I was wondering when I’d start seeing some pushback on the idea that government-funded universal pre-kindergarten education was an important and urgent component of educational reform and had proven benefits. This article by Neil McCluskey at RealClearPolitics is a pretty good start:
Today the unenviable task of opposing publicly funded schooling for the littlest Americans falls to me. Worse, I have to disagree with Peter Salins, whose past work I’ve greatly enjoyed. Yet oppose and disagree I shall, especially with Salins’s basic contention that positive effects of publicly funded, “high-quality preschool” are “empirically validated.”
As the Brookings Institution’s Grover “Russ” Whitehurst has been working feverishly to communicate, we simply do not have a good base of top-flight research — studies in which children are randomly assigned to large preschool programs — on which to conclude that public pre-K works. Most assertions about its effectiveness, such as President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union claim that “every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than seven dollars later on,” are based primarily on two programs: Perry Preschool of the 1960s, and Abecedarian of the 1970s. Both treated fewer than 60 children, were very expensive, and were staffed by people highly motivated to prove their programs’ worth.
I think there’s sufficient reason to believe that there are certain populations of kids, especially special needs kids, for whom early intervention is vital. The empirical evidence in support of universal pre-K isn’t nearly as compelling.
The president who ran for the office boasting he would restore seriousness and realism to American foreign policy has conducted the least serious and most unrealistic foreign policy in living memory. His pronouncements barely make an impression even on cable news anymore and are mocked by apparatchiks from Damascus to Moscow.
I think Mr. Salter’s memory is selective. Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, predicated on the notion that the United States could function in the world on the basis of moral suasion alone, was clearly “the least serious and most unrealistic foreign policy in living memory”. During his tenure as president, Barack Obama has conducted a much more, er, kinetic campaign in Afghanistan than George W. Bush did (most of the U. S. casualties in Afghanistan over our 13 year campaign there have been during Obama’s presidency), conducted an air campaign that lead to the overthrow of the legitimate government of Libya, and sent U. S. armed drones into action in nearly a dozen countries. That’s a significantly more extensive use of U. S. military force than by Ronald Reagan, cited by some as the paradigm of toughness.
The problems that I have with President Obama’s foreign policy are, essentially, two. I don’t think that the U. S. should make threats as he did against Syria for example, especially if we don’t intend to follow through with them. That’s a problem typical of American presidents—speaking a bit too much.
And I don’t believe you can construct a coherent foreign policy touting the importance of international institutions and law on the one hand while flouting them by exceeding Security Council mandates in Libya or ignoring them with violations of national sovereignty or waging war without Security Council authorization on the other.
The word for that isn’t unserious or unrealistic. It also isn’t realism. The word is sophistry.
I’ve just been reminded of why I don’t read Anne Applebaum’s columns. Consider the opening paragraph of her most recent:
There have been high moments: Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, locked in a bear hug; George W. Bush looking into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and seeing “a sense of his soulâ€; Hillary Clinton pressing the “reset button.†There have been some very low moments, too. But for more than 20 years of Russian independence, a single narrative about Russia in the West has nevertheless prevailed.
I must be out of step. I consider those low moments, epitomizing the worst features of the relationship between the United States and Russia—cult of personality, ignorance, and arrogance on our part.
Is this:
Openly or subconsciously, since 1991, Western leaders have acted on the assumption that Russia is a flawed Western country.
really the animating principle of the last twenty years of relations between our two countries? I certainly don’t see it that way. I think I see it more as treating Russia as a vanquished foe, now irrelevant on the world stage. The first part is true but imprudent. The second is, well, premature. Russia will always be a regional superpower and will be a world power as long as it maintains a nuclear arsenal as large or larger than ours.
Since Congress controls the E.F.C. formula, it makes sense for political leaders who are serious about controlling college costs and student debt to start by making the E.F.C. more realistic. But tinkering with the E.F.C. formula won’t be sufficient because there are so many problems with it. For example, it doesn’t take into consideration geographic differences in cost-of-living, or the lack of liquidity in one’s home.
So let’s get serious instead. Congress and the president should drastically cut the E.F.C. — by around 75 percent, to reflect the fact that since 1980 tuition has risen at nearly five times the rate of the Consumer Price Index. Doing so would force colleges to construct financial aid packages without the artificial price supports of inflated contribution numbers — and make paying for college less agonizing.
“E. F. C.” stands for “expected family contribution, a number calculated based on a formula devised by Congress (which should be a warning signal right there). For Mr. Cohen’s proposal to work wouldn’t tuition need to be unrelated to costs and/or wouldn’t the size of funds available from which to award financial aid need to be much larger than they are now?
I gave my proposal for making college more affordable long ago. In digest form, I think the largest states should each close one of their failing state colleges (they all have them) and use the funds they’ve freed up to create a high quality degree-awarding online educational program at low or no cost, at least for residents of those states. The degree offered could be an associates or a bachelors degree.
