Will Skillman Fellow in Education, Center for Education Policy, The Heritage Foundation
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.
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, Wisc.
Jonathan holds a B.A. in English from Furman University and an M.A. in economics from the University of Arkansas.
Vice President for Litigation & General Counsel, Goldwater Institute
Jon Riches is the Vice President for Litigation for the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and General Counsel for the Institute. He litigates in federal and state trial and appellate courts in the areas of economic liberty, regulatory reform, free speech, taxpayer protections, public labor issues, government transparency, and school choice, among others.
Jon has developed and authored several pieces of legislation, including the landmark Right to Earn a Living Act, which provides some of the greatest protections in the country to job-seekers and entrepreneurs facing arbitrary licensing regulations. He also developed legislation eliminating deference to administrative agencies in Arizona—a first-of-its-kind regulatory reform that can serve as a model for the rest of the country.
His work at the Institute has been covered by national media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CBS This Morning, Bloomberg News, and Politico. Jon is also a member of the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project: State and Local Working Group.
Prior to joining the Goldwater Institute, Jon served on active duty in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps. While on active duty, Jon represented hundreds of clients, litigated dozens of court-martial cases, and advised commanders on a vast array of legal issues.
He previously clerked for Sen. Jon Kyl on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, worked for the Rules Committee in the Arizona State Senate, and clerked in the Office of Counsel to the President at the White House. Jon received his B.A. from Boston College, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his J.D. from the University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law.
Jon served as a presidentially appointed Panel Member on the Federal Service Impasses Panel. He is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University School of Law. Jon is a native of Phoenix.
Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Luke A. Wake is an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation. Prior to joining PLF, he was a senior staff attorney at the NFIB Small Business Legal Center.
Wake has particular expertise on environmental and land use issues, and has worked on numerous other constitutional issues and matters of importance to small business owners. He is an ardent defender of private property rights, which he believes are essential to the free enterprise system and the foundation of American liberty. As a strong advocate of individual rights and economic liberties, he has built his career defending small business interests.
Wake has focused on a whole host of issues, from employment law matters to regulatory compliance. In addition to serving as a resource for small business owners, Wake is committed to ensuring that the voice of small business is heard in the nation’s courts. As an appellate practitioner, Wake has focused particularly on informing the courts on matters of administrative law and on issues under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. He is also working to advance small business interests in law review articles, and was recently published in the Berkeley Journal of Law & Ecology. See R.S. Radford & Luke A. Wake, Deciphering and Extrapolating: Searching for Sense in Penn Central, 38 Ecology L.Q. 731, 746-747 (2011).
Before joining the Legal Center’s team, Wake completed a prestigious two-year fellowship as an attorney in the Pacific Legal Foundation’s College of Public Interest Law. Wake is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland Ohio, and is a member of the California Bar. He completed his undergraduate studies at Elon University in North Carolina in 2006 where he focused on political theory and corporate communications.
Explainer Episode 72 - Parental Rights & Student Privacy in Education
Jonathan Butcher, Jonathan Riches, Luke A. Wake
Legal experts Jonathan Butcher and Jon Riches discuss the debate between parental rights and children’s...
Topics
School Policies Hiding Students’ Gender Identities Face Different Legal Fates
In the United States, approximately 1,044 school districts (impacting more than 10 million students) have...
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The Biden Administration’s Proposed Changes to Title IX Threaten Parental Rights
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for Title...