This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

In states, there is a revolt afoot over common core educational standards.

It seems that if states learn what's in it, they like it less.

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

There has been, over the last maybe two months, a nationwide and I think largely unexpected revolt, I think it's fair to say against the

common core, which are national curriculum standards that almost every state in the

country adopted and at the very least they adopted on a very rushed timeline because the federal government

through the stimulus, and a part of the stimulus called the Race to the Top program, said,

if you want to compete with this money you have to sign on to the

common core. This was actually done and the deadline to say you had signed on was

before the common core was even published and almost nobody knew it was coming

because there was no time for states to debate it, to discuss it, for people to know it was

coming down the pike and so what seems to have happened is in the last two or three months the with this thing called the Common Core, which they'd never heard of,

and people are saying, what the heck is the Common Core?

And they've started to find out what it is.

They're starting to find out it is not state-led and voluntary.

It comes from the National Government Association, the Council of Chief State

School Officers, which do not represent states.

They may be organizations, that, membership organization of state-level officials, but you

don't elect them. I don't think anybody in the country

says, well, I elected my governor because I wanted to see what he do in the National

Governor Association. And now they found it that the federal government has really been the one that's pushing all this.

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