Cato's Center for Educational Freedom (CEF) is grounded in the understanding that education works best for all people--from individual students to society at large--when it is rooted in the free decisions of those to be educated and those who educate. Since the early 1980s, Cato scholars have laid the intellectual groundwork for the explosion of school choice after the pandemic, as well as the growth of charter schools and scholarship tax credits. Victories were piecemeal throughout Cato's decades of education research, testimony, and advocacy, but the combination of COVID-19 school closures and educational culture wars shined a spotlight on the inability of public schools to serve diverse people equally and led to an explosion in school choice. Since 2020, approximately half of US states have enacted or expanded school choice programs. More than 40 years of Cato's foundational research and advocacy helped guide the course.
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