General notes:

Summary:

Matt Welch is an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of “free minds and free markets.” He served as Reason‘s editor in chief from 2008-2016. He is co-author, along with Nick Gillespie, of the 2011 book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America, which Tyler Cowen called “the up-to-date statement of libertarianism.” Welch also wrote the 2007 book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

Reason has been a Western Publications Association magazine of the year finalist every year under Welch’s leadership, winning five first-place Maggie awards, as well as another 18 first-place notices from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Welch himself has won eight first-place L.A. Press Club awards over the years, for work on subjects ranging from Jackie Robinson to Cuba to the “banal authoritarianism” of Thomas L. Friedman and David Brooks. From December 2013 to January 2015 he was co-host of the nightly Fox Business Network program The Independents.

Before assuming editorship of Reason in 2008, Welch worked as an assistant editorial pages editor for the Los Angeles Times, media columnist for Reason, California correspondent for The National Post, political columnist for WorkingForChange.com, and regular contributor to the Online Journalism Review. Before 1998, he lived for eight years in Central Europe, where he co-founded the region’s first post-communist English-language newspaper, Prognosis, worked as UPI’s Slovakia correspondent, and managed the Budapest Business Journal.

Welch’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, ESPN.com, The Hardball Times, The Columbia Journalism Review, Salon.com, Commentary, LA Weekly, Orange County Register, and scores of other publications. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, public radio, and AM radio stations from coast to coast.

Welch lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two daughters.

The American taxpayer has long accepted that education is a public good – something worthy of funding with the common purse. Until recently, a majority of Americans, including parents, have also believed that public schools are a generally the right vehicle for that funding. However, opinion has changed rapidly, and the response by school administrators to COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of that change. A new survey finds that more than 80% of parents believe that taxpayer funds should follow students to whatever schools they attend, rather than defaulting to the defective public school system.

Even more tellingly, Matt Welch reports that "Families are Fleeing Government Run Schools" – voting with their kids' feet, as it were, against the sudden and unpredictable closures and suspensions of in-person learning. Welch, an editor at large at Reason Magazine, has been reporting on the shift taking place among the population – with an increasing number of both upper and lower-class progressives suddenly embracing school choice when the dysfunction of government-run schools became too glaring to ignore. He joins me LIVE this Sunday to explain why parents are taking their kids out of public schools, and where they are all going.

Have the teachers' unions overplayed their hand in demanding indefinite virtual learning and protections for their members at the expense of learning outcomes for children? Find out, this Sunday (8-9 am PACIFIC) on the show of idea.

Matt's article focuses on NYC schools.

Why are people fleeing?

Unpredictable schedules – about-faces by the administration.

This is a version of Robert Higgs's "regime uncertainty" – where changes in regulations (rather than the regulations themselves) are the biggest hindrance to entrepreneurs, since it prevents them from planning ahead.

Schools with fewer pupils get less funding from the state.

COVID Insanity is another reason – masks, testing, and closures when one pupil gets an infection.

Most of the school will have to be isolated at times.

Unions have overstepped – their decline is imminent.

Even liberals are becoming disillusioned:

Minority parents are also now craving school choice.

Democrats have prevented charter schools from giving them an alternative:

The barriers for public schools to reopening include ridiculous distancing requirements that prevent all students from returning, to quarantining policies that force thousands of students home when one student tests positive.

Formerly coveted public school sees steep drop off in enrollment.

The boom in public charter schools:

Private and Catholic schools are not gaining many of the pupils lost by public schools. Instead it's ad hoc groups and homeschooling:

Virtual learning schools saw much larger declines - especially in rural areas - than those that returned to in-person.

Resultant learning setbacks from remote learning.

Failed leadership is to blame. NYT also blames leaders who have not promoted vaccination, however, to make it safer for everyone to go back to school. This prompts the question of how effective those measures would have to be for progressive areas to keep schools open.

Rich schools were more likely to stay open.

Many students who didn't enroll in school didn't show up anywhere else.

Kids are missing many more days in school.