Now is the winter of discontent for Middle East dictators. A great political awakening is roiling the region – which makes this exactly the wrong moment to weaken America’s ability to help people struggling to free themselves.
House Republicans, however, are determined to do just that. Oblivious to the growing democratic ferment in the Muslim world, they voted last week to cut funding for U.S. diplomacy and assistance by some $4.4 billion, along with a haircut for the National Endowment for Democracy (or NED, and full disclosure: Will Marshall is a member of NED’s board). Although it usually flies under policy-makers’ radar, the NED is America’s premier instrument for assisting democratic transitions in long-closed societies.
To be fair, President Obama’s new budget proposes an even deeper cut (12 percent versus the GOP’s six percent) in the NED’s already miniscule $118 million budget, though it wouldn’t take effect until next year.
These changes were tucked deep in the giant, $61 billion package of 2011 spending reductions the House approved last week in a frenzy of misplaced fiscal probity. We hope the Senate doesn’t overlook them as it tries to salvage something sensible from the House package and continue funding the federal government. If you want to establish your bona fides as a resolute budget cutter and enemy of big deficits, domestic spending isn’t the place to look for serious savings. The real money is in the big middle class entitlement programs and in tax expenditures, backdoor spending programs that cost the federal government over $1 trillion a year.
We are fiscal hawks, but these untimely cuts in democracy assistance illustrate the perfect folly of trying to balance the budget on the back of domestic discretionary spending, which accounts for only 13 percent of total federal outlays. They are too small to make an appreciable dent in America’s $1.6 trillion deficit, but they would curtail our ability to support the spread of America’s democratic ideals in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The NED was established in 1983 under the bipartisan auspices of Ronald Reagan and Democratic Rep. Dante Fascell of Florida. They believed the United States needed a non-official way to lend a helping hand to homegrown reformers. Funneling support through a non-government entity like the NED rather than the State Department or USAID makes it hard for autocrats to tar recipients as tools of American policy.
Since its inception, NED has backed virtually every significant struggle for freedom in the world. It helped ease democratic political transitions in Poland, Chile, South Africa, Nigeria and Russia. Crucially, it nurtures political dissidents from Burma to Cuba, including Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in China, as well as countless lesser-known but equally courageous champions of human rights and democracy.
The NED and its core institutes are active in the Middle East and North Africa, although its nearly $22 million in annual grants to the region now seems wholly inadequate. In Egypt, for example, its micro-grants support youth participation in government, workers’ rights and – presciently, in light of the crucial role Twitter and Facebook played in drawing crowds to Cairo’s Tahrir square – digital media workshops for young people. In Yemen, another flash point, the NED supports young entrepreneurs and helps human rights and women’s empowerment groups build capacity.
Facing a snap vote in just six months, Egypt is ill-prepared for a democratic transition. It has no organized opposition parties and its civic groups, non-governmental organizations, and democratic institutions are—to be generous—underdeveloped. This is no time to be denying U.S. policy-makers the tools they need to help. But seeding the ground for democracy in the Middle East is a long game. Whatever the outcome in Egypt, we need a sustained and strengthened effort to help local reformers throughout the region put in place the building blocks of an independent civil society and functioning democracy.
That is the NED’s mission, and it needs more resources, not fewer. If our political leaders really want to show they are serious about whittling down America’s monstrous debts, they ought to follow Willie Sutton’s advice and go where the money is.
The Battle of Madison is in full cry, as labor and its progressive allies rally to block Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s plan to curb union bargaining power. The leftish Nation magazine calls it “Labor’s Last Stand.”
That’s a tad melodramatic; unions probably aren’t headed for extinction. But the traditional model of collective bargaining looks increasingly like an anachronism that may not survive this political donnybrook.
Like most states, Wisconsin is facing serious budget shortfalls. But Walker, a first-term Republican, isn’t just calling for givebacks from state employees. In addition to asking workers to chip in more for their health and pension benefits, he wants the legislature to pass a bill that would restrict their bargaining rights to the subject of wages. And he’s not alone: other GOP Governors, including John Kasich of Ohio, plan to follow suit.
Many Republicans blame states’ budget woes on generous labor contracts, which they see as creating a privileged class of public sector workers sheltered from the vicissitudes of the “real” economy. “Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt,” Republican presidential aspirant Tim Pawlenty wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.
This has incensed liberals, who note that it was Wall Street bankers and speculators, not bureaucrats, who plunged the nation into the fiscal crisis and the Great Recession. They say Walker is exploiting the fiscal crisis to aim a dagger at the heart of the only part of labor that has grown in recent decades: public sector unions. (More than 36 percent of public employees belong to unions, compared to just 7 percent of private sector workers.) Democrats view the GOP bid to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights as an attempt to topple a key pillar of the party’s progressive coalition.
In this view, what’s happening in Wisconsin and elsewhere is a political power play, pure and simple. Says Paul Krugman:
You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions. Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.
But things aren’t quite this simple, for three reasons.
First, Krugman conflates public and private unionism. Where public sector unions are concerned, the “boss” isn’t some private oligarch, it’s the government — ultimately the public. Unlike private unions, they get to pick the people on the other side of the bargaining table by funneling union dues into their political campaigns. Even if union leaders and lawmakers were saints, such an arrangement inevitably would put the public interest and the interests of government workers in tension. That is why no less a liberal paladin than Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed public sector unions, saying “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted in the public service.”
Second, progressives should acknowledge that many states have gone overboard in negotiating generous compensation packages for public employees. For example, the states are carrying about $1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities on their books. Many pay a higher percentage of their workers’ health care premiums than private employers typically do. It rankles private sector workers to see states go into debt to provide public employees with pay and benefits (not to mention job stability) that are beyond their reach.
Third, progressives need to improve the quality of public services even as they reduce the cost of government. Collective bargaining agreements often impede the quest for flexibility, innovation, and higher productivity in the public sector. A classic example is teacher tenure, which makes it difficult for public school systems to get rid of ineffective teachers or to pay good ones on the basis of superior performance.
