Corey Turner

were already at a private school.

And Iowa's not alone in this.

I've seen this in other states' new choice programs.

Rob Sand is Iowa's state auditor, and he's a rare Democrat elected to statewide office in Iowa.

He's not a fan of this idea of paying private school students to keep doing what they were already doing.

That is dumb.

We should not be using tax dollars to subsidize behavior that would exist without it.

We're not making a difference.

We are literally wasting money when we give it to people to do a thing that they would be doing anyways.

That said, Aisha, I did talk to some public school parents who told me, look, these ESAs made a huge difference, and they opened the door to private school that was closed to them before.

Among those parents is Stephanie King.

A few years ago, King, who is not Catholic, sent her youngest to public school.

And she kind of bristled at the fact that many of her neighbors were using private schools.

The reason, she said, was the same reason that she ended up switching too.

Her daughter's public school was pretty distracting, she said, with lots of fighting and yelling.

Even with this new choice program, the data suggests that Xavier schools may still be out of reach for the city's poorest families.

So of Xavier's more than 2,500 students, about 13% are low income compared to the public schools where 57% of kids are low income.

I actually asked McCarville.

If the point of public education is to serve all kids, to serve the common good, can private schools be relied on to do the same?

How are our schools not for the common good?