This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 26,

2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

When COVID-19 looked like it might devastate American private

schooling, Cato's Center for Educational Freedom began

tracking the sector's health, cataloging schools going out of business, and enrollment trends.

Cato's Neil McCloskey has a new Kato paper on the subject out today.

We discussed the latest version of his survey results.

Neil, it was right about four years ago.

Four years ago, last week, week in fact when the United States of America kind of shut down and

this affected education in a pretty significant way.

Public schools were closed.

Private schools were closed,

but perhaps to a lesser extent.

Can you give me a sense of what that change looked like at least initially in any differences or similarities between public and private schools?

Well if you go back to four years when the United States was quickly locking down in response to this still fairly mysterious illness called COVID.

You saw public and private schools all being shut down,

often by the order of governors or local policy makers.

So there wasn't a big difference between public and private schools

because they were all tended to be subject to these orders. What we did see very quickly

was that private schools much faster went to meaningful

education so it was online but they quickly got into their curriculum

and continuing to move along in that curriculum where we saw a lot more public schools

...