This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, April 9, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's hard to find silver linings to a global pandemic,

but it has helped achieve something valuable for parents who want to make meaningful

choices for their own children's education.

This year may well be the best year for the expansion of school choice ever.

Jason Bedrick, Director of Policy at Ed Choice and an adjunct scholar at the Cato

Institute, details what's happened so far. In 2018 and 2019 and 2020 we had sort of successive massive changes in sort of the

structure the potential structure of education and teacher unions in the

United States of America.

We had the decision at the US Supreme Court

that told public sector employees

that they effectively could not be compelled

to pay dues to unions that they didn't want anything to do with.

We had these, a bunch of pension fights in various states for teachers and we had the

red for ed movement in some states that were teacher strikes or teacher

sickouts or others and then we had a global pandemic that effectively closed schools for a very long time.

Now here we are in 2021.

What is the state of school choice at the various state levels now?

I mean the state of school choice has never been better in some sense.

And I think that the pandemic has obviously a lot to do with it in a few different ways. First, the

pandemic opened a lot of people's eyes to the necessity to have multiple options.

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