On a Mission from God: The Rise of School Vouchers in America with Alec MacGillis, ProPublica

In this episode of Faithful Politics, Will Wright sits down with investigative journalist Alec MacGillis from ProPublica to discuss his latest exposé, "On a Mission from God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Religious Schools." Alec provides a deep dive into the rapid expansion of private school voucher programs, particularly in Ohio, and how they are fundamentally reshaping the landscape of public education. He details how these programs, originally marketed as a means to provide alternatives for struggling students, are overwhelmingly subsidizing families who were already enrolled in private schools—predominantly religious institutions. The conversation also explores the historical roots of the voucher movement, its ties to Christian education, and the political strategies that have driven its success. Will and Alec discuss the broader implications for public schools, the constitutional concerns over church-state separation, and the potential for further expansion under a second Trump administration. If you care about the future of education in America, this is an episode you don’t want to miss.

• Read the article 'On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools': https://www.propublica.org/article/school-vouchers-ohio-church-state-tax-dollars-private-religious
• Read Alec's latest follow up report 'In the Wild West of School Voucher Expansions, States Rely on Untested Companies, With Mixed Results': https://www.propublica.org/article/school-voucher-management-classwallet-odyssey-merit-student-first

Guest Bio: Alec MacGillis
Alec MacGillis is an award-winning investigative journalist with ProPublica, focusing on issues like economic inequality, gun violence, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education. Before joining ProPublica, he reported for The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The Baltimore Sun. His work has won numerous national journalism awards, and his reporting consistently sheds light on undercovered but crucial topics shaping American society. His latest investigative piece, "On a Mission from God," examines the political and religious forces driving the rise of school vouchers in the U.S.

Transcript

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Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching us on our YouTube channel, we're happy to have you. I'm your political host, Will Wright, and your faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram can't be here with us today. He's currently auditioning for the lead role in Velocipastor 2, but he'll join us next time. But in his stead, we have with us Alec McGillis. He is a reporter for ProPublica focusing on gun violence, economic inequality. and the pandemic era school crisis. also previously reported for the New Republic, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and he is out now with a new wonderful investigative piece called, it's funny, I have a little asterisks, take a breath here, on a mission from God inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to provide religious schools. That's why I had to take a breath because like it's hard to say it all in one breath. But so welcome to the show, Alec. Yeah, really, really glad to have you here. And I guess just to kind of jump right into it, give us sort of like the broad overview of like what the story is about and kind of what motivated you to pursue it. So I've been writing a bunch of stories these last couple of years about the crisis facing public education in the wake of the pandemic and the pandemic school closures written about the rise in absenteeism, learning loss, the big decline in school achievement. The fact a lot of schools are having to close because there's been such a drop in enrollment in a lot of districts. And then I decided to take on this story about the rise in private school vouchers around the country, which was another outcome really of the pandemic. And we can get into that more later. But I decided to take this one on largely because I was aware that there was this huge surge happening in private school vouchers and that a lot of people were not aware of this. A lot of people, friends and colleagues and associates of mine in sort blue states had no idea that this was happening, that you had... Just in the last couple of years, you've had the expansion of school vouchers to the point where there are now a dozen states, including some very large ones, that have universal school vouchers, meaning that any family of any income level can now get public money, taxpayer money, to subsidize their kids' private school tuition. This has happened very suddenly in the last few years, and there are a bunch more states that are probably on the verge of getting of getting universal private school vouchers. And I just thought it was time to write a big definitive article about how we got to this point. And I decided that the best way to do this would be to focus on one state in particular, and I chose Ohio. For those that don't know much about like a voucher per se, or maybe like some of these coded words like school choice, can you explain a little bit more in detail like what is a voucher? Is it like a physical piece of paper that says good for one choice of school or something like that? Like what is a voucher? Essentially, it's these variant size from state to state, but typically they are around seven or $8,000 per kid. Sometimes it'll be a little, might be $8,000 for high school kids, $6,000 for younger kids. In some states, the voucher is the same size for all families, regardless of their income. In Florida, it's the same size for everyone. Arkansas, it's the same size for everyone. In some other states like Ohio, the size of the voucher is somewhat smaller for wealthier families, but still everyone gets at least some money