As details continue to emerge about the Obama administration’s 2014 education budget proposal, Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, continues to find more to dislike.

In fact, McCluskey says from just a cursory review of the most recent developments “there seems to be a lot of bad stuff” being proposed, not the least of which is the size of the $71.2 billion U.S. Department of Education spending plan. That is a 4.6 percent increase from the 2012 enacted level, and McCluskey characterizes it as “neither constitutional nor effective.”

Here are some of the areas McCluskey finds most objectionable:

“Invests” in preschool: Head Start, Early Head Start, and state programs either are shown to fail, or have little to no good evidence supporting them.

$12.5 billion in mandatory funds to “prevent additional teacher layoffs and hire teachers”: We’ve been getting fat on staff – including teachers – for decades, and it hasn’t helped.

$1.3 billion for 21st Century Community Learning Centers: Federal studies have found these have negative effects.
Race to the Top for higher education: So far, RTTT has been big on promises, small on outcomes, and huge on coercion to adopt national curriculum standards.

$260 million to scale up higher education innovation: MOOCS and other innovations have been developing pretty well without federal “help.”

Maintain “strong” Pell Grant program: Pell is part of the tuition hyperinflation problem, not the solution.
There will no doubt be more-detailed analyses of specific education proposals to come. Stay tuned!