This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 14th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The No Child Left Behind Act is due for reauthorization, but in the years since it passed in 2001, it's been

revealed as an utter failure.

Neil McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom, says the simple

solution is to get the feds out of the classroom.

Seven years ago the No Child Left Behind Act was due to be reauthorized.

Now the No Child Left Behind Act, you first have to understand. It's really

the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. In any event, it was due to be reauthorized

seven years ago because everybody more or less decided it was a failure.

So remember what that did was the federal government said to states if you want federal education

money you have to have statewide standards statewide tests, you have to have adequate yearly progress for all students, various

subsets of students toward full proficiency and math and reading by 2014.

Nobody was going to hit that deadline.

Most states weren't getting,

making any sort of meaningful progress.

And so people said, we need to get away

from this really prescriptive law that's not working but nobody could agree on what to do.

So then you have race to the top 2009 or essentially the Obama administration said we have this pot of money that came through the stimulus.

We'll tell you what to do.

You've got to have national standards.

You have to have teacher evaluations that can be connected to student test scores and things like that.

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