankings like Rhode Island’s. When they treat it as non-negotiable—as Florida, Arizona, Idaho, and Louisiana have—they produce opportunity. Rhode Island’s poor showing is not an indictment of its children or its teachers. It is an indictment of a political culture that still prefers monopoly to mobility. Parents in the Ocean State should not have to wait another year for the next report card to confirm what they already know: the system is not designed around them.