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Love the government, hug the government, hug the government, love the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government, hug the government. Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy. I'm Northern Kentucky University political scientist Michael Baranowski. My guest today is Josh Cowan, Professor of Education

Policy at Michigan State University. Today we'll be talking about his recently released book,

The Privateers, How Billionaires, Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Josh Cowen,

welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So I thought we'd get really basic to start with, just to make sure everyone understands.

Can you just briefly explain what exactly school voucher programs are in general?

Yeah, so vouchers are kind of an umbrella term for any taxpayer funding that goes to private school tuition for K-12 in particular.

So there's been quite a number of different mechanical ways that policymakers have designed these voucher systems over the last 30 years.

But at the sort of at their core, what we're

talking about here are any sort of program that uses taxpayer funding to pay for private

school tuition.

And if I did a little research on this before we talked about just reading your book, but

according to analysis I saw on Education Week, there are 29 states as well as D.C. that have at least one sort of private school choice program, which I guess would fit under that umbrella.

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