This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 23rd, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown. A new report details how many states are lagging behind meeting those no child left behind

mandates. The strategy, according to Cato's Neil McCluskey, promised to achieve

results years down the road and just hope that NCLB goes away.

23 states, in order to sort of comply with the No Child Left Behind Act has taken their

what's basically a 10-year plan to get all your kids to proficiency.

Actually, it's a 12- year plan, but they've taken that 12 years

and they said we're going to make the vast majority of our gains to full proficiency in the

second half of that 12 year time span.

So essentially what they've done is they've gambled.

They've said we're never going to reach proficiency by 2014 for every student.

And if we push this far enough back there's a very good

chance no child left behind won't be with us anymore and we won't have to worry about

it.

So it's something akin to blowing off all semester and deciding a couple hours before the test you're gonna

gonna just blast through all the material and and get an A. Yeah, it's basically, well, if they don't cancel the exam, which is what we're really hoping for, we'll just cram a lot at the end. And then we're going to hope there's going to be a real big

curve at the end as well. How have states done that? I saw that Oregon had said well

we've given ourselves a lot of leeway up front and what that will give us time to implement a new online state

of the art testing program and that's really going to pay some dividends down the road.

I assume the stories are similar in other states.

The first thing you have to do is decide, well,

is what the state school bureaucracy

or the federal's bureaucracy,

...