476: Unleashing the Power of Educational Entrepreneurialism! (with Kerry McDonald)

On today's episode of The Brian Nichols Show with guest Kerry McDonald, Senior Education Fellor from FEE (the Foundation for Economic Education):

"I mean there's a lot we could dwell on in terms of what is negatively happening in education. But I think that there are a lot of good things happening. Actually, as difficult and devastating as the pandemic response has been over the past couple of years, the real upshot is that parents have been put in charge of their children's education in ways that were unimaginable pre-2020.

Not only beginning in 2020, with school closures and recognizing the power and influence of teachers unions, and keeping schools closed influencing CDC policy, which we saw last year, I think it's really just opened a lot of parents' eyes. And they've been more interested and curious about various other education options for their children.

So we've seen not only kind of record rates of parents removing their children from assigned district schools for homeschooling, creating pandemic pods - that in many cases have now turned into full-fledged micro-schools - but we've also seen tremendous support for school choice policies that enable education funding to follow students instead of going to these bureaucratic school systems that are increasingly unresponsive to parent needs.

So there's a lot we could say about the negative aspects of American education today, but I think there are tremendous positives as well.