Hillsdale College student and Turning Point USA Student Action Summit attendee Domine Clemons told Breitbart News that the quality of education in the U.S. has been “tanking” in the last 50 years, adding that school vouchers are practically considered a dirty word in Washington DC. Clemons spoke to host Alex Marlow in a Wednesday interview for SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily campus report.

“I went to a ton of different kinds of schools, which also, I think, led me to this interest. I was home-schooled, mostly went to public school, private school, and just seeing the different kinds of teaching styles really interested me in what’s going on in America, so I did a thesis my senior year of high school on the past 50 years of education reform, and it really is just tanking.”

“You know, you can look up the U.S. nation’s report card, and you can see how poorly students are doing in their reading proficiency, and their math proficiency, all across the board, and so I have been interning with an organization called Florida Citizens Alliance, and there, we really worked to get parental control back and get this politically biased material out of K through 12 schools.”

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Clemons also noted that she interned in Washington D.C. last semester at the Department of Education in the Office of the Secretary, Betsy DeVos.

“And I know Secretary DeVos is really trying to work on getting school vouchers, but that word in D.C. is almost like a bad word,” said Clemons. “I think their first response to the word ‘voucher’ is that it’s going to be taking away money from the public schools, and so, we’ve gotten so far away from this free market thinking.”

The student added that the reality is, “if we do have school choice, it will push the public schools to kind of raise their quality and standards because you’ll have the chance to put your student in a better school.”

“I really do think that if we opened it up to school choice, there’s so many things that happen in the free market,” she said. “There’s a really strong hold with teachers unions right now, and we’re just not able to break through that and do what’s really best for the students.”

Clemons also mentioned that she will be attending Turning Point USA’s annual Student Action Summit from December 19 to 22 in West Palm Beach, Florida.

“This is going to be my first experience going to a Turning Point event, so I think just actually getting involving and meeting a lot of people,” said Clemons. “This is my senior year at Hillsdale, so I really am looking to put myself into the conservative movement and see what I can do in my future.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.