This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 8th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

This weekend, the Cato Institute and the larger movement for Educational Freedom

lost one of its most powerful champions in Andrew Coulson, a long time

director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom. Coulson drove the discussion

about school choice into the big picture, long-term thinking.

His colleague of many years here at Cato, Neil McCluskey, discusses Andrew's contributions.

Before Andrew came to work at the Cato Institute and began his work in education, what was he doing?

Andrew has a very sort of interesting path to education reform in school choice.

He was actually a computer engineer.

He worked for Microsoft in the 1990s and he essentially he finished his work at

Microsoft and he was basically just reading about education issues, saw things in the newspaper that he thought,

this doesn't make any sense. Why do we run an education system that's basically a government monopoly?

And that just sort of inspired him

to undertake several years of research

into how had education been delivered over the centuries,

how do we deliver it now, why does it make a lot more

sense to do what he discovered was being done throughout most of history, which was free people,

were educating other free people through voluntary association, often getting paid for it, sometimes making a profit off it, and it worked pretty well.

And he wanted to really tell that story not because he'd been a teacher

principal or something like that but because he saw a big problem and I guess kind

of the engineer and him kicked in and said how do we fix this problem?

...