There's a messed up set of incentives that's baked into the K-12 public school system, where they get your money regardless of whether they open their doors for business. So, teachers unions had an incentive to keep their doors closed. Corey D'Angeles, the Reason Foundation's Director of School Choice, has been tracking the impact of the pandemic on education policy. He's found that a growing number of parents are leaving traditional public schools and looking to take their education dollars with them. At the same time, there's growing frustration with teachers unions for their continued opposition to reopening, despite mounting evidence that schools aren't a significant source of infections. Why was it okay for the private schools to reopen, but not the public schools? The public schools in some places were saying that we can't open for in-person instruction because it's too dangerous, but then they were reopening the same physical school buildings for in-person childcare activities. D'Angeles says that unions have made a host of ridiculous demands as conditions for returning to work. But then they started lumping in all these political demands and their calls to reopen schools. So, for example, one of the first teachers unions to do this was the Los Angeles Teachers Union. They wanted to defund the police. They wanted Medicare for all and all these other political goals that didn't seem like they had a lot to do with reopening of schools. With public schools struggling to provide quality online education, many parents attempted to transfer their kids into virtual charter schools, taking their education dollars with them. D'Angeles says teachers unions turned to lawmakers to stop the outflow. The Oregon Education Association lobbied to the government to make it illegal for families to switch to schools in this time of need. And you saw similar actions in places like California and Pennsylvania, where the money wouldn't follow the child to the charter schools. This was an act that protected the monopoly at the expense of thousands of families. As a result of slow and incompetent rollouts of distance learning, students around the country are failing at much higher rates. So, for example, in my area, Fairfax County Public Schools, the rate of students who have been failing two or more classes has increased by 83 percent since last year. There's been a nationwide study on this by McKenzie and Company, and they've estimated that students have lost between one and three months of education this year, and they've seen that there have been inequities as well. For disadvantaged groups of students, they've lost more months of learning than more advantaged groups of students. The silver lining is that there's growing recognition that traditional education funding is deeply flawed, and that money needs to follow the child. The latest national survey from Gallup estimates that traditional public schools will lose about seven percentage points of their student population this school year. More and more people are starting to realize these closed buildings are continuing to get their children's education dollars while they're scrambling and none of that money's following them to pay for private school tuition and fees at a pocket, or to help cover the costs associated with home-based education. 86 percent of families now support the concept of education savings accounts, or what I like to call funding students as opposed to systems. I've been tracking about 14 states now this year in January that have had legislators introduce bills to fund students as opposed to systems. So states like New Hampshire, Utah has a particular bill that's interesting, Kansas, and Kentucky, Arizona has a bill to expand their already existing school choice program. You have Nebraska, you have Iowa, Florida has a bill to restructure all of their vouchers. A lot of people are figuring out that there's no good reason to fund institutions when we can fund students directly instead.