There’s no doubt that progressives must defend workers’ right to organize to protect their mutual interests. But organized labor also needs to evolve alternatives to the traditional collective bargaining model, which no longer fits the modes and organization of work in a post-industrial, globalized economy, and arguably has always been problematic in the public sector for the reasons that gave FDR pause.
Unlike private firms, high labor costs can’t drive government out of business or overseas. But running deficits to give workers what looks like special treatment can drive down public confidence in government. That’s why public employees need to develop new strategies that reconcile basic job protections with the need for a more effective, accessible, and fiscally responsible government.
High-performing charter schools need to grow faster to serve more students, but to do so, they will have to overcome not just organizational obstacles but also significant political ones. That was the takeaway from a panel discussion on charter schools the Progressive Policy Institute held at the National Press Club today to launch a new PPI report: “Going Exponential: Speeding the Growth of High-Quality Charter Schools,” by Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel and Joe Ableidinger.
Bryan Hassel led off the panel by discussing his report, which begins from the premise that high-performing charter schools need to grow faster in order to serve more low-income children. “They only serve a tiny fraction of the students, only ten percent,” he said. “And the average number of schools being added annually is 1.3 schools. Only five CMOs [Charter Management Organizations] are planning to have more than 30 schools in their network by 2025. I don’t see a lot of prospects for serving millions of kids who need these schools.”
Hassel’s report focuses on urging leading CMOs to think big, and he distills nine lessons from high-growth organizations in the private sector that could apply to charters. On the panel he focused on four: generating cash flow, tackling talent scarcity, reaching customers where they are, and finding top leaders committed to growth.
To improve cash flow, he proposed a pay-for-performance scheme: “What if the best charters were paid more?” Hassel asked. “What if the top 10 percent received 10 percent more? Then they could invest in growth. And then we’d pay worse charter schools less, which would hasten the closing of the worst charter schools.”
To improve reach, Hassel proposed micro-reach and micro-chartering strategies: “How do you do more without having to find a facility?” Hassel said. “One idea is that policymakers could issue charters not just to whole schools but to individual teachers who want to serve 20-40 kids.”
EvaMoskowitz, CEO of Success Charter Network (who was featured in the documentary “Waiting for Superman”), applauded the goal of rapid growth. Success Charter Network has doubled in size every for the last four years, and will open up two more in the next year. “And I don’t die of exhaustion,” said Moskowitz, “I could keep going.”
And when she says exhaustion, she means exhaustion from the politics. “In our world it’s really hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “It’s the teachers’ union blockading students and preventing them from entering the school. We’re talking about having to ask police to come to usher our kids, five year olds, into the building” These politics, she noted, put real obstacles on growth.
Andrew Rotherham, partner at Bellwether Education Partners and former PPI colleague, echoed Hassel’s call for scaling up. “This field does not understand scale,” he said. “The only thing we consistently know how to scale is problems, bad ideas, and perverse incentives.”
Like Moskowitz, he also put a focus on politics. “We’ve done a poor job of using regulation and incentives,” he said. “Really there’s only one state, Michigan, that in meaningful ways incentivizes a process where good charter schools can replicate effectively.”
Rotherham noted that in many ways, top charter schools have grown beyond expectations. Once upon a time people predicted KIPP would never expand beyond two dozen schools (it is now at 100) and TFA would never expand beyond 500 core members (it now has 20,000 alums). But he also posed a question for future growth: “Do we need more CMOs or bigger CMOs? We talk about more-more-more, but what should it look like.”
R. Brooks Garber, vice president of federal advocacy for National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, added a note of caution to the rapid growth strategy. Quality control is important, he said. “It takes only one failure, and one failure would be the end of the brand. We open schools one grade at a time.” But he agreed that charter schools could be more strategic.
Hassel responded by suggesting that even if rapid expansion resulted in slightly reduced performance for top charter schools, it would still probably be better than the alternative – the continuation of inferior public or other charter schools.
All and all, the discussion highlighted the tensions between the aspirations of rapid growth and the substantial on-the-ground obstacles, both political and organizational. Everyone wants high-performing charters to grow faster. But it ain’t easy.
President Obama’s proposal to fund high-speed rail in the next surface transportation bill does more than boost the prospects that fast trains could be running in places like Florida and California by 2018. He calls on Congress to end its haphazard pork-barrel approach to building infrastructure.
In today’s 2012 budget plan, the president outlines a new template for federal transportation spending. He calls for strategic infrastructure spending that ends congressional earmarks that have resulted in the squandering of taxpayer money, and for consolidating many of the current funding streams for surface transportation into a unified “Transportation Trust Fund,” a proposal that echoes the recommendations of a recent PPI policy memo.
He challenges Congress to move “toward a cost-benefit analysis of large transportation projects” and to an “integrated national strategy” that harkens back to the original purpose of federal transportation spending – to defend America at the height of 1950s Cold War by building interstate highways.
Obama smartly frames today’s overarching issue not as a matter of simple budget cutting, but of helping business and labor compete in a global marketplace by modernizing infrastructure “in desperate need of repairs and upgrades.” The 2012 budget calls for $556 billion in transportation spending for the next six years, with about 10 percent going to high-speed rail and Amtrak’s existing train service, about 8 percent to mass transit and the remaining 82 percent for highway infrastructure improvement.
Now begins the raucous debate.
For one, Obama’s proposal will need to withstand the political strain of special interests vested in the “old ways” of funding highways from preset state formulas and congressional earmarks.
For another, House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) has his own ideas: a six-year bill of only $250 billion (less than half of what Obama wants). A quarter of a trillion equals the amount of tax revenues expected from federal gas taxes.
The good news is that Mica understands that America needs better surface transportation, including selective high-speed rail. His solution is leveraging private capital with federal funds.
Getting high-speed rail into the dedicated funding scheme of the transportation bill is the essential first step to attract private capital. Mica knows this and will need to educate his colleagues to this basic fact of economic life.
Raising the 18.4 cents-per-gallon federal gas tax, which has remained unchanged since 1993, could help fund the $556 billion Obama proposes. This approach has been endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but faces congressional opposition because of the potential public blowback of higher taxes at the pump.
