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The King of Stuff welcomes Jason Bedrick, the Director of Policy for EdChoice. Jason just wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal on teachers’ unions fighting against reopening K-12 schools and parents’ understandable frustration. Jon and Jason discuss the damage of not re-opening, districts charging for daycare, and the Tocquevillian rise of microschools and “pandemic pods.”
Previously, Bedrick was a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, served as a legislator in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, and was an education policy research fellow at the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.
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I marvel that the value of school choice in improving government schools remains so controversial (I know, money).
Thirty years ago our children attended very good government schools. It was clear to me that the faculty and administration of those schools were very aware that they had to be good because they were competing against private schools. The schools straddled the border between the extremely wealthy part of town and a less wealthy part of town. Before the days of formal school choice, those wealthy parents could easily afford expensive private schools, so the government school personnel knew they had to compete to keep the children of those wealthy parents. The government schools did keep most of those children, as the government schools stayed better because they knew they had competition. Even at the time I thought, “The government school is better because it has to compete for students. Why can’t less wealthy parents have the same ability to force the government schools to compete for their children, and thus become better schools?”
[There was also the factor that the people in the wealthy part of town were generally successful in professions and business, and so knew how to apply direct pressure to the schools.]