This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 9th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Oklahoma now is moving ahead with a charter school run by a religious organization.

Charter schools are of course public schools, so how did we get to a point where something that

would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago is now moving forward?

And what do religious groups believe they'll get out of submitting

their own educational preferences to regulation from the state?

Cato's Neil McCluskey comments.

So the best place to begin, if we're going to talk about school choice modern day

charter schools and private school choice programs is about 1989 because they were

1989 there really were no modern day

school choice programs you had your town tuitioning in Vermont and Maine but there

weren't any charter schools and there weren't any voucher programs.

Later we get tax credit programs in education savings accounts, but the basic idea of

somehow publicly connected funding letting you go to a private school.

But in 1990, we basically have the beginning of both of these things,

the first charter schooling and the first voucher programs.

And what they represented was people largely based on kind of academic outcomes measures.

Were kids learning to read, were they learning to do math, and often did they just

just feel safe in their schools.

This drove a school choice movement

that we see really begin in 1990

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