This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 16th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The confluence of events may soon leave states compelled to adopt national curriculum standards, a top-down approach that would

direct states to use federal guidelines for educating children.

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

So the No Child Left Behind Act is premised ultimately on this idea that all kids will be something called proficient by 2014 and math and reading.

Now mainly what that's done is it's caused states to set very low standards of things they call proficiency.

What they define proficiency.

No normal person, if they knew what it was, would say that is a proficient level of math,

understanding, or literacy.

But another way some states game the No Child Left Behind system is they were supposed to make

progress every year toward this full proficiency by 2014, but what many of them did

is said, well we'll just make most of our progress a few years before that with the

assumption that the No Child Left Behind Act would have disappeared by then or at least been hugely changed.

But what happened was, even though there's bipartisan agreement that the No Child Left Behind Act is a failure and that it was totally unrealistic.

The reality is there's huge disagreement on what to do with the law and there have been lots of other things that have pushed it down on the list of priorities. Wars, debt

ceiling debates, things like that. So now we're almost at 2014. Lots of states

have these schools that are dubbed failing and they're saying help us

federal government and since Congress can't seem to get a law passed the Obama administration is now saying we'll let you out of the law but

you're going to have to do things that we think are the right kind of reform

regardless of what Congress might want.

What is actually written into the law that does give some leeway to the executive branch

...