Jonathan Butcher

Jonathan Butcher is the Acting Director of the Center for Education Policy and Will Skillman Senior Research Fellow in Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

He has researched and testified on education policy around the U.S., including testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He serves as chair of the South Carolina Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is the author of The Polarization Myth: America’s Surprising Consensus on Race, Schools, and Sex (Encounter Books, December 2025) and Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (Bombardier Books, April 2022). He wrote chapters in Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think (Encounter, 2026), and 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.

Jonathan also 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.

In 2018 the Federal Commission on School Safety cited comments from his testimony in the commission’s final report. 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.

Jonathan previously served as the Education Director at the Goldwater Institute, where he remains a Senior Fellow. He was a member of the Arizona Department of Education’s first Steering Committee for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, the nation’s first education savings account program. 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.

Prior to joining Goldwater, Jonathan was the Director of Accountability for the South Carolina Public Charter School District. Jonathan previously studied education policy at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and worked with the School Choice Demonstration Project, the research team that evaluated voucher programs in Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee.

Jonathan holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Furman University and a master’s degree in economics from the University of Arkansas. He also holds an M.A. in Theological Studies from Erskine Seminary, where he was awarded the Zondervan Theology Award, which is given to the student who demonstrated the most outstanding achievement in Biblical Studies.