for their kids' tuition. It is universal in that sense. And crucially what's happening in these universal states is that so far at least most of the people using these vouchers are the people, the families who are already had their kids in private schools. So essentially, while the argument, the overarching argument for vouchers all along for decades now has been that they would help kids escape struggling schools, give those families another option. What we're seeing so far is that the vast majority of of these vouchers are going to the families who are already there. So it's in Ohio, know, St. Bernadines out, you know, in suburb of Columbus or Cincinnati, suddenly you have all the families who are going there for years and they would maybe never ever even sent their kids to public schools or contemplated doing that are now getting. five or six or seven or $8,000 per kid. And in some of these schools, know, some parochial schools, that just about covers tuition. essentially, a lot of these families are now having the close to the full cost of their kids' private school and covered by the state. Wow, you know, it's weird, but not necessarily surprising. mean, like this, this has kind of been going on since like Brown v Board education, right? mean, like since when, when, when we, when America said you have to integrate schools, there was a lot of Christian organizations, know, Bob Jones University, you know, kind of Falwell's in there. And, and it's just like, that was sort of their way of, you know, I don't know, like keeping like segregated schools segregated. And there's always been kind of like this church tie to vouchers for some reason. And in your investigative piece, like you clearly like see that. So, and it takes place in Ohio. So like why Ohio of all places? So I decided to focus on Ohio for a few reasons. One is that I've done a lot of reporting there over the years and so just know my way around and have a lot of contacts there. Second of all, the voucher movement really kind of started there. It was one of the two states where it really got, where the modern voucher movement got a start in the early 1990s. It was Ohio and Wisconsin in the early 1990s. And third of all, There is an amazing trove of letters that are in the private, the collected papers of George Voynovich, who was the former governor of Ohio in the 90s, Republican governor in the 90s. And he had this incredibly close relationship with the Catholic bishops in Ohio. He was himself a devout Catholic and he was constantly corresponding with the bishops. And in this correspondence, you see this the strategizing around getting a private school voucher program launched. And so it was just a really good way to kind of dive into the historical record to do some, you know, investigating of how this all got going. So can you elaborate on what's the strategy? Because it's not like somebody snaps their fingers and then all of a sudden vouchers are going wherever they want them to go. There had to have probably been a series of steps to get to the point where it's on somebody's radar. So kind of walk us through the steps that the politicians and church officials took. Sure, well, back in the early 90s, the challenge facing the church in Ohio, as in many other states, was that you had these parochial schools in the big cities that had lost a lot of their students to suburban flight, to white flight. And... to try to keep these schools going, to fill the seats, these schools had started admitting a lot more African-American children in cities like Cleveland and Cincinnati and Columbus. A lot of those families couldn't pay as much, couldn't afford to pay as much as the families who had fled to the suburbs. And so their tuition was being even more heavily subsidized by the church. And the church was having trouble getting by. with the schools were having trouble getting by. And despite the fact that they were already getting a lot of money from the state of Ohio, Ohio very unusually since the sixties had been sending millions of dollars to the state's Catholic schools in the form of subsidies for transportation and some special ed stuff and administrative stuff. But in the early nineties, these schools were really struggling and George Voynovich, the new governor knew this. He had himself had gone to Catholic schools growing up and they came upon, settled on this plan to try vouchers as a new way to funnel public money into these Catholic schools. And they knew it was going to be very, very tricky to do this, that there would be a lot of opposition, both from the general public worried about money. going from public schools, private schools, and also from groups like the ACLU who would be likely to sue over this on church state grounds. And so what they did was they came up with a way to really try to make it as... kind of as covert as possible and make it not seem like a church thing, that the church was driving this. So what the governor did was he created a commission on school choice. It was called the Governor's Commission on School Choice. And he appointed a businessman who had raised a lot of money for him to run this commission on school choice. What you see in the letters that I saw was that, This commission was full of people who had been selected by the church. The bishop sent a list of names of people they wanted to have on the commission and six of those people ended up on the commission. Of course, was not, no one knew that they had been picked by the church, but that's. mean, if you're going to make a commission, you it's like you might as well fill it with people that you want. Yeah, so they, the commission, then the commission lo and behold, you know, year after it formed, it came out and said, you know what, what we think we should do is we should have a, create a pilot program for school vouchers. And, and then there was this big push by, not by the church, the church