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Flypaper

Tunnel vision

Chester E. Finn, Jr.
4.21.2008

You gotta give it to purebred libertarians, they never let their vision of how the world ought to work be distorted by any realities about how it actually works. Nowhwere is this clearer than in K-12 education, where the CATO crowd, indistinguishable nowadays from the "separation of school and state crowd," basically doesn't believe in any form of public education. They believe in private education, purchased in the marketplace by parents who want and can afford it for their kids from schools that are not accountable to anybody for anything except keeping those tuition payments rolling in the door. The heck with everybody else's kids. The heck with an educated polity or transmitted common culture. Check out Neil McCluskey's review of my book.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., scholar, educator and public servant, has devoted his career to improving education in the United States. At Fordham, he is now Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus. He’s also a Volker Senior Fellow at…

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