This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 21st, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President is pushing pre-K in a big way, but there's plenty of evidence that the feds don't do a very good job in that

arena. Never mind that the feds have basically no legitimate constitutional role in

education.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director for the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom, explains.

So the President is broadly talking about expanding the federal role in pre-kindergarten education and child development because there's a lot of nutrition and health care and other stuff involved in this.

And from what we've seen, a big part of that is expanding Federal Head Start, expanding Federal Early Head Start and then expanding

and increasing the amount of money that will be sent to states to encourage

them through matching funds to expand their own pre-kindergarten programs.

As is typical, when the federal government offers matching funds,

it means that they don't have the money themselves to fund it but in the case of

Medicaid at the very least it also perverts budget priorities because they are

matching funds and it encourages states to spend more than they otherwise would.

Yeah, well that's what the federal government's been doing in education for a long time.

Now it's not always with matching funds, but it's always about here you do X, Y, and Z, and we're going to give you more money,

even if that doesn't make sense, even if it's something that the states could have done more cheaply.

And in pre-kindergarten, clearly, the goal is to convince states or I shouldn't say

convinced I should just say bribe states into expanding pre-kindergarten

programs even though the research on state level pre-K

is usually very low quality,

and it doesn't give us any basis for saying

...