This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 10th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown. It took a while

but South Carolina has jumped into the race to the bottom of educational standards

prompted by no child left behind.

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

He's also author of the book Feds in the classroom.

What's going on in South Carolina unfortunately is not all that different from what's gone on in many states.

What they're doing is they have a testing system currently in place, the Pact, which is I think the Palmetto

achievement test basically, and it's relative to other states fairly difficult to do well on, to meet what's called proficiency.

And a state ends up looking bad under the No Child Left Behind Act

if a lot of its kids have difficulty reaching proficiency on their state exams. It can also have some ramifications

for schools where they would have to go through, one year have to offer a public school choice,

and after that they would have to go through some

sort of restructuring. So what South Carolina is doing is what many other states have done

which as I said boy it would be easier just to call proficient a much lower level of nodes than we call it now.

And then we'd do very well on our exams and we wouldn't have any trouble under No Child

left behind.

So the House of Representatives in South

Carolina last week passed a bill that would have a new testing system where

they say we're not lowering standards, don don't worry we'll still have the same high

standards it's just we're gonna call something that's a much lower score

proficiency so this gets them out of trouble and no child left behind, but even more insidiously,

they will be telling parents and children they are proficient, and many parents and children

...