This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 18, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Even some fans of national education standards are abandoning common core.

The latest, teachers unions.

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

comments.

It's very hard to judge how great support is for the Common Core

among teachers, or really anyone else.

In part, that's because you have to know what the definition of the Common Core is.

It could mean lots of different things, lots of different people.

And then you have to know how it's described in the surveys. Some surveys will give you a description of the Common Core,

others will just base it on what you say you know about the Common Core. That said,

there is probably majority support, I would guess, for the Common Core itself,

the standards among teachers.

At least, there's not a huge number of teachers say they just reject what's in the Common Core.

On the flip side, there's almost certainly a majority opposition of the Common Core if you

talk about the standards coupled with tests and those test results having ramifications

for the teachers, whether or not they get promoted, whether or not they're able to choose

where they transfer, any sort of ramification of teachers, they're very much, it seems,

against that component of the Common Core.

So if you consider that the Common Core discussion, when you hear Common Core broadly,

most people are probably thinking not just about the standards, but the standards and

...