In short, winning approval for better transportation in the tricky crosswinds of a divided Congress and tax-phobic public is going to require the White House to stay laser-focused on the right track.
I don’t do much politics, but I feel like I have to say something about the demise of the Democratic Leadership Council, which helped bring Bill Clinton to the Presidency in the early 1990s. A lot of writers have interpreted the end of the DLC as the end of centrism, and a sign that Washington has become completely polarized.
My take is different. To me, we’re moving into a new era of centrist ideas, based around the importance of innovation and investment, creative thinking about regulation and jobs, and a greater appreciation of a global economy built around cross-border collaboration rather than “you-me” economic nationalism.
Rather than the center disappearing, I think we’re going to start seeing both left and right start drawing on ‘new centrist’ ideas. Let me just give a few of them:
*The importance of innovation for driving economic and job growth. When businesses try and innovate, we should reward rather than punish them, especially given the innovation shortfall of the past decade.
*The need to think about investment in broad terms, including human capital and knowledge capital. Our conventional economic statistics, which measure only physical investment, are giving us a misleading view of the economy.
*The need to understand the true nature of the long-term fiscal and entitlement problem: The long-term rise in medical spending is a total reflection of falling or flat productivity in the healthcare sector. If we can fix that–through a combination of techological advances and institutional change–we can in effect grow our way out of the entitlement problem.
*The importance of rising real wages for young educated workers as a sign of the health of the economy. Real wages for young college grads have been falling since 2000–we cannot operate a modern economy this way, because our young people can no longer afford to pay for the education they need.
*The need to find some way to lessen the burden of regulation without losing touch with our social values. We need a systematic process for examining the thousands of regulations and carefully adjusting or removing the ones that slow down growth, while protecting public health, safety, and the environment.
*The need to think about the global economy in terms of supply chains which cross national borders. The U.S. needs to make sure that we are part of global supply chains and that we are getting our fair share of the benefits. And we need new measures of competitiveness that take account of the new world.
Look, I get it. If you’re not a budget wonk, I can understand how you might not care about this stuff. But if you’re a progressive and you’re concerned about the Tea Party destroying the EPA for no good reason, then that’s reason to pay attention.
I’ve written a policy memo about something else that is crucial to understand if we want to even the discussion of getting Defense spending under control: it’s simply vital that we end the practice of supplemental war funding bills.
Wait! Wait! Don’t fall asleep. Seriously. We’ve wasted $200 billion over the last ten years through a little-discussed system of back-door Pentagon budgeting, which essentially funds the stuff on DoD’s wish list by falsely calling them “emergency war necessities.” Why, for example, did Congress give Don Rumsfeld an $11 billion slush fund to spend as he pleases without any Congressional oversight?
We have to end this systematic abuse of your taxpayer dollars — start reading here to find out how.
The White House won’t back down. That was the signal beamed yesterday when Vice President Joe Biden announced the administration’s plan to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years. But questions remain: How can the administration convince a spending-skeptical public it’s a worthwhile investment? And how can it bring long-term funding predictability to high-speed rail?
Since winning control of the House, Republicans have been angling to cancel the administration’s high-speed rail program as part of their deficit reduction plan. Their goal is to halt the program before any new train segment is constructed in Florida and California (where plans are most advanced) and to rescind funds appropriated but not yet spent on other passenger rail lines under the stimulus act.
Yesterday, the administration called their bluff by asking for $8 billion for fast trains in the 2012 federal budget, followed by $45 billion over the next five years.
The proposal puts a bold but reasonable dollar sign on President Obama’s State of the Union pledge to bring high-speed rail to 80 percent of Americans within 25 years. The federal government now spends about $35 billion a year to maintain its highway system. Washington will have to spend considerably more to expand roads to accommodate a growing population if new train lines are not in the transportation mix.
Assets Matter
But to make high-speed rail happen, the White House needs to mount a better public education campaign. For starters, the president must hammer home the point that developing modern infrastructure matters just as much as cutting spending.
In other words, while we want to avoid government waste that raises the national debt, productive debt – or debt that creates future opportunities for all citizens – is not a burden, especially when money can be borrowed at record low interest rates.
A presidential trip to General Electric’s locomotive factory in Erie, Pa., could demonstrate that America has an existing manufacturing base for high-speed rail. This base needs to be tapped before more jobs migrate to countries that actually make things.
GE has pledged to develop high-speed trainsets aimed for the California and Florida lines. CEO Jeffrey Immelt could pitch in by tasking his big financial arm, GE Capital, to help finance promising rail projects.
President Obama should also lean on his newfound friends at the Chamber of Commerce. Joe Biden got it right yesterday by warning that “commerce is going to suffer and it’s going to show up on the bottom line” if the U.S. does not improve the flow of people and goods. Building and operating high-speed lines would also create tens of thousands of middle-class jobs.
Reforming Congressional Spending
Public persuasion must be matched by a more clear-eyed view of how to fund this long-term program without the uncertainty of annual congressional appropriations.
The six-year surface transportation bill coming before this session of Congress could be an excellent vehicle for the White House to develop a reliable source for high-speed rail funding. We have outlined in a policy memo how to restructure the transportation bill, now beset by wasteful congressional earmarks, into a productive program that leverages public money with private capital.
While the White House and House Republicans currently appear far apart on high-speed rail policy, there are areas of compromise. House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) has been critical of stimulus money spent on existing rail lines for upgraded passenger service. Mica says he is in favor of “true” high-speed rail that operates above 150 mph and would support federal funds that reduce trip times along Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor.
There seems to be room for the White House to accommodate Mica’s concerns, including expediting an environmental impact study that currently hangs up progress in the Northeast Corridor, and ways for Mica to persuade his colleagues that reflexively obstructing rail projects is not the way to bequeath America a better transportation future.
I’m responding to the posts by Arnold Kling andcritiquing Tyler’s The Great Stagnation. Let me just throw out some thoughts, from the perspective of someone who thinks that The Great Stagnation is a terrific book.
