The new wave of private school vouchers

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

Business, News

4.6 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For decades, private school vouchers, often referred to as school choice programs, were limited to low-income students. But recently, several states have passed universal voucher programs that any family, regardless of income, can use to pay their kids’ private school tuition. On the show today, Huriya Jabbar, professor of education policy at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, explains the history of private school vouchers, what makes the latest wave of these programs different from traditional school vouchers, and why some believe private school vouchers undermine the purpose of public education in the U.S. Plus, what does Milton Friedman have to do with all of this?

Then, Kai Ryssdal explains the ins and outs of how the Bureau of Labor Statistics revises its job data. And, we’ll hear from listeners about free garden seeds and American soccer in the ’70s.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

- “Millions of campaign dollars aimed at tilting school voucher battle are flowing into state races” from AP News

- “Arizona School Voucher Program Causes Budget Meltdown” from ProPublica

- “Public Funding, Private Education” from The New York Times

- “The new and radical school voucher push is quietly unwinding two centuries of U.S. education tradition” from the Brookings Institution

- “Which States Have Private School Choice?” from Education Week

- “Georgia election board approves another rule that could disrupt certification” from WABE

- “Election Deniers Secretly Pushed Rule That Would Make It Easier to Delay Certification of Georgia’s Election Results” from ProPublica

- “Fed Confronts Up to a Million US Jobs Vanishing in Revision” from Bloomberg

We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody I'm I'm Kyle Rizdall. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where none of us is as smart as all of us. And I'm Kimberly Adams.
0:14.0	Thank you for joining us on this Tuesday.
0:15.0	It's August the 20th.
0:17.0	It's election season, as well as back to school season,
0:20.0	so today we're going to talk about a combo of the two, an issue where politics and education
0:24.9	collide. Private school voucher programs, or private school choice programs, as some folks call them.
0:32.2	These use taxpayer money to pay for students
0:35.4	private school tuition and more and more states are passing laws to either
0:40.0	create or expand these programs?
0:43.6	We are going to talk about all that today because while it's not maybe the top tier issue,
0:49.7	it is one of those things policy-wise that a lot of people pay a lot of attention to.
0:54.4	So here to make us smart about this today is Hario Jabbar, Professor of Education Policy at
0:58.5	the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education just down the road
1:01.6	from where I sit right now.
1:03.2	Welcome to the show.
1:05.2	Hi, thank you.
1:06.4	So I can't decide whether I should go historical,
1:10.3	just because that's my deal.
1:11.8	Where did this, how long has this idea of school
1:13.9	voucher has been around and where sort of where do they come from? Yeah it's always good to
1:18.7	start with the history I think. So the concept of using you know public dollars to fund private education is
1:25.3	typically traced to Milton Friedman's call for restructuring public education
	...

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