This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 22, I'm Caleb Brown.

Advocates for Broad Educational Freedom Cheer the Supreme Court's Carson v. Macon decision, so what's next for the

movement toward decentralizing control of educational decisions away from

publicly administered systems in favor of the preferences of individual parents and families.

Cato's Neil McCluskey comments.

Carson V. Macon was a big case for fans of educational freedom, especially in K-12.

And to remind listeners, what was that case about and how did that change the field of battle in educational freedom?

So Carson v. Macon was about, in a way, a very specific program.

The state of Maine, along with Vermont and then much more recently, New Hampshire, has something

called town tuitioning, which is a program in which if you live in a town that basically doesn't have enough people to efficiently support

public school system, sometimes it means you don't have enough for high school,

but it could be middle school, could be elementary school,

but that the people who live in that town can take the money to educate their kids to any other

school or at least in theory any other school, or at least in theory any other school.

That meant they could pay for another school district,

but they can also pay for private schools.

And what Maine said was up until actually 1980, you could take that money to a religious private school.

And what Maine said is, well, okay, you can take the money to a school that identifies as religious in other

words has religious status but you can't take the money to a religious school that

acts on its religion called religious use.

And this was sort of an anomaly.

We'd had a long growth and precedent of saying in school choice programs you can choose religious schools as long as that's a free choice.

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