1. I agree wholeheartedly with Tyler that the current crisis is a supply-side rather than a demand-side problem. That explains why the economy has responded relatively weakly to demand-side intervention.
2. From my perspective, the innovation slowdown started in 1998 or 2000, rather than 1973–sorry, Tyler. The slowdown was mainly concentrated in the biosciences, reflected in statistics like a slowdown in new drug approvals, slow or no gains in death rates for many age groups (see my post here), and low or negative productivity productivity in healthcare (see David Cutler on this and my post here). This is a chart I ran in January 2010 (the 2007 death rate has been revised up a bit since then)–it shows a steady decline in the death rate for Americans aged 45-54 until the late 1990s.
The innovation slowdown was also reflected in the slow job growth in innovative industries, and the sharp decline in real wages for young college graduates (see my post here). (Young college grads, because they have no investment in legacy sectors, inevitably flock to the dynamic and innovative industries in the economy. If their real wages are falling, it’s because the innovative industries are few and far between).
3. The apparent productivity gains over the past ten years have been a statistical fluke caused in large part by the inability of our statistical system to cope with globalization, including: The lack of any direct price comparisons between imported and comparable domestic goods and services; systematic biases in the import price statistics (see Houseman et al here, for example); and no tracking of knowledge capital flows. I’ve got several posts coming on this soon.
5. I’m of the view that we may be close to another wave of innovation, centered in the biosciences, that will drive growth and job creation over the medium run. If we want growth and rising living standards, we need to avoid adding on well-meaning regulations that drive up the cost of innovation.
Uprisings across the Middle East have exposed the futility of America’s Faustian bargain with “moderate” Arab despots. Whatever happens in Egypt, it’s time for the United States to switch course and throw its weight unequivocally behind popular aspirations throughout the region for political freedom and economic opportunity.
No doubt this will be risky: If friendly autocrats go down, who knows what will take their place? Already there’s chortling in Tehran, because the fall of pro-western rulers could tilt the regional balance of power toward Iran and its satraps, weakening U.S. influence and further isolating Israel. For American strategists, however, such risks must be measured against the enormous costs of perpetuating a rotten status quo in the Middle East.
U.S.-backed regimes are far from the region’s worst, but they have contributed to the dismal conditions – stunted political and economic development, systematic abuse of human rights, endemic nepotism and corruption – that breed popular discontent and, at the extreme, the violent ideology of radical Islam. Washington’s support for authoritarian rulers has yielded neither lasting stability nor moderation, though it has compromised our own liberal values and engendered anti-American sentiment on the street.
Now, amid rising popular demands for change, America should aim not at stability, but at transformation in the Middle East. We should side with the young, civic activists and political reformers who want to throw off strongman rule; knock corrupt elites from their privileged perch; bypass central bureaucracies that stifle enterprise and dole out economic favors as a means of social control; empower civil society and women; and, in general, open Arab and Muslim societies to the modern, interconnected world.
Given our embrace of realpolitik in the Middle East, America doesn’t have a lot of credibility in the eyes of people now protesting in the streets of Cairo and other Arab capitals. But while our influence on political developments may be limited, there’s nothing to prevent the United States from addressing the economic frustrations that feed today’s revolts.
As PPI has documented in a series of policy reports (see here and here), the Middle East is the great outlier in today’s system of economic globalization. If you take out oil, the region’s share of world trade has remained strikingly small (about two percent of farm and manufacturing products), even as its population has nearly doubled over the past three decades. Exports are up in some countries, including Egypt and Pakistan, but the region as a whole attracts very little foreign investment. Poverty rates remain high – in Egypt, just under half the population is poor – and, according to the International Labor Organization, the Middle East has world’s highest unemployment rate: 10.3 percent compared to a global average of 6.2 percent.
This picture of economic stagnation is particularly grim for the young. Fully a quarter of them can’t find work. Little wonder that, as young men pour out of schools and universities into barren job markets each year, some are susceptible to Islamist extremists who offer them not only pay and adventure, but also a compellingly simple account of who is to blame for their misery – corrupt rulers in cahoots with the infidel West.
One practical way the United States can counter the radical narrative is to champion economic freedom and prosperity in the Middle East. The principle instrument here is trade and investment, rather than development aid. What these countries need is economic reforms that facilitate their integration into global markets, not wealth transfers from rich countries that end up lining the pockets of corrupt elites. To spur reform and growth, President Obama should ask Congress to pass a massive tariff-reduction bill based on the successful precedent of the Africa and Caribbean free trade agreement. A Greater Middle East Trade Initiative would provide the levers for lowering barriers to trade and investment in the region, promoting financial transparency, encouraging all countries to join the World Trade Organization, and removing obstacles to individual enterprise.
The nexus between trade and investment and economic reform is critical. As Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto has shown, massive state bureaucracies and bad laws smother entrepreneurship and drive a lot of economic activity underground. In Egypt, more people work in the underground economy than in either the private or public sectors. His studies also show that a low-income entrepreneur has to negotiate with scores of government agencies to start a business, and it years to get clear title to land.
Of course, Washington should press harder for political reforms and fair elections in the Middle East as well. But many in the region simply don’t trust Washington to embrace democracy if it produces outcomes we don’t like. By focusing on poverty, unemployment and jobs, the United States can work around such suspicions. Making life better for ordinary people is the best way to advance U.S. interests in the Middle East.
Just before the holidays, the National Center for Teacher Quality released a report evaluating 53 institutions* that train and educate students for the teaching profession in Illinois. Immediately and predictably, all hell broke loose. Schools responded that the report methods and data collection were skewed and lazy—the NCTQ responded back that its methods are well-founded and that great volumes of data were reviewed to inform their judgment.
The debate swirls on with US News and World Report’s recent announcement that it will be using NCTQ’s rating system to form its annual ranking of education prep programs. That’s okay. Debate is good, particularly around something like education, which is an undeniably big deal. But debate can also be obscuring.
At almost exactly the same time that NCTQ revealed its findings about Illinois’ teacher prep programs, another report was released, to relatively little fanfare, let alone debate. Prepared by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the 40-page document argues that the training of teachers needs to be “turned upside down”—more clinical experience, more rigor, more accountability, more careful placement for new teachers. In short, pre-ed should look a lot more like pre-med.
