Hello and welcome to the Cato podcast.

I'm Neil McCleskey, director of Cato Center for Educational Freedom, and I'm one of the co-editors

of the new book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn, examining America's centuries-old

school choice movement.

The book lays out the long, actually

the very long, history of the fight for pluralistic options in American education. It's an effort

that not begin in the 1950s, as both detractors and advocates, might end up have you believe,

but it's as old as the idea of public schooling.

So it didn't start either with efforts to dodge integration after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954,

nor with Milton Friedman's essay sketching out vouchers in this 1955 book chapter,

The Role of Government in Education.

No, school choice is the inevitable outcome, or the movement for school choice is the inevitable

outcome of government trying to provide education for diverse people.

Diverse people need differentiation in their education, and one system of government schools does not supply

that. It's my great pleasure today, and as the country celebrates National School Choice

Week, to be joined by three of the fantastic contributors to this book, which I should point out,

I co-edited with the great James Scholes

of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University. The contributors

joined me today are in order of their chapters, not their altogether magnificence, which could

be in this order, maybe isn't.

Just didn't play into any of my decision-making.

But joining us today, first, Cheryl Field-Smith, who's the professor of educational

...