This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 19th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We've said it before and we'll say it again.

2021 is the year of school choice.

Jason Bedrick directs policy at Ed Choice.

We spoke last month about the millions of new students

who will be eligible for school choice programs

throughout the country

and what next steps ought to be for

making sure that school choice options stay in place. A lot has been made of

the disruption to young people with respect to education during COVID-19, what has, what do we

know about how well young people have performed in schools over the last year or so?

Well there's a recent report out from McKinsey which shows that students are on average

about five months behind on math and four months

behind on reading and that for African American children actually the losses

are much larger closer to six to seven months behind.

So there is a lot of catch-up work to do this year and unfortunately the way things are going, it looks like it might be not a year of recovery, but another year where we'll be facing more learning losses.

So it is unfair to lay those losses purely at the feet of, for lack of a better term, big ed,

the education establishment in the United States but certainly the

re the way in which school systems and teacher unions responded to that did not seem to be particularly helpful.

I mean school systems in general aren't super nimble when it comes to dealing with a quick change and I think we can be forgiven they can be forgiven

for the first several months even of the difficulties that school systems faced but

...