This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 22nd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In this year of school choice, some lawmakers have felt compelled to change how they think

about choice for lower income families.

Pennsylvania is one such state their Democratic governor has signed into law dramatic expansions

of measures to help families make meaningful educational choices.

Mark LeBlond with the Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania explains how it happened.

My colleague at the Cato Institute, Jason Bedrick, calls 2021, and I've been leaning on him and needling him.

Is it, are we there yet? Are we there yet? In terms of this being the year of school choice.

And from my vantage point in Central Kentucky,

certainly that was the case for Kentucky.

Kentucky passed a small but extremely robust school choice program that a lot of people are very excited about

and giving a lot of lower income parents a lot of new options.

What has been the experience through this pandemic with school choice and sort of

the politics of school choice? Well it's been an interesting year Caleb for sure that

the year of education Joyce, as Jason Bedrick rightly calls it.

You know, I've lost track of the number of states. I think it's 18 with major transformative,

either expansions or new programs for kids.

But what we've seen is we've seen the perfect villainy of the teachers union.

So somebody like Randy Weingarten is, you know, the teachers union. So somebody like Randy Weingarten is the perfect

villain and schools are they've been closed they haven't been open but at a very

basic level they haven't been offering parents what they needed.

...