This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 6, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown. The No Child

Left Behind Act committed billions of new dollars to a massive imposition of the federal government into

K-12 education.

The results have not been impressive.

Now that the Act is 10 years old, the Cato Institute's Neil McCluskey argues, it's time

to get the feds out of the classroom.

Almost everybody, almost universally, people dislike no child left behind and it's accepted

as a failure.

And there's good reason for that.

We've had a big increase in spending

as a result of no child left behind.

We've had lots of federal rules and regulations

promulgated, but we haven't seen any real improvement and

in fact what we've largely seen are kind of lies where states and districts are

telling kids that they're proficient, telling their parents their kids are

their kids are proficient and they're not proficient in any meaningful way.

So one of the problems that you've identified and many scholars have

identified is that the federal government delegated to

states the role of defining what constitutes proficiency. They said the

students must be proficient but they allowed states to

define proficiency. It was actually in many ways took American education

backwards. Yeah, well, there were clearly problems with the law where it's basically a law divided

...