officials, the, the church, the, the, what's called the Catholic conference in Columbus, this sort of policy arm of the church. was tried to try to lie low and there's a letter from one of the, from George Mojnovich's chief advisor saying, telling him that the plan was for the church officials to lie low and pretend like they had nothing to do with this. But meanwhile, actual church members all across the state were being mobilized to send letters and make calls, know, thousands of letters and calls to state legislators making the case for for this school voucher pilot. Nonetheless, this was such a controversial idea back then that Voinovich decided not to actually try to pass standalone legislation to create a voucher program. In the end, in 1995, they ended up just slipping it into the state budget as in sort of the, know, at the last second and slipped it into the state budget. And there you had the creation of this small voucher pilot in Cleveland with only a couple thousand kids at first who were getting these vouchers to go to help their families afford school. And it was all these cases, we're talking parochial schools because in Ohio, this is the key point, in Ohio, most private schools are religious based, either Catholic or evangelical or some Jewish schools, but you don't have really very few of the secular private schools that are so prominent in the big cities on the coast. So you have this, the voucher gets going and it's sold as a civil rights thing. It's sold as a way to help these disadvantaged, mostly black school children in Cleveland get out of these struggling schools and... have more options and more opportunities. It was sold that way, but all along, it's clear when you read these letters that all along this was seen as just the first step, the foot in the door. And then over time, it's incredible to see how over the decades there was just this relentless push to expand it. In 2005, it expands to other cities in Ohio and other other districts deemed to be struggling in Cincinnati and Columbus and Toledo and Akron. And then finally in 2013 or so, it expands to kids anywhere in the state up to a certain income level. So sort of working class kids in any district can now get vouchers to go to a private school. And then finally, just two years ago, it becomes universal. And it's now in Ohio, any family can get one these vouchers to subsidize their kids' education. It's now up to around 150,000 kids who are getting these in Ohio, and the cost is nearly a billion dollars. It's just been extraordinary to see this relentless growth and this explosion in the last two years toward full universality. Gosh, that's crazy. Like, so, I mean, what's gonna happen to all the public schools then? Well, what you're seeing right now in Ohio, as in other states that have gone to universal vouchers, is that so far there's not been all that much growth in private school enrollment. And that's for a couple of reasons. A lot of families are simply satisfied with their public schools. In other cases, a family might want to go to a private school, but it's... It's hard to find one that'll take them. A lot of schools are sort of at capacity. They don't necessarily... This is one the key points with vouchers, of course. It's school choice in the sense that a family can in theory now choose where the kids go to school with these vouchers. But it's still the private schools themselves that get to choose who comes to them. Public schools have to take all comers. Private schools can say, want Jimmy but not Johnny. And especially if Johnny's maybe gonna. cause some troubles in the classroom, or maybe if Johnny has special needs that are going to require extra attention, or if Johnny's just, yeah, his grades aren't that good. And so some families might be inclined to go to private schools, but they can't find a spot in them, even though they now have access to this voucher. So what you're seeing right now with public schools is that because there hasn't been that much, there's two ways that public schools are gonna lose funding as a result of this huge expansion in vouchers. One is that, is if Johnny decides to go to a private school, to leave this public school for private school, in that case, that money, public schools get funding based on how many kids they have in their school, and per capita. And if Johnny, when Johnny's leaves to go to private school, they lose, they lose that money that came with him that was attached to his, you know, to his person. that so far isn't happening too much for the reasons I just described. But then there's this other way that private schools are taking money away from public schools with a rise in vouchers. And that's simply the fact that as the state, as Ohio and other states are spending so much money on these vouchers, almost a billion dollars in Ohio. It simply leaves less money overall for public education. So in Ohio, for instance, there's been a push in recent years to increase funding for public schools, state funding for public schools, to provide more money for local districts that are lower income and can't spend very much of their own money in schools, and to just to raise achievement. there's actually been court cases in Ohio, as in many other states, over what over the state constitution's requirement to provide an adequate level of education. And Ohio legislators had come up with a plan to increase funding, public funding, funding for public schools, state funding for public schools, to meet these levels of adequate education. Now, because the state is spending almost a billion dollars on these private school vouchers, there's simply less money left over to meet those goals for public funding. So it just makes it, it is at some level zero sum. It's just common sense. If you're spending a billion bucks on private school vouchers, there's just not going to be enough left over to do what, to do any kind of big initiatives on