This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 27, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown. Several states are working on educational freedom this year.

Jason Bedrick Policy Analysts at the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom

explains how those states might change how children get educated.

Well, as Yogi Berry used to say, it's difficult to make predictions especially about the future.

But with that caveat, I think 2015 could quite possibly rival 2011, which was what the Wall Street

Journal called the year of school choice.

There are about a dozen new and expanded school choice programs in 2011.

And right now there are dozens of states that are considering school choice proposals.

For example, Colorado, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, South Carolina,

South Dakota, and Texas are all looking at new scholarship tax credit programs.

They're looking to expand scholarship tax credit programs in several states,

including Georgia and the Anna and South Carolina.

And I know of at least three states that are considering education savings accounts.

That's Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Virginia.

Now obviously not all of those states are going to end up passing something or signing

it into law, but in a number of states there are very serious proposals and it's likely that several of them are going to pass new and expanded school

choice programs this year. Well let's start with New York. Governor

Andrew Cuomo there has had a fairly interesting and sort of highly touted dispute with teachers unions there and he has in some ways endorsed scholarship tax credits of a sort.

Yes, actually he spent quite a bit of time in his State of the State address this year laying out his education

agenda.

He ruffled a lot of feathers in the public education establishments because he identified failing schools as a very as a crisis in New York and he said that the you know the current teacher evaluation system was baloney and he wanted to reform it.

But one of his most controversial, at least for the public education establishment, one of his most controversial

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