This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 16th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Race to the Top Fund was a big chunk of change tucked away in the stimulus

aimed at knocking down some state barriers to education reform.

But the bottom line for the multi-billion dollar fund is that it does many of the things that

have been wrong with education for decades, namely centralizing more power in Washington.

That's according to Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

The Race of the Top Fund is $4.35 billion that was put into the stimulus, but it is controlled by the Secretary of Education

who can give it out at his discretion.

And so what he has done and what the administration's done

is built up a gigantic PR machine behind it

and made it sound like it's going to be the biggest thing in

education reform since the invention of the common school.

What has he set up in terms of some sort of criterion for doling this money out?

Well, so there's going to be essentially a contest for states to get some of this money,

and it's not certain how many states will get any of it. It'll

probably be 12 states roughly is what they've been talking about. And they've been

saying you know there are some things that there's only actually one thing the state has to do, and that is eliminate any barriers they might have to teachers being evaluated based on how much their students learn.

And that's the one thing you have to.

You have to eliminate any barrier like that if you want to compete.

Otherwise, it's all been suggestions

is that you would really help yourself if you eliminated

...