Citing both medicine and education as practice-based fields, the NCATE report argues that a doctor can’t practice from books alone. In fact, she can’t even begin to conceptualize practice without actual patients. Education works similarly.
This report is also hardly alone in the analogy—the National Research Council points out that this argument has been made in various forms since the ‘80s, and at least one Boston program has been placing “teacher residents” in city classrooms since 2003.
There are clear similarities between education and medicine: both draw from a rich body of knowledge, scientific inquiry, and multi-disciplinary information. Both seek to impact the body or mind to some degree, dealing both with internal structures and external stimuli. Both aim for betterment and regulation, though differently defined.
The biggest disconnect between the two might be the argument that education is not practiced to achieve a singular, universally agreed upon outcome—though I think any randomized sample of doctors would might have more to say (medicine to heal, to prevent, to improve, to harmonize, etc.). In both fields, technique is easy once you know the basics. And opinions on the purpose of your vocation will ultimately be self-generating. In education, it’s a common starting point that’s missing.
What would it look like if we were to train teachers they way we train doctors?
It would look interdisciplinary. It would look reflective. It would look more holistic than it does today—meaning, technique (how to get your 17-year-olds to pay attention to you for 42 minutes) and theory (17-year-olds are at a particular developmental phase, are suffering from over-taxed short-term memory, and are having difficulty building cognitive schemas that they need to organize and access information) would be linked, rather than siloed into separate classes or disciplines.
And it would look hard, I think. There’s a reason for the high attrition in freshman O-Chem courses. There’s no reason to assume that the demands of learning to teach should be any less. Being able to nurture an intellectual life is just as important as being able to save one on the operating table.
The old axiom “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” is standing in the way. But if we also value the statement that “Education is the silver bullet” (I’m quoting West Wing there, but the idea behind this statement saturates the panic about educational achievement we live with today) maybe it’s time to change axioms for good.
Making it happen, of course, is the sticky wicket. The NCATE report suggests that the solution might be in the change itself. It advocates involving clinical hosts (districts, schools, principals and individual teacher mentors) at the start of the training process.
This means not only co-designing goals and strategies for their achievement, not just providing placements, but also allowing for networks of critical reflection and feedback between the college classroom and K-12 learning site. Going beyond superficial partnership to create a deeply interconnected learning system does more than just give stakeholders a seat at the table—it changes the way they think about that table, and allows for a ripple effect of changing values.
Teach for America has long grounded its successes in the quick leap from its participants’ boot camp training to their presence in actual classrooms, and some charter schools or alternative certification programs have followed their lead to create their own quick-start or feet-wetting recruitment programs that often bypass traditional, certification-earning coursework for teachers—and often lead to high attrition and rapid teacher turnover.
Instead of squabbling over efficacy, traditional teaching colleges and university programs should learn from the best these programs have to offer (rapid introduction to clinical practice) and incorporate it into the just-as-necessary academic content they’re most equipped to provide: study in cognitive and learning sciences, developmental and psychological theories, and the most recent neurological findings that impact kids’ learning.
It’s not the NCATE report that’s ignited the firestorm of debate. But I would argue it should be. We’re used to a few key scapegoats for kids’ low achievement in schools (unions, assessment measures, etc.). But placing blame at that level disregards the source of the problem.
Re-tooling how teachers are educated seems to get us much closer to the root of the problem of our broken educational system. If nothing else, training teachers on a med-school model might provide some desperately lacking consistency in the field. The single-word summation of the NCTQ Illinois report was not, despite the responses it garnered, “evil” or “incompetent.” It was “inconsistent.” So maybe that’s the surest foothold to climb out of the teacher quality trap, stop placing blame, and start doing something.
*I would be remiss not to note, as a student and employee at DePaul University, one of the institutions in reviewed in the NCTQ Illinois report, that my views here are wholly my own and are not to be considered representative of the school.
Just before the holidays, the National Center for Teacher Quality released a report evaluating 53 institutions* that train and educate students for the teaching profession in Illinois. Immediately and predictably, all hell broke loose. Schools responded that the report methods and data collection were skewed and lazy—the NCTQ responded back that its methods are well-founded and that great volumes of data were reviewed to inform their judgment.
The debate swirls on with US News and World Report’s recent announcement that it will be using NCTQ’s rating system to form its annual ranking of education prep programs. That’s okay. Debate is good, particularly around something like education, which is an undeniably big deal. But debate can also be obscuring.
At almost exactly the same time that NCTQ revealed its findings about Illinois’ teacher prep programs, another report was released, to relatively little fanfare, let alone debate. Prepared by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the 40-page document argues that the training of teachers needs to be “turned upside down”—more clinical experience, more rigor, more accountability, more careful placement for new teachers. In short, pre-ed should look a lot more like pre-med.
Citing both medicine and education as practice-based fields, the NCATE report argues that a doctor can’t practice from books alone. In fact, she can’t even begin to conceptualize practice without actual patients. Education works similarly.
This report is also hardly alone in the analogy—the National Research Council points out that this argument has been made in various forms since the ‘80s, and at least one Boston program has been placing “teacher residents” in city classrooms since 2003.
There are clear similarities between education and medicine: both draw from a rich body of knowledge, scientific inquiry, and multi-disciplinary information. Both seek to impact the body or mind to some degree, dealing both with internal structures and external stimuli. Both aim for betterment and regulation, though differently defined.
The biggest disconnect between the two might be the argument that education is not practiced to achieve a singular, universally agreed upon outcome—though I think any randomized sample of doctors would might have more to say (medicine to heal, to prevent, to improve, to harmonize, etc.). In both fields, technique is easy once you know the basics. And opinions on the purpose of your vocation will ultimately be self-generating. In education, it’s a common starting point that’s missing.
What would it look like if we were to train teachers they way we train doctors?
