This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 15, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Educational institutions have failed to keep up with the needs of American workers.

From K through college college there are reforms that could

more easily accommodate the needs of workers and workers to be. Cato's Neil McCluskey is

author of two chapters in Cato's new book Empowering the New American Worker. We spoke last week.

Often we talk about education in terms of what are the outcomes that we're getting for those who are being educated.

And that's important when we talk about elementary and secondary education.

It's certainly important as we prepare future members of the workforce,

but it's also important to remember that K-12 education,

which is dominated by public schooling, so government-run and assigned schools,

also serves in many way current workers. Families, people who have

kids are reliant on the public school system overwhelmingly because that's where all their money has to go.

And they rely on it to educate their children, but also to have their children and sort of supervise and oversee their children and sort of supervised and oversee their children much of the time when

parents are at work. And what we have seen put in very stark relief under COVID-19, the pandemic, was that public schools are not

responsive to families needs and the more difficult situations get or may be out the ordinary, the less likely they are or able

they are to serve diverse families, including people who work.

And so a lot of the K through 12 chapter in this really important

book talks about how basically public schools tend to let families down and

they do it at a high price.

COVID-19 was the most sort of stark picture of this where people in order to go to work

needed to have somewhere to send their kids, but public schools overwhelmingly said,

...