the public funding side of the equation. I don't know enough about the mechanics of how schools count the number of kids. I've got two kids in elementary school right now, but if you were to remove those kids and put them in a private school, what's the rubric by which the money they get? maybe the better question is, those kids that are using the vouchers, like, how does the state figure out how much money they get since they're not really kind of being accounted for? Yeah, the way the way it typically works is that education in most states is funded by largely by combination of state and local dollars. You still you have some federal money as well, especially for the, you know, the most low income schools, but it's largely state and local funding. So typically in a district in a sort of typical district in Ohio, a the state will be will provide about maybe three or four five thousand dollars per kid actually in the wealthier districts is probably somewhat less than that like a typical suburban district might be only two or three thousand dollars per kid that the state will provide per per kid in the school and then the local schools the local district through local tax dollars mostly property taxes is how we typically do it in this country is then also is adding the vast majority of the funding for that kids education. And so, you know, might be that school might be getting, say, let's say $15,000 per kid through those two funding sources, primarily through those two funding sources. And so, you know, at some point in the year, usually like October, we'll have like a count, we count day and based on how many kids are in the school on that day. The school is getting X millions in funding for the kids, educate the kids under its roof. If a kid leaves for the private school, they're losing those $50,000. The kid's not there. And meanwhile, the state is now gonna be giving the private school that he went to five or six or seven or eight thousand dollars based on the family's income. So remarkably the state is actually giving, in most cases the states in Ohio is now giving the private schools more money per kid than it is spending on the kid in public school because it's only sending local districts a fairly modest amount for kids in public school. but it's now spending quite a bit more on average for the ones that are going to private school. It's quite striking. How does Ohio's voucher program compare to some of the other states? I think Oklahoma, Florida, I think has programs like that, but yeah, how does Ohio compare? It's the main difference between some of these programs is that, as I mentioned before, that some of them are... universal in the sense of being the same amount of money for everyone, regardless of their income. So Florida, Arkansas, a bunch of others, everyone gets the same six or seven, $8,000, no matter how wealthy they are. In Ohio, the wealthiest families do get somewhat less. So they're eligible for money. They all get money, but the wealthier ones get somewhat less. Another key difference is that in some states, including Florida, Arizona, Arkansas, West Virginia. Parents can also get money, homeschooling parents can get money for their kids. So, and that's typically, in that case, it's called, the name is often an education savings account, ESA. So the money basically, in a sense comes, there's an account, everyone has an account. If your kids are not in public school, everyone just gets an account, sort of, you know, that your money sits there, you can either use it for a private school voucher, or you can use it for homeschooling expenses. That's where things often get very, very tricky, because then the question is, what's a legit, what's an, what's an approved expense? Who's going to vet that? There's all these states that have these ESAs have already gotten a lot of, you know, had lot of problems with this, with expenses that are very eyebrow racing, know, TVs and gaming consoles and, you know, all sorts of things that families, exactly, kayaks. And so, and then you have to hire a company to manage that spending. So that's a whole other expense. have another article coming up shortly on those companies. So Ohio does not have that, an ESA, that there's some people who are pushing for one, but right now it's just a straight voucher program where the money can just be used for actual private schools. That is so wild. So, I guess, what are the arguments for and against the voucher program through kind of the lens of the church-state separation? mean, are proponents of the voucher saying that the church of, the separation between church and state is a farce or what? Because I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around. You know, what seems like exactly as your title alluded to, know, taxpayer money is going to these religious organizations. You know, I mean, some legislature person could write a bill says no money shall be appropriated to religious institutions or something like that. But none has come up near as I can tell. So, yeah, well, like what's the argument there? So in those letters that I looked at from the early 90s, it was clear that George Voynovich, who was the governor of Ohio then, just really didn't think that there should be any real separation of church and state. He was very candid in those private letters with the bishops where he, you at one point he said, look, I just think that you guys in the church would do a much better job of spending this money than the government would. So we should just be getting you as much of this money as possible because I think you'll get better outcomes. Voinovich really just didn't see any real separation there, any real need for that distinction, that long-held distinction in the Constitution, both the US Constitution and state Constitution, that have some kind of establishment clause saying the government The government is not going to be, in this country, not