This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Louisiana is suing the federal government over, among other things, the Common Core.

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

since the lawsuit isn't quite as simple as it's made out to be.

What Bobby Jindahl has done is he has launched a lawsuit against the Department of Education that says the Race of the Top program,

which was $4.35 billion out of the stimulus in 2009, that states competed to get part of and waivers out of the No Child

Left Behind Act which really started in 2011 and said if you do certain things that a

Department of Education wants you to do, you can get a waiver out of

parts of the No Child Left Behind Act that people didn't like.

He's saying that that is unconstitutional

control of education by the federal government.

Now, the biggest part of this

that people have heard is the Common Core.

He's been fighting Common Core for a while now. That is Common Core are national standards in English and mathematics.

There's also a test connected to that and there was coercion to use the test that the federal government selected and funded and he's just saying

all of this is unconstitutional in the 10th amendment and in violation of several federal

statutes.

So with specific respect to the idea of waivers you've made this point for a long time that there's nothing in the No Child Left Behind Act or its reauthorization that indicates that the Secretary of Education can unilaterally

bestow these things upon people.

Right, well, it does say he can give waivers.

That is clearly in the law.

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