There’s one thing that I wonder whether Mr. Cohen is aware of. Skyrocketing college tuitions aren’t new phenomena and predate the E. F. C., FAFSA, or any of the bureaucratic alphabet soup in today’s educational landscape. In the eight years between when I started college and when some of my grad student friends started the same college eight years previously the tuition at my price-y private university tripled. That was just about a half century ago and today’s tuition at the same school are an order of magnitude higher than when I started. The difference is that the increase in tuition has far outstripped the increase in wages.
What I think would actually happen if Mr. Cohen’s proposal were implemented is something that’s already under way: top schools would increasingly narrow their admissions to cash customers. Limiting the admissions of the prestige universities to the children of the 1% doesn’t precisely sound to me like a better, more just, more egalitarian society but I guess I just don’t see the bigger picture.
One last observation. I found it amusing that Mr. Cohen attended the Naval Academy where the tuition is fully borne by Uncle Sugar and dumped that for Ivy League Brown. I think there’s probably a subtext behind his op-ed.
I have something of a broad, philosophical foreign policy question I’d like to put on the floor to see what other people have to say about it. What should the attitude of the United States be to countries that explicitly identify themselves as belonging to a particular race or ethnicity?
It’s not uncommon. Many of the countries in the world do. For example, most of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa explicitly identify themselves as “part of the Arab nation” which I gather is the customary formulation. San Denista Nicaragua explicitly identified itself as a mestizo country. And so on.
I’m not entirely comfortable with such identities and I think that as a country we should be wary of being too cozy with countries that enjoy them. In this, however, as in many things I think that pragmatism should be our guide. Sometimes there are reasons of state to have close relations with countries of which we disapprove profoundly.
I see official languages a bit differently. Most countries have one or more official languages—we’re the oddball in not having one. It always surprises me a bit when Americans express surprise that you don’t need to be able to speak, read, or write English to become an American citizen.
In the post I draw attention to two fine articles on the Ukraine situation, one by Fred Kaplan in Salon and the other by Lawrence Freedman at War on the Rocks. Both are well worth reading and essentially conclude that although U. S. response to the situation in Ukraine has been far from perfect many of the criticisms being leveled at the president over it by his political opponents are hyperventilating. Approaches and criteria are laid out for evaluating the situation and the response.
This reminds me of a great Soviet-era joke which I’ll repeat if I get the time.
Update
Okay. Here’s the joke.
It’s Moscow in the 1970s in the middle of winter. A rumor spreads through the city that meat will be available for sale the next day at Butcher’s Shop No. 1.
Tens of thousands turn up on the eve of the event: wrapped up against the cold, carrying stools, vodka, and chessboards, they form an orderly queue.
At 3 am the butcher comes out and says, “Comrades, I’ve just had a call from the Party Central Committee: it turns out there won’t be enough meat for everyone, so the Jews in the queue should go home.”
The Jews obediently leave the queue. The rest continue to wait.
At 7 am, the butcher comes out again: “Comrades, I’ve just had another call from Central Committee. It turns out there will be no meat at all, so you should all go home.”
The crowd disperses, grumbling all the while: “Those Jews have all the luck!”
According to a recent study published in JAMA trauma patients without insurance received better care than those with insurance. From the authors’ conclusion:
Patients with severe injuries initially evaluated at non-trauma center EDs were less likely to be transferred if insured and were at risk of receiving suboptimal trauma care. Efforts in monitoring and optimizing trauma inter-hospital transfers and outcomes at the population level are warranted.
I would very much like to see how that finding is reconciled with the frequently-encountered claim that it’s impossible to get healthcare without insurance.
I think it should be obvious to everyone that it’s long past time when a special prosecutor should be named to investigate the IRS’s of certain organizations whose politics they didn’t much like for harassment. Republican Congressman Jim Jordan argues for that in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:
A special prosecutor, uncompromised by partisan political winds, provides hope of uncovering what happened at the IRS. As Elijah Cummings, my Democratic colleague on the Oversight Committee, said on May 22, 2013—the day of the committee’s first IRS hearing—getting the truth and restoring trust must be paramount. “This is more important than one election,” he explained. “The revelations that have come forward so far provides us with a moment pregnant for transformation; not transformation for a moment, but for generations to come and generations yet unborn.”
I hope Mr. Cummings and fellow members of his party will join me in acknowledging the time has come for the appointment of an independent and unbiased special prosecutor.
As appropriate as the message may be, I fear that Cong. Jordan isn’t the best person to be making the argument.
Far too many of his fellow partisans have seriously conflicting goals. The goal of a special prosecutor should be to determine exactly what happened and, possibly, determining who if anyone has committed a crime, filing suit if appropriate. When Republican goals include establishing culpability as a highest priority, preferably blaming it on the president, it clouds the issue seriously. It raises the spectre of a special prosecuter who, like the Red Queen, wants to pronounce the sentence first.
If Republicans really wanted to know what happened, they could grant Ms. Lerner immunity and then demand that she testify in full before Congressional committees under threat of contempt of Congress. There appears to be a prima facie case for perjury against her which could also be used as leverage.
Failing to take these steps seems to me to weaken the case for a special prosecutor. Too many Americans still have unhappy memories of an unending Kafka-like tenure of a special prosecutor whose actions more resembled those of a Grand Inquisitor than it did a search for the truth.