It would look interdisciplinary. It would look reflective. It would look more holistic than it does today—meaning, technique (how to get your 17-year-olds to pay attention to you for 42 minutes) and theory (17-year-olds are at a particular developmental phase, are suffering from over-taxed short-term memory, and are having difficulty building cognitive schemas that they need to organize and access information) would be linked, rather than siloed into separate classes or disciplines.
And it would look hard, I think. There’s a reason for the high attrition in freshman O-Chem courses. There’s no reason to assume that the demands of learning to teach should be any less. Being able to nurture an intellectual life is just as important as being able to save one on the operating table.
The old axiom “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” is standing in the way. But if we also value the statement that “Education is the silver bullet” (I’m quoting West Wing there, but the idea behind this statement saturates the panic about educational achievement we live with today) maybe it’s time to change axioms for good.
Making it happen, of course, is the sticky wicket. The NCATE report suggests that the solution might be in the change itself. It advocates involving clinical hosts (districts, schools, principals and individual teacher mentors) at the start of the training process.
This means not only co-designing goals and strategies for their achievement, not just providing placements, but also allowing for networks of critical reflection and feedback between the college classroom and K-12 learning site. Going beyond superficial partnership to create a deeply interconnected learning system does more than just give stakeholders a seat at the table—it changes the way they think about that table, and allows for a ripple effect of changing values.
Teach for America has long grounded its successes in the quick leap from its participants’ boot camp training to their presence in actual classrooms, and some charter schools or alternative certification programs have followed their lead to create their own quick-start or feet-wetting recruitment programs that often bypass traditional, certification-earning coursework for teachers—and often lead to high attrition and rapid teacher turnover.
Instead of squabbling over efficacy, traditional teaching colleges and university programs should learn from the best these programs have to offer (rapid introduction to clinical practice) and incorporate it into the just-as-necessary academic content they’re most equipped to provide: study in cognitive and learning sciences, developmental and psychological theories, and the most recent neurological findings that impact kids’ learning.
It’s not the NCATE report that’s ignited the firestorm of debate. But I would argue it should be. We’re used to a few key scapegoats for kids’ low achievement in schools (unions, assessment measures, etc.). But placing blame at that level disregards the source of the problem.
Re-tooling how teachers are educated seems to get us much closer to the root of the problem of our broken educational system. If nothing else, training teachers on a med-school model might provide some desperately lacking consistency in the field. The single-word summation of the NCTQ Illinois report was not, despite the responses it garnered, “evil” or “incompetent.” It was “inconsistent.” So maybe that’s the surest foothold to climb out of the teacher quality trap, stop placing blame, and start doing something.
*I would be remiss not to note, as a student and employee at DePaul University, one of the institutions in reviewed in the NCTQ Illinois report, that my views here are wholly my own and are not to be considered representative of the school.
President Barack Obama today announced a major new policy agenda to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings by 20 percent by 2020, and it looks like he’s been reading PPI’s memos.
Last November, PPI released a policy memo calling on the President to support commercial retrofits as a key to powering America’s economic recovery. It called for a “targeted set of short- and long-term policies to spur jobs and drive investment in retrofitting commercial buildings”. With one in four construction workers unemployed, an aggressive plan to upgrade commercial buildings will not only create jobs, but it will also make small businesses more competitive.
The President’s new Better Buildings Initiative (announced on today’s visit to Penn State University to spotlight the school’s recently developed “Energy Innovation Hub”) is a signal of support for commercial retrofits as a driver of America’s economic recovery. The White House estimates that this will generate energy savings of $40 billion by 2020 for American businesses.
To meet this goal, the President proposed a number of policy actions. The most significant is to change the existing “Energy Efficient Commercial Building Tax Deduction” into a tax credit. Currently, the tax code provides an incentive to building owners for retrofitting buildings through a tax deduction of $1.80 per square foot.
Bipartisan support for the tax deduction already exists. Recent legislation from Senators Bingaman (D-NM) and Snowe (R-ME) on energy tax incentives would increase the deduction to $3.00 per square foot. Groups such as Rebuilding America, a broad-based coalition of labor, business, utilities, manufacturers, and policy groups, support updating the commercial building tax deduction to make it more usable for existing buildings. Rebuilding America issued a press release saluting the President’s Better Buildings Initiative.
Other elements of the Better Buildings Initiative include a ramp up of energy efficiency financing opportunities for commercial retrofits, with support from the Small Business Administration; a competitive grant program at the state and local level called “Race to Green”; an initiative to encourage CEOs and universities to commit to increase the energy efficiency of their buildings, called the “Better Buildings Challenge”; and a Building Technology Extension Program.
Jones Lang LaSalle, the nation’s second-largest commercial property manager, called the President’s proposal “exactly what’s needed to jump-start major energy and carbon reduction initiatives and to create jobs and efficiencies that enhance our global competitiveness.” (A White House fact sheet is available here.)
The President’s announcement on commercial retrofits sets the stage for renewed efforts in Congress to pass clean energy legislation. This will be part of deliberations in Congress over the President’s Budget. Over the past year, energy efficiency policy has garnered the support of Republicans and moderate Democrats alike. The Better Buildings Initiative goes a long way to outline a strategy for innovation and competitiveness in America and should be supported in the debate over the President’s Budget.
Today, the U.S. is suffering from a regulatory paradox: Too few and too many regulations at the same time. On the one hand, financial services were clearly under-regulated during the 2000s, making financial reform essential. Similarly, President Obama’s healthcare reform bill was a key first step to reining in medical costs.
But in other areas we see an accumulation of rules and regulations over the past decade. The trend started with the vast expansion of homeland security regulation under the Bush administration and continued through the first two years of the Obama administration.
That’s why President Obama should be applauded for issuing his executive order “Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review” on January 18. The order asked agencies to pay more attention to promoting innovation as part of the regulatory process. In addition, agencies were directed to come up with a plan for reviewing their existing significant regulations.
However, the president’s executive order did not go far enough. A regulatory ‘self-review’ process has been tried repeatedly in the past, and it’s always fallen far short of expectations. Regulators have a tough time trimming their own regulations, given internal bureaucratic pressures. But don’t blame the agencies—neither Congress nor the executive branch has a good way of reviewing and reforming existing regulations, even when they have become outdated or burdensome.
