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The story of American education today is one replete with achievement gaps: achievement gaps between different states; between rich and poor, white and black, white and Hispanic; between school districts, individual schools and even between children within individual schools.  In elementary school our children compare well internationally; by high school they have plummeted to the bottom of the international league.  We spend more money overall on education than any other country but we get the least bang for our buck.

These findings are highlighted in a recent report by McKinsey & Company: “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”  The report’s recitation of our educational failures will sound all too familiar to anyone who even vaguely follows this issue.  Where the report is particularly useful is in quantifying the economic cost of our national failure to educate our children to world standards.  Among the report’s findings, for example, is that if the United States had in recent years closed the achievement gap with top performing nations such as Finland and Korea, our Gross Domestic Product in 2008 could have been between $1.3 to $2.3 trillion higher (or 9-16% of GDP).  In a further example, if the gap between black and Latino student performance and that of whites had been similarly narrowed, the report finds that US GDP in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher (or 2-4%).  The gain would likely have been even bigger had the gap between the lowest achieving states and the rest been narrowed to a similar degree.

Why it is that 25 years after a landmark report admonished that American K-12 education was characterized by a “rising tide of mediocrity” our children languish near the bottom of the international achievement league?  The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found in 2006 that US 15-year-olds ranked 25^th out of 30 nations in math and 24^th in science.

The litany of depressing statistics goes on and on but the key point here is that if we don’t turn things around, we will not be able to maintain our place as the foremost economic power.  And what about the lost employment opportunities in such fields as high technology as Microsoft, Intel and others rely increasingly on foreign graduates of American universities because we don’t produce enough of our own?  These are jobs that pay $77-100,000 a year for a software developer.

K-12 education is principally a state responsibility and the states have failed dismally.  Even President (and former governor) George W. Bush recognized it with what was probably his most useful legislative accomplishment: No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  To his credit Bush took the improvement of US education seriously enough that he was willing to push the federal government more deeply and intrusively into the issue than ever before.  Regrettably, too many of the darts he fired at state backsides to prod them into doing better have missed their mark. 

For example, insisting on annual testing from third grade on has turned out to be overkill, taking up too much of the time of teachers who have a lot to do during the shortest school year in the industrialized world.  A laudable requirement aimed at raising the proficiency of math and other teachers has been largely circumvented by many states.

Most serious of all, whilst NCLB required that states meet student proficiency targets across the board or face consequences, it made the fatal error of leaving both the definition, and the testing of “proficiency” to the states.  This has led to perverse outcomes as some states strive to meet NCLB benchmarks but without actually doing much to improve their children’s performance.  This was highlighted in a recent Time Magazine article by Walter Isaacson advocating national educational standards for US children.  In one particularly egregious example, Mississippi tested its 4th graders in reading and pronounced 89% of them proficient or better, making them the highest achievers in the nation.  When they were tested under the more rigorous (and meaningful) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 18% were actually proficient – putting them dead last.

Not all is bleak since not all states are led by boneheaded governors like Haley Barbour in Mississippi, or Terry Sanford in South Carolina who famously tried to refuse federal stimulus dollars for education, preferring to use it instead (if he really absolutely had to take it) to pay down state debt.  North Carolina and Texas are southern states that, along with Virginia, have made significant strides to improve their children’s education.  We have in Massachusetts a state whose children’s educational level compares favourably with the best performing countries in the world.  If the top five American states were tested separately they would do well when stacked against their international peers.  The problem is there are fifty states not five and the worst performing ones are dragging the nation down.  And even in the better ones there is much room to improve.

I agree with Isaacson that we need national standards and a national test; “national” does not have to mean “federal.”  In fact, we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel again but maybe settle on a curriculum and test regimen with a proven track record: the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System or MCAS. The fact is if all US children performed at the level of those in Massachusetts we would have much less to complain about.  Why not adapt MCAS for the nation as a whole or at least use it as the basis for a national examination? While we’re at it, I suggest we try to learn from that state how they have managed to get a first time pass rate of around 90% of their children for what is a rigorous examination.

We also need to improve the funding mechanism for education in this country.  As most states grapple with the current deep recession, education is being cut almost everywhere. How is this going to improve our ability to educate our children or to compete economically in the future?  They’re not cutting education funding in competitor nations so why are we?  Can we not get our priorities straight and assure education funding regardless of the economic ups and downs?

Why is our spending not cost effective?  Maybe we spend too much money on things like school transportation when we have parents and public transport which should carry the load.  And there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that we spend way too much on educational bureaucracies.  Fifty of them and that doesn’t include the school districts themselves (about13000 of those).  How about states pooling their bureaucratic resources instead of clinging to their very expensive independence?

The school year is too short.  It needs to be increased to at least 200 days a year from 180.  And while we’re at it, let’s make teaching the highly paid profession it should and needs to be to attract the best and brightest.  Yes, both suggestions will take money – see the paragraph above.

Many will say we can’t afford or don’t have the will to take these tough and expensive steps to bring our children up to where they can compete with the best in the world.  I would answer with a question: How can we afford not to?

