Ashley Rogers Burner joins us. She's been here before. She is director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. Her new book is Educational Pluralism and Democracy,

How to Handle Indctrination, Promote Exposure, and Rebuild America's Schools. That's our timely topic

today. Welcome, Professor Berner. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, now you wish to,

first of all, compare U.S. public schools to public schools in

other nations. And even I wasn't aware of in many ways how unusual the American public school

system is relative to other schools. First, maybe I should say, when you say public schools in many Asian

and European nations, the term extends to rather different objects than those it designates

here in the United States. What is the big fundamental difference?

So the biggest difference is that when most countries around the world, in fact, more than

80% of the countries tracked by UNESCO, when the question comes up, what is public education,

it doesn't mean just one thing. If you ask the question in the United States, what's public education?

Instantly, most people think of the neighborhood school, the district.

But if you were asking that question in the Netherlands,

or most provinces of Canada or Indonesia, Israel, Belgium, it would be a multitude.

The state funds a wide variety of schools and holds them all accountable

for academics. That could be in a larger small, religious or secular, a lot of curricular

variety all over the place? It depends. So historically, the strongest performing countries, like France, the Netherlands, the UK,

have had pluralistic funding where they fund all different kinds of schools.

The Netherlands funds 36.

And while they didn't have to use the same curriculum per se, they had to cover the same

knowledge domains. So, you know, for example, in the Netherlands, they fund Jewish, Hindu,

Catholic schools, but all of those school kids have to learn what Hinduism believes. They fund creationist schools, but all of those school kids have to learn what Hinduism believes.

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