The regulatory system needs a mechanism to address this need for periodic review. We propose a Regulatory Improvement Commission (RIC), an independent body analogous to the BRAC Commissions for evaluating military base closures. This is designed to build on the president’s executive order, and in the process improve its effectiveness. The RIC will take a principled approach to evaluating and pruning existing regulations, gather input from all stakeholders (not just business or just agencies), and do so in a manner that ensures we protect public health, safety, and the environment.
As the foreign policy community begins a reevaluation of conventional wisdom about the Middle East, an obvious consequence in the aftermath of events in Egypt, one of the many questions that will get revisited is how to incubate a Palestinian state. It would be a pity if that track escaped the same needed consideration, or proceeded without an eye towards the pressing lessons emerging, even as the riots continue to simmer and the dominoes continue to teeter.
If the chaos sweeping the Arab and Muslim world has shown us one thing, it’s that Arab regimes in the Middle East come and go. If it’s shown us two things, it’s that regimes in the Middle East come and go, and that when they go, there had better be healthy liberal, secular democratic opposition groups ready to enter the vacuum. Otherwise the result is what we’re seeing now in Egypt, where the choices are between hostile political Islamists on the one hand and, on the other, a reshuffled version of the same regime that’s been ruling the country for decades.
One lesson that needs learning, then, is that an Arab state without an organized middle class is not only doomed to failure, but ALSO that the most organized oppositional forces sweeping the Middle East are basically one-man-one-vote-one-time Islamism. It’s not enough to have a middle class, and one can’t wave a magic wand or sprinkle fairy dust to make it happen. A middle class needs time to develop, to breath, and to become a recognizable political bloc with recognizable political interests channeled through recognizable political parties.
And that’s exactly what Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is attempting to accomplish in the West Bank. His economic initiatives, coupled with his institution-building programs, should not just be viewed as ways to increase the average Palestinian’s standard of living. More than that, they’re attempts to ground a future state in something like a civil society, the ultimate goal being to prevent a political vacuum from engulfing a future Palestinian government.
The Prime Minister knows that Hamas is ready to fill that vacuum and, having seen the creeping theocracy that is the Gaza Strip, he knows what the consequences would be if the Iran-backed terrorist organization ever succeeded.
The trick for the rest of us, of course, is to ensure that the process is allowed to play out – for the Palestinians and in Egypt – and that Fayyad’s efforts are allowed to become robust.
Economic peace should be allowed to take hold – and deeply encouraged – before political imperatives, lest still-fragile Palestinian institutions get overwhelmed and crumble.
And if we have learned a third thing from events this week – and more on this soon – it is that peace in the Middle East must be between institutions and societies, not simply with Arab political figures, whose future is far too uncertain across the Arab world for us, or our friends in Israel, to bet the farm on their survival.
Markups of 20 to 50 percent on products like leather shoes and polo shirts have sent Western buyers scrambling for alternate suppliers…..Already, the slowdown in American orders has forced some container shipping lines to cancel up to a quarter of their trips to the United States this spring from Hong Kong and other Chinese ports.
It’s time for state and local economic development agencies to start honing their import recapture strategies. By ‘import recapture strategy’, I mean the judicious use of loans and other aid to help rebuild and restart manufacturing production and jobs that were lost to foreign factories.*
Yes, I know that sounds weird after all the manufacturing jobs that have been lost. Anecdotally, the price differential between China and the U.S. was on the order of 35%. Given the price jumps in the pipeline, all of a sudden the cost of U.S. production might be in spitting distance for some industries.That’s especially true since domestic manufacturers have the advantage of being close and flexible.
I’m talking here both high- and low-tech production here. The question is which industries are ripe for import recapture, and how many jobs could be created. Here I’m going to tell you an important little secret–you cannot rely on the BLS import price data to tell you where the gap has closed between import and domestic prices. Two reasons:
* The BLS does not measure the difference between the price of imports and the price of the comparable domestic goods. Just doesn’t. Never has. It’s a gaping hole in the data.
*The BLS does measure changes in import prices–but very very badly (see here and the conference proceedings here). To understand how badly, take a look at this chart, which supposedly tracks the price of Chinese imports.
If you believe this data, the price of Chinese imports into the U.S. has been effectively flat (plus or minus no more than 4%) for the past seven years, through the biggest import boom in U.S. history, the biggest financial crisis in75 years, and a 25% appreciation of the Chinese yuan against the dollar. As the saying goes, “this does not make sense.”
As often happens with State of the Union addresses, President Obama’s speech left a lot of D.C. pundits and policy types unsatisfied and complaining that he didn’t lay out enough specifics, or that he didn’t use clear enough language to endorse one policy proposal or another. And for some of the areas that he breezed through so quickly between his Sputnik references, they’re right to be hungry for more.
But one area where he did manage to send some strong signals was on energy policy. He didn’t lay out a long list of proposals here either, but he made it clear that he plans to push for an ambitious two-part energy agenda: encouraging technological innovation through research and development funding, and pursuing a strong national Clean Energy Standard (CES) that shifts our energy production away from the dirtiest categories of traditional power resources.
Supporting energy R&D isn’t really anything new for Obama, but the 80 percent CES target for 2035 is a more exciting announcement. It’s a bold attempt to take Congress again into the breach of debating a national energy plan, which requires more than relying on innovation alone. It’s a starting point for talking about what we want our mid-term future to look like, and how we intend to realistically manage our energy resources over the course of the next few decades.
One reason Obama is able to set the goal so high at 80 percent is that his definition of “clean energy” in this proposal is very broad. It goes beyond the zero-carbon category of renewables and nuclear, and includes partial credits toward the goal for natural gas and clean coal (see DOE’s fact sheet), a step that goes beyond most CES proposals that have been floated in Congress, and well beyond what many environmental advocates are comfortable calling “clean.” But Michael Levi has done an excellent job providing first-responder estimates of what the country’s generation supply would look like in 2035 under this proposal, and concluded that it’s clearly a more ambitious target than last year’s Senate bill.
