This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Are we seeing a mass exodus from public schools?

At the very least, the ranks of homeschoolers and pandemic pod people, have

swelled as school districts have faced difficulties returning to in-person classes.

Cato adjunct scholar Jason Bedrick discusses how parents, districts, teachers, and

their unions have chosen to respond to the pandemic. We should definitely have a

lot of sympathy for anybody who is running a school or a school district in these

trying times it's very hard to know what the right thing is to do and you know

practically impossible to please everybody if you're going to be closed obviously a lot of parents are going to be very very upset

but even if you open up depending on what sort of measures you put in place some parents or other parents are going to be upset. But in the midst of all this this chaos,

the teachers unions are making matters actually much worse.

In some cases, they're striking for safety alone, and that's one thing.

And again, I'm sympathetic when teachers are saying,

look, if we're going to come back into school,

we want to make sure that this environment is safe for us to teach and safe for our students to be in and safe also for the caregivers that the students have back home.

But in many cases, their list of demands include political items that have absolutely nothing

to do with safety.

So for example, the United Teachers Union in Los Angeles, which is the largest district in the nation,

said that they won't agree to go back to school until policy makers pass a new wealth tax, a new income tax on millionaires, until they defund the police,

until they act, enact Medicare for all. And they've also demanded a new moratorium on charter schools.

So these items clearly have nothing to do with the safety of their students and everything

...