This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 24th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The COVID pandemic may not yet be done with schools.

Cato's Neil McCluskey details some of the new challenges presented

by the pandemic and the natural policy fallout. But he also says 2022 might be another

banner year for educational freedom.

2021 has been commemorated, memorialized,

I don't know what you'd call it, as the year of school choice.

Given the omicron wave and states now trying to implement new or expanded school

choice programs, what are some of your expectations?

Well, so 2021 became the year of school choice, almost certainly because of public schools response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the frustration that that

created among parents certainly but I think there's sort of other people, you know, regular citizens thinking, why aren't our schools that we all pay for, more responsive?

So you got to go back to the 2020, 2021 school year where things were first big debate was are we even going to be open

should schools be open in person should everybody be online and what we have

found was well what we saw at the time was a lot of people did not want to have their kids

learning exclusively on a computer. They wanted them in person and many school districts

said no we're not going to open in person it's too dangerous or the

teachers union won't let us or any number of reasons and so a lot of people who

wanted in person education couldn't get it and that created a whole bunch of

frustration then you get into the current school And that created a whole bunch of frustration.

Then you get into the current school year,

the 2021, 2022 school year,

...