going to be establishing, endorsing any one religion. We're going to keep it separate. When this all got into the courts in the late 90s, you see you have these two programs in Cleveland and then the other big one was in Milwaukee. And you start having, of course, a lot of legal challenges on church state grounds. The ACLU, the teachers unions start filing suit against these programs. And then when it gets to the US Supreme Court in 2002, the proponents aren't as explicit as Voinovich was in his letters. not there saying, we think that separation is a sham, we don't need to have this. Instead, they're saying, look, these programs are so narrow. They're so closely tailored. This is just a couple thousand poor kids in Cleveland. This is just... It's not that big a deal. Like, let's just let this go. It's not, you know, the bigger scheme of things. It's not such a, it's not some great threat to the church-state separation. And then the Supreme Court upheld the Cleveland program, basically on those grounds. 5-4, very narrow ruling saying, because this is such a sliver of kids in this one city, you know, it's okay. And, but on that ruling and then on some successive rulings and more recently, we've not gotten to the point where it's not narrow at all. it's, it's, it's a billion dollars in Ohio. It's 150,000 kids. It's, it's even bigger in other States like Florida and Arizona. It's Texas is about to, is probably going to, is very likely to approve vouchers, universal vouchers at great cost this year. So it's really remarkable to see how the proponents have managed to take these rulings that were based on the targeted nature of these programs and just now drive a truck through them. Wow. Do you get a sense that the general population in Ohio fully kind of understands what's happening with regards to school vouchers? There's certainly more awareness of it there than elsewhere. The local, state local press has done a very good job of covering this to the extent that it can, you know, with the diminished resources of the local media these days. But I do think it's not fully sunk in with a lot of people, just how broad the ramifications of this are going to be. There's been a lot of, there was a lot of federal funding the last couple of years for schools nationwide. It's part of the pandemic relief funding that President Biden was pushing out there. And that really helped to stave off any big cuts in schools around the country. That money's now run out. And so there's going to be way more budget pressures now in public schools. And I think so it's going to start sinking in more with people, wait a second, why are we spending a billion dollars on mostly well-off kids in private schools when my kids' school, public school, is facing these cuts? So I think we're to start seeing more of that dynamic. And then more awareness will rise from that. But for now, it's almost been a lot of these states with universal vouchers, it's kind of, well, let's put it this way, the people who are getting the vouchers are not exactly, are not out there shouting about it because they know they've got, it's a, it's a well-kept secret in that sense where every one of these schools is now getting these vouchers, like everyone. I mean, why would you not? It's the money sitting on the table. And although there are some parents who, who I've spoken to who, actually had qualms about getting the money. They said, I don't need this. I'm well off. I decided to send my kid to private school because I think it's best for my kid, but I don't think that the state should be paying for that. And those parents have gotten letters from their private school administrators saying, you got to take the money. Because yeah, they're basically making it all but a requirement for them to take the money. That is wild. mean, straight up wild. How many non-Christian or Christian-adjacent private schools do you think are getting this money also? Very few. There are some large Jewish schools in Ohio that are in Cleveland, Columbus, that that rank very high on the list of schools in terms of how much money they're getting in these vouchers from the state. But the vast majority of private schools in Ohio are either Catholic or evangelical. And that's That's the case in a lot of the states that have expanded their vouchers. Most of the vast recluse of the schools that are getting this money are in fact religious, which is why the church state issue comes to the fore. Even if there weren't the church state issue though, even if these were secular private schools, it's worth noting that that still raises questions about why is the... Why is the public subsidizing the operation of private schools that are not required, that can pick and choose their students, don't have to take everyone, that face, that have many fewer requirements as far as accountability and transparency. We simply know much less about what's going on in these schools in terms of achievement and safety, what have you. It's just important to keep that in mind that even if there were not the state church question, there'd still be things to raise about this whole voucher expansion. Is there any litigation that you're aware of going on? like, you know, we've had Rachel Lazeron from America's United. I figure like this would be right up their alley, just throwing lawsuits like left and right. Are you familiar with things like litigation? Yes, so there's a big lawsuit in Ohio that was filed a couple years ago as the program that was expanding so dramatically. A huge coalition of more than 200 public school districts and the teachers unions and some others filed suit against the expanded vouchers on multiple grounds, including the church state grounds, but also on grounds of racial equity. The fact is that the vast, huge majority of the new voucher recipients in Ohio, after they expanded the program, are white, much out of just disproportion with the state's