This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 10th, 2007 on Caleb Brown.

How do education tax credits fare with the public as compared with education vouchers.

Adam Schaefer is a policy analyst for the Cato Institute.

He says parents and voters like school choice in general, but differ on which form they'd

prefer it to take.

It says tax credits that extend school choice to more children

are more popular with the public than vouchers.

There's majority support pretty consistently in polls for school choice, just the general concept,

and in particular for vouchers and tax credits to allow people to choose among public and private schools.

Tax credits do tend to get about five or ten

percentage points more support on pretty similar programs in terms of you know who

they cover.

So generally speaking, tax credits are more popular,

but both are popular.

Is that in part because the word voucher

is considered a bad word, the teachers unions have been sort of hammering on that

particular word. It's become sort of an epithet for teachers unions.

That may be part of it and certainly in states where there this has been a high profile issue

Maybe in Milwaukee and other places that's that's had a bigger impact generally speaking the polls also find that people don't know a whole lot about

public policy in general and education policy and reforms in particular

most people really have never heard of the word voucher or the voucher in the context of education.

They don't know a whole lot about either of them.

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