Public Education: Dumbing Down Your Child

Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage Foundation. He is the author of Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (Bombardier Books, April 2022). He co-edited and wrote chapters in The Critical Classroom (The Heritage Foundation, 2022), discussing the racial prejudice that comes from the application of critical race theory in K-12 schools. In 2021, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster nominated Jonathan to serve on the board of the South Carolina Public Charter School District, a statewide charter school authorizer. He has researched and testified on education policy around the U.S.

Jonathan co-edited and wrote chapters in the book The Not-So-Great Society, which provides conservative solutions to the problems created by the ever-expanding federal footprint in preschool, K-12, and higher education.

He has appeared on local and national TV outlets, including C-SPAN, Fox News, and HBO’s Vice News Tonight, and he has been a guest on many radio programs. His commentary has appeared nationally in places such as the Wall Street Journal, Education Week, National Review Online, Newsweek.com, and Forbes.com, along with newspapers around the country.

In 2017 he was a co-recipient of the State Policy Network’s Bob Williams Award for Most Influential Research for a proposal to protect free speech on campus, alongside Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Jim Manley of the Goldwater Institute.

He is also a Senior Fellow with The Beacon Center of Tennessee, a nonpartisan research organization, and a contributing scholar for the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

Jonathan previously studied education policy at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Jonathan holds a B.A. in English from Furman University and an M.A. in economics from the University of Arkansas.