This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 20, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

A popular program in Nevada to enable students to leave public schools faces two court challenges.

Jason Bedrick Education Policy analyst at the Cato Institute discusses the results of

round one.

last year the Nevada legislature enacted the nation's first nearly universal

education savings account program in which every child who spent at least

100 days in the previous year at a public school, whether they're assigned a district school or a charter school can leave and

completely customize their education using about five thousand dollars of the

money that would have been used for their public school education.

So they can use it at private schools, but they can also use it for things like tutors, textbooks,

homeschool curriculum, online learning, and they can even use it for different college

courses and save the money from year to year.

So the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the program. what was the result?

Yes, there's actually two lawsuits currently against the program.

One of them is from the ACLU, and that, finally, the decision came down earlier this week in the lower court

dismissing the challenge. The ACLU challenged the

ESA on two grounds.

First, they said that it violated a section of the Nevada Constitution that requires the state to create a uniform system of common schools.

And they argued that there's a clause

that it says that these common schools

must be established and maintained in each school district at least six months of the year and they should allow instruction they may not allow instruction of a sectarian character therein.

But there's a separate clause in the state constitution that

...