This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 15th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In state legislatures, the push for school choice continues, but in the last few years, culture

war fights have cropped up. And those fights have been embraced by the right

those include bans on critical race theory how history is taught more broadly and

limitations on how trans students are able to participate in sports.

Cato's Neil McCluskey says the victory to aim for trans students are able to participate in sports.

Cato's Neil McCluskey says the victory to aim for is choice and not engaging in either

bands or mandates on those other issues.

We spoke last week.

An argument that you make that I make that lots of people make who are active school choice advocates will say

Look school choice is a way to diffuse a lot of the problems that are culture war battles,

that are winner-take-all battles over what happens in schools in America and that has that seems to be a bedrock

idea behind school choice. Is that changing? Well I look at it a little differently in that I often feel like

the argument that school choice is a way to have peaceful coexistence in a pluralist society, not to mention

enable people to have self-determination about what their education's going to be about,

is buried in the school choice debate.

At least it was for a long time.

So I've been at this almost 20 years now.

And for most of the time I was, I've been involved, or at least half of the time I was I've been involved or at least half of the time the whole debate seemed to be

Does school choice lead to higher test scores the goodness is we got away from that because people got tired of education, school choice,

public schools, no matter what you're looking at, being reduced to test scores.

...