This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 31st,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. This year has been a big one not just for

school choice but for universal school choice. But implementation remains a

stumbling block for many states and political opportunities from cracking down on some of the

choices families might make with their newfound educational freedom,

maybe too tantalizing to turn down.

Andrew Clark is president of yes, every kid.

We talked about implementing educational freedom without political strings attached last week.

The last few years have seen sort of a, almost a tidal wave of

a new and expanded educational freedom options, school choice broadly, and where I live in Kentucky,

of course, it's basically non-existent,

but people did recently get the opportunity to choose adjacent district

schools if they want to, so even that is an improvement.

But I think it's helpful to understand better the mindset of parents in those two

environments, the environment where your preferences don't matter and you're not

wealthy enough to exercise what's known as choice by realtor by moving to a

district that will be able to better meet your needs and a wide variety of options from which you can choose or you can still remain disengaged if you want to but having a wide variety of options

different focal points for various schools be it arts or science or sports or any number of other things that schools can focus on.

What's the difference between parents and those environments?

It's like anything else, right, when you have a dependency on government, you tend to lose self-confidence, you lose a sense of self-worth, and then you tend to accept all sorts of things that you would never accept in an otherwise rational situation.

And so you see this a lot in places like Arizona and Florida that are more mature when they have some

optionality and they say, I can go to the school of arts or I can go to the

...