population. Basically, it's the kids that were already at these private schools who are now getting vouchers. And that lawsuit is... has been working its way through the system and it'll probably come to trial later this year. And it'll just be interesting to see how it fairs. I mean, on the one hand, because the program's guns has expanded so much, raises, lot of the questions that were raised 20 years ago are now much more pertinent. because, it really, you can't argue anymore, this is just a narrow little thing. On the other hand, if the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court again, this Supreme Court has shown itself to be very, very supportive of funding for religious institutions. Yeah, so after the Kennedy-Burmerton decision about the coat print on the 50-yard line, what have you, the Supreme Court did away with a test that they used to use called a limit test to decide if something meets the three criteria if it violates the Establishment Clause. They basically did away with that. To your point, I think that You know, the Supreme Court has already kind of laid the grounds to make some of these religious liberty type of decisions easier for themselves, whether that was intentional or not. But I am curious, though, since we're talking about the Supreme Court, stay up in that neck of the woods. Like, what effect, if any, do you think a change in the administrations will have on, you know, seeing this program expand kind of more federally? it's huge. mean, the Trump administration is fully behind school choice, school vouchers. Project 2025, is sort of this policy blueprint for the new administration, talks a lot about their book, talks a lot about vouchers, school choice. And so there's the government. federal government will now be doing everything it can to further the expansion of vouchers. There's a bill in the House, U.S. House, that would try to boost school vouchers through a tax credit program. There's, you know, of course only so much the federal government can do in this regard because education is a largely state and local matter. But you can be rest assured that they'll be doing everything in their powers to try to further the expansion. So that really with the idea that I could possibly spread even into blue states. And that's the key thing what's been happening. The expansion until now has been entirely in red and purple states. And now you're starting to see some bluer states or states, know. more down at that end of the spectrum, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, big pushes happening there. Georgia just expanded its program last year, not to fully universal, but they're sort of on their way there. So it's just, this is gonna be spreading much more into the battlegrounds in the blue states with the federal backing. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about the positive impacts of voucher programs. mean, clearly, you would probably assume this major change or this influx of new money or old money just spent differently that you would see quite a bit of an improvement in academics, right? So what are the grades of these? know, schools that are implementing this. Well, it's sort of a tough question to answer because there's just not that much transparency into a lot of these schools. So we actually don't know that much about how kids there are doing, to the extent that there's been efforts over the years to try to gauge the performance of with vouchers in these in-private schools versus how they would have done if they'd stayed in public schools. The results are very mixed. In some cases, it looks like kids fear better when they went to the private schools, in other cases, not. But I think as far as the, one benefit to be blunt about this throughout your expansion is that it has made parochial schools in these states that, it's put them on much more solid ground. There's been a lot of, in a lot of states like where I live in Maryland or where I'm from in Massachusetts, you've had all sorts of, so countless closures of local Catholic schools. And you see, if you go around town, you see all these schools that are closed and maybe they're standing empty or they've become condos or what have you. And... And this, but this, in these other states that have expanded these voucher programs, you have pro-creel schools that are obviously on much now firmer footing because of these millions of dollars that they're getting. And so I can see an argument. My article does not get into litigating the sort of the merits of voucher programs. It's really more about describing the rise of them. But, There's certainly an argument to be made that if you believe that families in general should have choice, and if one believes that there's a whole tradition of Catholic schooling in this country and other religious schooling, and if you believe that these schools should still be there for families to choose, absolutely these vouchers have helped to sustain these schools in these states in a way that has not happened in the states that don't have vouchers. Yeah. So you said something earlier that made me think about like, there's no, I don't know, reporting mechanism or no accountability. I mean, like, how do we know 20 years from now, like, we've got a bunch of people that can't read or add or something like that. Well, we already got that problem now. The new scores just came out from the nation's scorecard, as they call it, showing just continued, I mean, really sad regressions since the pandemic for the fourth and eighth graders taking that test. And now she gets to something that. You know, I alluded to earlier, which is that it's so important to recognize that the reason, one of the big reasons why we've seen this expansion in vouchers in the last few years are the pandemic school closures, which were so extended in so many places, in many cities, schools were closed in person instruction for a year or