Educational freedom is the term used across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show for the principle that families, rather than federal agencies or school districts, should control where and how children are educated. The phrase appears in the show’s introduction of Andrew J. Coulson, whom Bob Zadek identifies as Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, and recurs in a caller’s 2011 endorsement of Ron Paul’s message of “legalized freedom, individual freedom, and educational freedom” Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011). The concept is presented less as a single policy than as a cluster of arrangements — local control, school choice, charter schools, homeschooling, and education savings accounts — set against what the sources describe as federal and bureaucratic direction of schooling.
Federal involvement and local control
In the 2009 episode, Bob Zadek frames the topic as the nationalization of education and argues that federal involvement undermines federalism and local control. He describes education as having been as local as government could be, with PTAs, parents and teachers involved, and says that for roughly 220 years the country had the best educational system in the world without federal involvement End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009). He recounts attending Jamaica High School in Queens, New York, graduating in 1958, and receiving what he calls a perfectly wonderful public school education, and asks what went wrong between that graduation and the present day.
Zadek’s guest, Andrew J. Coulson, discusses the history of federal intervention from the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act to initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and the episode description states that the discussion highlights the lack of constitutional authority for federal involvement and the failure of increased spending to improve academic outcomes. Coulson argues that the interventions do not work: spending is far higher at the federal, state and local levels than a generation or more ago, results have not improved, and in some areas are worse. He states that the high school graduation rate is lower today by 4 or 5% than it was in 1970 while spending on schools has more than doubled, and attributes the stagnation to the absence of a competitive enterprise system in education End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Zadek urges listeners to tell their Congresspeople not to support Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, calling them one-way tickets to central control, and argues that federal power is very difficult to unwind once claimed. He notes that the Department of Education formed in 1980 started small and that agencies do not close themselves down. Coulson’s proposed positive step is support for school choice programs at the state level that make it easier for families to choose between public and private schools, so that federal constraints on public schools become less of an issue because families can move their account to a different school and let that school fail End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
Educational freedom and state politics
The 2022 episode with Jason Sorens treats educational freedom as one component of a state-level freedom index. Sorens says that with personal freedom the index finds no relationship to partisan movement, but that more conservative-leaning states tend to show more educational freedom, meaning more school choice and more freedom to homeschool. He pairs this with more freedom to own and carry guns, and says these findings tend to cancel out or wash out in the index against progressive states’ greater freedom on drugs, marijuana, gambling and alcohol. He describes the states that do better on personal freedom as tending to be more rural, naming Nevada, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado as near the top, and New York, Texas, New Jersey, Delaware, Hawaii and Kentucky at the bottom Ranking Freedom in the 50 States (2022).
Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts
The 2022 episode with Matt Beienburg describes educational freedom in practice through Arizona legislation. Beienburg says Arizona has been one of the best leaders across the country for school choice and educational freedom, citing open enrollment policies that let public school students opt out of their local school and attend a different public school or district, and public charter schools that are independently operated, tuition-free and government-funded. He says families during the pandemic found traditional public schools disrupting in-person learning and imposing mandates, and that charter schools had waitlists out the door, leaving families in practice with no alternatives Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022).
Beienburg describes the new legislation, which he says the Arizona legislature passed and Governor Doug Ducey signed and called for in his State of the State address, as transformative. It takes Arizona’s ESA program — Education Savings Accounts, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts in Arizona — and allows a family, rather than sending a child to a public school, to take some of what taxpayers were going to spend on that child and put it into an account operated and managed by the parents, usable for any educational purpose: private school, at-home education, learning pods, micro-schools, tutors or textbooks. He says this breaks the link that forced students through the public school system or forced families to pay twice, once through property and state taxes and again for their own child’s education, and that it prioritizes the education and funding of students rather than of a bureaucracy or a particular brick-and-mortar building Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022).
Across episodes
The topic appears in four episodes spanning 2009 to 2022, and the excerpts show a shift in emphasis rather than a change in argument. In 2009, Andrew J. Coulson and Bob Zadek frame educational freedom negatively, as resistance to federal programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, with school choice at the state level offered as a way for families to get out from under federal constraints. In 2022, Jason Sorens treats educational freedom as a measurable feature of state policy that correlates with conservative-leaning states, and Matt Beienburg describes an enacted state program, Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, as transformative legislation. The 2011 caller segment touches the phrase only in passing, listing educational freedom among the freedoms a caller associates with Ron Paul.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the constitutional provisions or amendments on which the federal education programs are said to rest, nor the holdings of any case. They do not give the full text of the Arizona legislation, its name, or the mechanics by which the accounts are funded beyond Beienburg’s description. The 2009 excerpt breaks off at the point where Coulson begins to answer Zadek’s question about what went wrong, so his account of the shift toward federal control is not available here. The 2011 and 2022 excerpts also end mid-segment, leaving the surrounding discussion unrecorded.