This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 27th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown at public schools across the United States fights over curriculum,

the influence of religion, secular and otherwise are all too common,

but finding solutions means recognizing the problem.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom

unveils a new map that tracks these local conflicts.

In 2007, you wrote a policy analysis called

Why We Fight, and it detailed how and many examples of fighting that occurs because public schools are by necessity in many ways very homogenized curriculum, homogenized preferences, and that often makes nobody

happy.

So you've launched a map.

What does that map tell us?

Right. So the basic idea is that, you know, I've heard for a long time as I talk about

school choice and talk about education people say, well we have to have public schools, we have to have public schools we have to

have government schools that everybody has to pay for because if we didn't do that

we'd have all these diverse people, different religions,

different linguistic groups,

different whatever you can think of,

would off be in their own little pockets

and we'd all be bulkinized.

The presumption then from that is not only

would they be separate, but for some reason that they would also be fighting like we saw in the Balkans particularly in the 1990s.

And I think that this has it exactly backwards.

...