The Death Of Public Schools...Sounds Serious! Cara Fitzpatrick Conversation

For Halloween I found the scariest book title around

If you have not read Cara Fitzpatrick's new book "The Death of Public School" I recommend it. Ignore the title, whether you love school choice, hate it, or are in the messy middle Cara's book is a discussion of the complicated history of school choice along two key dimensions - the expansion of choice and the change in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

There is a tendentious debate on social media and elsewhere about the origins of school choice. And yes it was a tool of segregationists during massive resistance. Cara gets into that (and goes deep on Virginia history) but also gets into the support on the left for vouchers as an equity strategy. That's especially salient today given the attention to how many public school boundary policies don't have a rosy history either. It's all more complicated than whatever some outrage-addled tweet jockey told you.

Jed is still off wandering the world like David Carradine so Cara and I sat down to talk about all that and contemporary education politics earlier this week on WonkyFolk. You can listen here and also here, watch below, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

(And in case you missed it I talked with Morgan Polikoff in October.)