This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 23rd, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

With reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act looming, what has the act brought?

And what is the general performance of federal standards-based education reform?

Neil McCluskey is a policy analyst with the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

Standards-based reform, he says, generally means a race to the bottom.

For government-driven education standards, he says the record of no child left behind is nothing to cheer about.

In your view, is there anything inherently wrong with what people refer to as standards-based

education reform?

Standard-based education reform is well intentioned and it sort of makes intuitive sense.

People say well what we should do is we set high standards for all students to meet and then

we require our schools to get there.

So as a concept it's good.

The problem is standard based reform never goes anywhere politically. There's lots of promises, lots of rhetoric about high standards, but it's

in the best interest of the politicians and the people who run the schools who spend the most

time lobbying the politicians running PR campaigns about what

should be done with the schools. It's in their best interest to keep standards as low as

possible. So there's always lots of rhetoric and lots of promises to parents that we're setting

high standards and we're going to bring all children those standards.

But the standards are setting are typically very low.

So it's really kind of a con game. They tell parents, look, we're bringing all your kids, these high standards, to proficiency. They're going to be prepared for the 21st century and the globalized flat world, but while they're saying all that in the

back room they're really making the standards low and meaningless. So

ultimately what's wrong with standards-based reform is it doesn't actually provide any high standards or real meaningful academic improvement?

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