even a year and a half. And it gave this huge opening to voucher proponents to say, look, All you public schools, you left all these kids high and dry. You left these families in the lurch while public private schools mostly opened up in the fall of 2020, in September, 2020. And so we need to give families more of an option so that this doesn't happen again. And going along with that, you had this dynamic where because kids were taking school, doing their school on Zoom for so long on the computer, parents had this window into what their kids were learning at home. They could see or hear what was going on on the screen. And a lot of parents didn't like what they saw. They thought they saw teachers pushing a, quote, progressive agenda in various ways. And so again, that sort of fueled this push for giving parents more... more ability to move their kids into a different kind of school. So the pandemic really, the school closures were just, and this is something a lot of people worried about at the time that supporters of public education said, look, is really, closing schools for this long is going to harm the institution of public education long-term. And that's really is what you're seeing here with this rise of vouchers. How much is this movement tied, if at all, to movements like Dominionism, like the New Apostolic, like the Seven Mountain Mandate, where education is like one pillar, one mountain. How much of this do you think is tied to that and or just broadly like Christian nationalism? There's certainly, I would say that there's strains of it in this movement. I this movement, you know, it does, it's a very large movement now. And so you certainly have proponents in that vein who are there in the mix. I went to a, I tried to go to a conference in Ohio in October that was being held by a group called the Center for Christian Virtue, which is a very powerful, evangelical, mostly evangelical lobby group in Ohio that has become a major promoter of school vouchers alongside the Catholic Church. It's of these two prongs, the Catholic prong and the evangelical prong. And at that conference, you did have people from Hillsdale College and some of these hubs of a more know, pick your attitude, you know, yeah, more, you know, a more aggressive form of sort of political religious Christian framing. And, but for the most part, you know, this really has just, as the article describes, grew out of, you know, fairly, you know, mainstream mainstream in Ohio Catholic institutions that were just trying to keep themselves afloat and saw vouchers as a way to bring more public dollars into their coffers. Yeah, so when you were investigating the story, did you get any kind of pushback, policymakers, educators, religious leaders, anything like that? The biggest, I mean, one of the biggest challenges in reporting a piece is just that you can't, these are not public institutions. And so you can't get access to them the way that you would to a public school. You know, was on several occasions, I was thrown out of, you know, school parking lots when I would just try to talk to parents about the vouchers. And you know, I have someone, in one case a very heavily armed police officer coming out to tell me to leave. and got thrown out of that conference that I just mentioned, even though I paid to register. so it really just makes it really hard to report on this because you now have billions of dollars of public money going to these institutions, but the institutions themselves are private. And so there's no school board for you to go to. You can't just go into this front office and say, I please speak to the principal? they are walled up. Is there a way for the public to see how their tax dollars are being spent and like with schools? Like does Ohio have a system for that? Yes, they do at least, you can at least see how much money each of these private schools is getting. There is a state database that just lists now. And it's pretty astonishing to see that these numbers and the numbers of kids, because basically it's everyone. So Alec, what's next? I you've uncovered this massive story, which I mean, I don't know how you journalists do it, because we've spoken to a number of journalists that just break these crazy stories. And I'm just like, how is this not the biggest thing in the news right now? And it's like with the Ohio, I'm like, really? This should be, I should have like 7,000 breaking news things across my screen. One of them can be the Ohio one. So like what's next? I think we're just gonna see lots of battles emerging around this in the next year or two, because you're gonna have battles in the states that don't yet have vouchers. There's gonna be this continued push by voucher proponents to try to get vouchers into big states, like Texas is the big fight now. Then you're gonna still see another push in Pennsylvania, all sorts of states that are now gonna be having these. these debates and then in the states that already have them, like Ohio and Arizona, you're going to see, you are going to see more fights now as the cost of these programs continue to grow and continue to eat into other parts of the budget. Not only eating into public school, public education, but other things that states spent money on or making it harder for states to say cut taxes because they have billion or two billion dollars now going to these private schools. And so there it'll just be there there's definitely going to be some level of backlash in some of the states that do have vouchers. It'll just be interesting to see how that plays out. Well, thank you so much, Alec. This has been a really, really good conversation. And I love your article. Just thank you for the good work that you're doing. Yeah, I did too. And hey, to our audience, thank you so much for stopping by again. And as always, make sure you keep your conversations not right or left, but up. And we'll see you next time. Take care.