This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 19, 2015, and Caleb Brown.

President Obama argued recently that sending your kids to private schools effectively breaks

down social cohesion and reduces opportunities

for other kids.

Neil McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, says that's

not only wrong, it may be precisely backwards.

We spoke last week.

So the president, and talking about poverty,

lots of social problems in the United States,

identified two things he said as kind of breaking

down communities and social cohesion and one of them was people choosing to

send their kids to private schools.

Now, this is wrong for numerous reasons.

By the biggest is that only about 9% of children

go to private schools.

So to act like we have this scourge of private schooling that rips apart communities,

just as in the case, in fact, there's been survey data done of the wealthy and sort of the mega wealthy in the country

and the large majority of those kids go to public schools.

So there's no meaningful evidence that private schooling is

what's ripping communities apart. In fact, what the evidence has long showed is that

wealthy people get to better schools by paying tuition we call the price of a house

which of course poor people can't say well we'll just go buy that McMansion

...