Welcome to the Freedom to Learn podcast. I'm your host, Ginny Gentles. This season, we're diving into what it means to return education to states, communities, and families.

And we're exploring what becomes possible when education is freed from union dominance and federal control.

Brian Jodas, National Press Secretary for the American Federation for Children,

joins us today to share the results from a September National School Choice survey.

We delve into the details, but I want to emphasize three findings.

Number one, the poll found that the majority of voters favored the federal scholarship tax

credit.

Number two, parents are particularly excited about the tax credit, with 66% of parents with kids

in public schools in support.

And number three, nearly two-thirds of voters favor their state opting into the federal scholarship

tax credit, and that support extends across ideological lines.

Brian previously served as the executive vice president of Parents for Educational Freedom

in North Carolina. Stick around to hear him talk about North Carolina's impactful parent

liaison team and then tackle his favorite school choice myth, that school choice siphons money

away from our traditional public schools.

Brian Jodas, welcome to Freedom to Learn. Jenny, excited to be here. You've worked in the

Education Freedom Arena in a variety of roles, and I want to talk about your work in North Carolina

and that state's school choice story. But let's start

with a new poll from the American Federation for Children, which found that Americans strongly

support school choice and will vote accordingly. Tell me about the poll. What's the top line finding

there? Yeah, it's really exciting. And look, obviously, it's in line with positive results we've seen across the country as it relates to school choice. And polls are great to have in hand, but you can also just see the way families have moved with their feet, too, over the last 10 years, really over the last five specifically. We've just seen incredible groundswell. And I think it's why we're in position to not only see great results like this, but to see so many champion on the national level for the federal scholarship tax credit, we'll talk a little bit more about that as well. But here's sort of top lines of what the poll told us. We were in the field in early September, a thousand registered voters. We actually waited heavily for families that, you know, had K-12 age students because you wanted a little oversampling to be able to hear from families that kids, you know, they're still in school. But here's sort of top line. And then we can kind of go as you want and talk about maybe some of the interesting findings we found. But 73% of voters believe school choice should be open to all families, very consistent with what we've seen in national polling over the last few years, including 55% who say it should be open to all regardless of income

or geography. So this idea of regardless of income, you know, what your zip code is,

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