… where all things conservative are moral, true and good. 

Mr. Kristol must have been snorting oxycontin with Rush Limbaugh before he wrote today’s fantasy piece:

All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era.

Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy.  And a good thing, too!  Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family.  Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world.  Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

After I stopped laughing, I continued reading all the way to the end where I found this note:

This is William Kristol’s last column.

So after a little more than a year, The New York Times has given up on William Kristol.  His being wrong about pretty much everything pretty much all of the time probably had something to do their decision.  Maybe now they will fill the conservative gap with someone who actually thinks issues through well enough to write convincing arguments for his side instead of another airhead cheerleader for the Republican Party.

I just finished reading Frank Rich’s column about how Hillary Clinton is starting to look a lot like Al Gore.  Not the new Al Gore that is confident in his views and public image – The old Al Gore.  The guy that was so careful about what he said during the 2000 campaign that his answers to questions were often very long and indirect.  I’ve noticed that about Hillary Clinton too, and I agree that if she continues to be evasive when she could answer a question with a short, direct statement, she could end up coming across as insincere and robotic like the old Al. Well except for the new giggle.

But here’s is a part of Rich’s column that really got my attention:

We are repeatedly told that with Barack Obama still trailing by double digits in most polls, the only way Mrs. Clinton could lose her tight hold on the nomination and, presumably, the White House would be if she were bruised in Iowa (where both John Edwards and Senator Obama remain competitive) or derailed by unforeseeable events like a scandal or a domestic terror attack.

I’ve seen this before in other columns by presumably intelligent pundits and I just don’t get it.

Why will another terrorist attack in America hurt Democratic candidates and help Republican candidates?
 
Who was our president on September 11, 2001?  You’d think it was Bill Clinton based on the crap you read in the papers, but it was George W. Bush. 

Who was handed a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US?”  You’d think it was a Democratic president, but it was George W. Bush, a Republican.
 
And if we are attacked again while he is still president are we to believe that the public would rally around the Republican candidates?
 
Is Rich right?  Are there millions of dumbasses out there who would support the man who would have twice failed to prevent a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.  Would they then support another Republican candidate for president?

Why?

Following a week of testimony from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, Bush appeared on TV last night and said:

In their testimony, these men made clear that our challenge in Iraq is formidable. Yet they concluded that conditions in Iraq are improving, that we are seizing the initiative from the enemy, and that the troop surge is working.

Followed by blah, blah, blah and a lot of misleading statistics about how the level of violence is down in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala.  Our mendacious leader failed to mention that the sectarian killings are down because the targets of their violence have fled the neighborhoods. 

The Uniter moved on to:

Whatever political party you belong to, whatever your position on Iraq, we should be able to agree that America has a vital interest in preventing chaos and providing hope in the Middle East. We should be able to agree that we must defeat al Qaeda, counter Iran, help the Afghan government, work for peace in the Holy Land, and strengthen our military so we can prevail in the struggle against terrorists and extremists.

Again, he failed to acknowledge that there was no al Qaeda presence in Iraq before we invaded.  If his goal really had been to “strengthen our military so we can prevail in the struggle against terrorists and extremists,” he would have continued fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and followed them into Pakistan where they are now—stronger than ever. 

But alas… there’s no oil in Afghanistan, and therein lies the real story.

Paul Krugman tells the tale quite well in today’s column:

To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.

Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.”

Near the top of his list was the promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.”

There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.

…

What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

…

No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

Last night Bush made it clear that he has every intention of passing this war on to the next president.  That reminds me of a football metaphor that Petraeus used not long ago.  He said “[We are] a long way from the goal line but we do have the ball and we are driving down the field.” (Check out Pierre Tristam’s column about what the use of a football metaphor in a soccer country says about the problem with our game plan.)

So to use another football analogy, we may have the ball, but the drive has stalled and we’re facing third and 36 on our own 22 yard line.  The next play:  Bush drops back to pass, the ball slips out of his hands and all he can do is hope that someone on his team picks up the ball so his team can punt.

It took just one day for George W Bush to unceremoniously dump his Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, following the mid-term elections on November 7^th. It was a fate long overdue and much too late to do any real good.

If Vice-President Dick Cheney was, as many believe, the prime moving force behind the Iraq invasion, the execution of this decision bore the indelible stamp of Rumsfeld.  He thus bears primary responsibility for the failure of the American-led invasion force to properly secure Iraq following the easy defeat of its army.  This in turn enabled the insurgency to take hold and create the quagmire in which we find ourselves three and a half years later.

Determined as he was to prove his theory that light, fast moving, high technology-equipped ground forces supported by overwhelming air power could achieve the same or better results as a much heavier and more substantial attack force, he scoffed at Army Chief of the Staff General Eric Shinseki’s estimate, given during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, that the occupation of Iraq would take several hundred thousand troops.  In fact the original army plan for the invasion envisioned a much larger assault force, something that Rumsfeld cited as an example of the sort of hidebound, backward thinking that he intended to change.

