This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 2nd, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The No Child Left Behind Act was hailed as a fantastic compromise and remains a showpiece for President Bush's

domestic agenda.

NCLB, as it's known, was a massive federal imposition on state education systems.

Now as President Bush fights a surprising battle to get NCLB reauthorized with both Republicans and Democrats,

what is the five-year record of No Child Left Behind?

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

offers his thoughts on NCLB's real record and what President Bush the agenda ought to be.

Five years later, what is the record of achievement

under the No Child Left Behind Act?

Well, it's kind of fuzzy what the record of achievement is

of no child left behind. We definitely have no evidence that it is improving test

scores or academic achievement from five years ago.

The Secretary of Education and the President

like to point a national assessment of educational progress data

and they say in five years we've had the biggest

increase in math scores ever in the test. The five years they're referring to

starts several years before no child left behind and ends in the middle of it.

If you look at other data, you actually see just flat scores are going down a little.

But the point is, we don't really know what

the effect no child left behind is having versus all the other reforms that are going into

...