Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is

an old friend of the magazine, former associate editor here, Mene Ucuburua. He's now an editorial board

member at the Wall Street Journal, where he weighs in on American politics, public opinion,

economic regulations, and the topic of today's discussion, education policy.

He's written for a number of leading publications, including the National Review, the New Republic,

new criterion, and for a city journal.

So today we're going to discuss the school choice movement, the state of the school choice movement, which has been, as we've reported in our pages, making great strides really across the country. So many, good to talk with you.

That's good to talk with you as well, Brian.

So, yeah, really over the past year or so, maybe a little longer, number of states have

introduced pretty wide-ranging school choice program, which provide families with different

kinds of arrangements with funds to pursue their preferred form of education outside in some cases the public school system.

So last July, Arizona became the very first state to pass legislation creating a universal

school choice program. And then I think Utah, Iowa, Arkansas, Florida, maybe one or two other states have followed suit. So I wonder,

you know, how does a universal school choice program work? And are there big differences between

these states' different models? Well, first of all, I'm glad that you narrowed the window for

the school choice movement

to the past year or so because I think a lot of people who follow education policy or even

just parents who follow the state of affairs at their schools and the schools of people

we know would be surprised to understand just how much the landscape has changed within the past year.

The idea of school voucher programs is something that has existed for decades, really.

The first school voucher program was in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin in the early 90s,

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