With his scathing and, at times, disrespectful treatment of senior army officers such as Shinseki, Rumsfeld largely succeeded in browbeating and intimidating the service into producing a plan more to his liking.  He appears to have surrounded himself with military advisors distinguished more by their willingness to agree with him than for any outstanding ability.  One example is General Tommy Franks who, as Commander-in-Chief of Central Command, was responsible for the planning and execution of the assault on Iraq.  Astonishingly, Franks did not plan beyond the defeat of the regular Iraqi armed forces and the capture of Baghdad.  The aftermath he left to others.  Within weeks of the overthrow of Suddam Hussein’s regime, he sailed off into happy retirement leaving behind a nascent insurgency that has since killed more than 2800 American soldiers.  

The failure to plan for the occupation phase and to provide enough boots on the ground to smother a simmering insurgency were colossal blunders from which the United States in Iraq has never recovered.  It was Rumsfeld who insisted that the occupation be administered by the Pentagon rather than the much better prepared State Department.  The man chosen by the Pentagon to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Paul Bremmer, turned out to be a disastrous choice.  His decisions to disband the Iraqi army and ban members of the Ba’ath Party from army and governmental posts at virtually all levels fed the budding insurgency as perhaps nothing else could, just as the failure to provide sufficient troops to secure weapons and ammunition dumps served to arm and equip it.  He failed to see that the looting and disorder that followed the overthrow of the established order would severely damage the image of the occupying forces and feed the belief that the Americans didn’t care about the security and welfare of the people of Iraq.

Right to the end, Rumsfeld in his arrogance insists that the real problem is that the rest of us simply don’t understand this war.  In reality, it’s Rumsfeld who doesn’t get it – any more than does Bush or Cheney. He completely failed to recognize the danger posed by the insurgency even as it developed in the early months, or to take the necessary steps to combat it.  In this he shares responsibility with a U.S. army hierarchy that seems to have indulged in a sort of self-imposed institutional amnesia regarding Vietnam and the lessons learned in fighting an insurgency.  The significance of that early failure cannot be overemphasised; all subsequent efforts to combat the insurgents and to quell sectarian violence are akin to trying to get the toothpaste back in the tube.

Ironically it may be that the successful operation to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan may have reinforced Rumsfeld’s conviction that massive force was no longer required in the successful invasion and occupation of a country.  In Afghanistan, highly trained special operations units in conjunction with indigenous Northern Alliance forces and pinpoint airpower were sufficient to defeat the Taliban.  It was a textbook operation, but even here the failure to deploy substantial American ground troops in the mountains of Tora Bora ensured that the bulk of the Al-Qaeda remnant and Osama bin Laden would escape to fight another day. 

Iraq was a completely different problem in which what followed immediately after formal hostilities were ended would determine success or failure in a dysfunctional society riddled with suppressed tribal and religious divisions.  Rumsfeld’s inability to grasp this essential fact and to plan for it has cost us dearly. He will forever be remembered together with the president and vice-president he served, as one of the architects of the greatest and costliest strategic blunder in modern American history.

Four branches of the military published an editorial today calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation.

Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times

Excerpt:

…despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a force for national unity has become a losing proposition.

For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don’t show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.

Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.

And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.

Now, the president says he’ll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.

This is a mistake. It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation’s current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.

These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.

And although that tradition, and the officers’ deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.

This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:

Donald Rumsfeld must go.

Bush’s response? shrug.

He says Rumsfeld is doing a “fantastic” job, but those on the ground that have to put their lives on the line think otherwise.

Time to leave.

Here’s what Keith Olbermann had to say about it:

Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.

He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential
administration.

“At least I tried,” he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin
Laden. “That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the
right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try; they
did not try. I tried.”

Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and
triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous
as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by
any one, in these last five long years.

The Bush Administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

The Bush Administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its
predecessors.

The Bush Administration did not understand the Daily Briefing entitled “Bin
Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.”

The Bush Administration did not try.

….

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts-that he was
president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our,
unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or
shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the
responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency
since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.

….

The basic plot-line was this: because he was distracted by the Monica
Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.

The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of this
slapdash theory, is that the Right Wingers who have advocated it-who try to
sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who
sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews-have simply skipped past its
most glaring flaw.

Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin
Laden in 1998 because of the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same
people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan
and Sudan on Aug. 20, of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he
did so?

That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie “Wag The
Dog.”

Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton’s judgment.

Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri-the future attorney general-echoed
Coats.

Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.

And of course, were it true Clinton had been “distracted” by the Lewinsky
witch-hunt, who on earth conducted the Lewinsky witch-hunt?

Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years?

Who corrupted the political media?

….

Thus was it left for the previous president to say what so many of us have
felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even
the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be a textbook definition, Mr. Bush, of cowardice.

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of
the past.

That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair-writing as George
Orwell-gave us in the book “1984.”

The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar
to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in
the good of others; we are interested solely in power…

“Power is not a means; it is an end.

….

The “free pass” has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us-then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war
in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did
9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which
doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding;
which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true
American would ever condone, let alone advocate.

And there it is, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

There’s more here.  Watch it here.