Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
7,479 appearances
87 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 4d ago
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 86 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 26.
Appearances
His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was a staunch supporter of school choice and the voucher system.
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She and her family gave $600,000 to promote school choice ballot laws in the decade before 2017.
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The coronavirus pandemic sped up the push to defund public schools as Trump pushed hard to transfer funds from the closed public schools to private schools.
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That push helped to change the nature of vouchers, from ones targeted at students from poor families or students with special needs, toward vouchers for everyone.
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In twenty twenty-two, Arizona lawmakers passed the biggest school voucher program in the nation.
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Advocates claimed that the new program would save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide.
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But in fact, as Eli Hager of ProPublica explained in 2024, the parents most likely to apply for subsidies already had their children in private school or were homeschooling them, using the vouchers to replace what they had been paying in the past.
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The state spending on vouchers ballooned to eight hundred and eighty six million dollars in twenty twenty four-2025 as families from wealthier, whiter school districts used vouchers for children who were already in private school.
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The costs blew a hole in the state's budget.
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In twenty twenty four, Arizona faced a shortfall of one point four billion dollars, forcing the state to slash spending for water infrastructure, road repair, and community colleges.
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But voucher programs continued to expand, helped by DeVos's continued promotion of vouchers after Trump left office.
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In twenty twenty two, a nonprofit she founded poured about nine million dollars, about two point five million of which came from DeVos and her husband into state elections, backing nearly two hundred candidates who would push school vouchers to subsidize private schools with public tax money.
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In May 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a voucher program in Texas, under which, beginning this fall, families will receive about $10,000 a year for each school aged child to spend at a private school, or $2,000 for children being homeschooled.
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The program is capped at one billion dollars in its first two years, but experts predict it will rise to almost five billion by twenty thirty.
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The measure had faced opposition from Democrats and also Republicans from rural districts who worried about money draining from their public schools.
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It passed only after national pro-chercates poured money into replacing the Republican state legislators who had stood against a voucher system with pro-voucher candidates.
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Abbott said that one of those donations, six million dollars from Republican megadonor billionaire Jeff Yass of Pennsylvania, was the largest single donation in Texas history.
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Earlier this month, Jaden Edison and Sneha Day of the Texas Tribune explained that a report from the state comptroller showed that of the more than 100,000 families participating in the new private school voucher program, most are white and from urban areas.
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Their families make less than twice the federal poverty level.
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About 70% were already attending private schools or being homeschooled.
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Showing 1901–1920 of 7,479 · page 96 of 374
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