The federal government is to blame for the poor state of the nation's school systems, according to Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.
"It's broken because the way we've delivered education is through a public schooling monopoly where the government doesn't just provide the funds to make sure people can access education. It provides the schools. And monopolies generally don't work," McCluskey told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
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"They really don't work when you have to pay for them through your taxes. And all that national standards are doing is saying, look, instead of having these 50 state monopolies . . . have one monopoly set of standards that really the federal government makes every state use which doesn't do anything to fix the fundamental problem with government monopolies."
In fact, he said, those government monopolies are run through politics.
"Politics governs them and the people with the most motivation to be involved in educational politics are the people whose livelihoods come from it – the teachers unions, the administrators – and those are the people you're trying to hold accountable," he said.
"So you're really saying, here, you hold yourselves accountable which people, naturally, don't want to do."
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