In last night’s GOP presidential debate, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said in response to a question about the Common Core national curriculum standards that, sooner or later, the Feds would de facto require their use. If you know your federal education – or just Common Core – history, that’s awfully hard to dispute.

Said Rubio: “The Department of Education, like every federal agency, will never be satisfied. They will not stop with it being a suggestion. They will turn it into a mandate. In fact, what they will begin to say to local communities is: ‘You will not get federal money unless you do things the way we want you to do it.’”

That is absolutely what has happened with federal education policy. It started in the 1960s with a compensatory funding model intended primarily to send money to low-income districts, but over time more and more requirements were attached to the dough as it became increasingly clear the funding was doing little good. Starting in the 1988 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) we saw requirements that schools show some level of improvement for low-income kids, and those demands grew in subsequent reauthorizations to the point where No Child Left Behind (NCLB) said if states wanted some of the money that came from their taxpaying citizens to begin with, they had to have state standards, tests, and make annual progress toward 100 math and reading “proficiency,” to be achieved by 2014.

Read the full article at the Cato Institute: Rubio Was Right on Fed Ed Power Grabbing