In practice, Obama’s CES target is also very similar to the Balanced Energy Portfolio target for 2040 that PPI is proposing in an upcoming paper, but more on that later.
Just as the CES proposal is a new beginning for energy policy this year, Obama’s speech also signaled a new approach to framing the arguments for his proposals, both in what he said and what he didn’t say.
First, what he didn’t say: the phrase “cap and trade” didn’t come up, but that was no surprise, especially after he chose not to say much about it while it was dying a slow and public death in the Senate last year. But some of the other things he didn’t include in this speech are more interesting. He didn’t use the words “climate” or “environment” once. And no mention of global warming, carbon, EPA, or clean air. Apparently Obama not only wants to put cap and trade behind us, but he wants to move beyond the climate debate and talk about energy only in terms of innovation, competition, and clean energy jobs. With so many Republicans in the House now proudly flaunting their rejection of climate science, Obama’s move is politically understandable, even if it’s not morally commendable.
Next, what he did say: Obama’s call to arms was announcing a “Sputnik moment” for clean energy and national competitiveness, rhetoric he and John Kerry have been using a lot in recent weeks. It isn’t clear to me how they are defining this moment, but apparently my confusion is reasonable, since Obama himself wasn’t so clear on it back in 2009 either, when he sent a different message on energy [courtesy of Rachel Brown]:
There will be no single Sputnik moment for this generation’s challenges to break our dependence on fossil fuels. In many ways, this makes the challenge even tougher to solve—and makes it all the more important to keep our eyes fixed on the work ahead.
Frankly, I like Obama’s earlier message more than his new one, because I don’t really subscribe to this idea that clean energy development is a race that we are going to win or lose as a nation. However, I do think we should be taking much stronger steps than we are now to shift our energy use to cleaner resources and grow clean energy industries globally, so if Obama can make that happen by convincing Americans that a Chinese solar research center poses the same type of existential threat to our way of life as Russian rocket technology we couldn’t match in 1956, more power to him.
The best takeaway from Obama’s case for competitiveness is that we need a sustained national commitment to innovation, recognizing it as a comparative advantage we should exploit wherever possible. This is true not only for clean energy, but for other innovative industries as well, as my colleague Michael Mandel emphasized this week. That commitment needs to be a shared effort that we value as part of our culture, with appropriate roles for the public, private, education, and non-profit sectors. It is a position that all progressives should rally around, because it’s one that will be under attack from the new goon squad of Tea Party conservatives, who want to cut most public spending just for the sake of cutting.
Just as progressives need to present a united front in support Obama’s call to defend well crafted R&D programs in the face of conservative budget roll-backs, progressives also need to raise their voices in support of his Clean Energy Standard proposal. Obama is right that investing in innovation and R&D is the key to finding long-term solutions that will be good for our economy and our planet, but innovation alone is not enough. Robert Stavins made the case last year that carbon pricing and R&D are both necessary, and one or the other alone is not enough, and I agree with his argument for the most part. And while a CES is a less efficient substitute for cap-and-trade, Stavin’s point still holds: whatever the incentive structure, we need a resource planning policy that reshapes today’s energy markets, while we wait for tomorrow’s solutions to become a reality.
President Obama deserves praise for taking a bold step toward an actual energy plan for the country, and he deserves it from all progressives. That means those of us who would prefer to see a stronger approach that includes a price on carbon, or those who are disappointed with Obama for moving too far to the center, should see the CES proposal for what it is: probably the only opportunity we have to move forward on energy resource policy in the next two years (at least), and therefore and opportunity that must be seized if at all possible. It also means that those who have advocated for innovation-only approaches need to extend their enthusiasm over Obama’s speech to support the CES together with other progressives, instead of trying to claim the mantle of leadership for themselves exclusively, as some have done this week.
Both pieces of Obama’s agenda are going to be tough to pass, and it goes without saying that they will require a better plan of attack than last year’s. There are a lot of details to be fleshed out, and some horse-trading compromises as it moves forward that won’t sit well with everyone. But the president has stepped forward this week and shown some real leadership, and progressives should return the favor as he takes the fight to Congress.
For those of you out there still trying to make sense of the President’s State of the Union address, we at PPI have spent the whole day thinking about it.
Here are our insights:
Lee Drutman gave the speech a B+ for including some version of 8 of PPI’s 10 big ideas for Getting America Moving Again. He also assessed the impact the speech and the agenda it laid out could have on Obama’s 2012 chances.
Michael Mandel praised Obama for spending time on innovation, regulation, and jobs, but argued that in all three cases, he got his priorities upside down.
Jim Arkedis explained how foreign policy served as an underpinning for the address.
Ed Kilgore assessed the Republican response as little more than preaching to the choir on the limited idea of limiting government.
Mike Signer discussed the power of pronouncements.
Now is the winter of discontent for Middle East dictators. A great political awakening is roiling the region – which makes this exactly the wrong moment to weaken America’s ability to help people struggling to free themselves.
High-performing charter schools need to grow faster to serve more students, but to do so, they will have to overcome not just organizational obstacles but also significant political ones. That was the takeaway from a 
President Obama’s proposal to fund high-speed rail in the next surface transportation bill does more than boost the prospects that fast trains could be running in places like Florida and California by 2018. He calls on Congress to end its haphazard pork-barrel approach to building infrastructure.
The White House won’t back down. That was the signal beamed yesterday when Vice President Joe Biden announced the administration’s plan to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years. But questions remain: How can the administration convince a spending-skeptical public it’s a worthwhile investment? And how can it bring long-term funding predictability to high-speed rail?
Uprisings across the Middle East have exposed the futility of America’s Faustian bargain with “moderate” Arab despots. Whatever happens in Egypt, it’s time for the United States to switch course and throw its weight unequivocally behind popular aspirations throughout the region for political freedom and economic opportunity.
Just before the holidays, the National Center for Teacher Quality released a report evaluating 53 institutions* that train and educate students for the teaching profession in Illinois. Immediately and predictably, all hell broke loose. 
