‘Set their feet upon surer paths’

Eighty-five years ago this November, President Herbert Hoover convened a White House Conference on Child Health and Protection to address advancing the healthy development of country’s youngest, most vulnerable citizens. “We approach all problems of childhood with affection,” he said in his welcome address, stressing that the conference aimed to “lighten the burdens of children, to set their feet upon surer paths to health and well-being and happiness.” Hoover’s eloquent words reflected deep national concern over the care and protection of children that gained momentum in the early 20th century, leading to first private and then public efforts to ensure young children’s well-being.

But over the past decades, we’ve drifted far from the clear focus on children’s welfare that Hoover so vividly expressed. Today, federal early care and education policies are a hodgepodge of fragmented funding streams, disconnected from each other and from a clear, coherent purpose. In the dysfunctional landscape of federal early childhood policy, policymakers have gotten locked into choosing among three bad options: tinkering around the edges of existing programs, trying to cut them or adding new ones on top of what is already in place. And none of these approaches will enable us to achieve the most important aim: giving America’s least-advantaged children a fair chance at a happy, productive life.

As I describe in a just-released report, “Renewing Childhood’s Promise: The History and Future of Federal Early Care and Education Policy,” an 80-year legacy of federal policymaking in early childhood has left us with three problems in particular. The first is that current debates are driven by established bureaucratic institutions, not core goals. Entrenched interests advocate for specific funding streams rather than for children. Our current debates are confined to well-worn ruts in the early childhood policy road, when instead we should be taking a step back, defining our fundamental goals and pursuing the most promising avenues to achieve them.

The second problem is that federal policy has evolved to reinforce a counterproductive, false distinction between so-called custodial and developmental care for children. Today, all programs for very young children – no matter what they are called – have two purposes: supporting parents’ work in a 24/7 economy and promoting children’s healthy growth and learning during the most crucial period of human development, from birth through age four. Those two aims are complementary, equally important strategies for building human capital in our nation’s most disadvantaged communities. Federal programs must advance both.

The third problem is that an overly narrow focus on children’s economic status and cognitive skills has replaced the broader vision Hoover put forward 85 years ago – to promote the “health and well-being and happiness” of poor children. Increasing family income and student test scores, while both important, are a means to an end, not ends in themselves. Children need much more than money and academic skills to grow up well; social, emotional, spiritual and cultural dimensions of children’s lives are also crucial.

The welfare of America’s children matters greatly to the future of our nation. And human flourishing, not short-term gains, should be the goal of early childhood policy – giving all children, no matter the circumstances of their birth, the chance to pursue a good life. We must aim to help children grow into adults who are able to “build meaningful dignified lives of their own making,” in Arthur Brooks’ words: finishing high school, working to earn a living, creating a stable family before having children and contributing to the wider community as law-abiding citizens. That goal is much harder to accomplish than the technical objectives of keeping children out of poverty and raising their test scores. But it is ultimately what’s really worth pursuing.

“Let no one believe that these are questions which should not stir a nation,” Hoover said almost a century ago. “If we could have but one generation of properly born, trained, educated, and healthy children, a thousand other problems of government would vanish.”

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1Pkb4SH

Russian Propaganda: Ways and Means

Thank you Mr. Chairman.

First, a disclaimer: the testimony I am about to give will be given in my capacity as a private expert and not as a Governor of the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Mr. Chairman, the Ranking Member, Members of the Committee:

The aggressive, often sophisticated and Internet-savvy propaganda campaign, underwritten by the Russian government to the tune of at least half a billion dollars a year, is flexible and skillfully adapted to the geography of the audience. While general patterns are similar and I will discuss them in a moment, content may differ considerably depending on the ethnicity, political culture and geography of the intended audience.

Thus, in Western Europe and the United States, the RT television network aims not so much to “sell” what might be called the “Russia brand,” but rather to devalue the notions of democratic transparency and accountability, to undermine confidence in objective reporting, and to litter the news with half-truths and quarter truths.

Read the PDF.

“Question more!” is RT’s advertising motto – and it is not coincidental. For the Russian network seeks to exploit several key conventions and tendencies of Western media:

• First, truth is in the eye of the beholder. As a keen and formerly inside observer of the Russian media effort put it, Russian propaganda uses “the idea of a plurality of truths to feed disinformation, which in the end looks to trash the information space.” [1]
• Second, that there are two sides to every story, and the credibility of the source is secondary.“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed in the 1960s. Half a century later, the message is increasingly detached from the medium, and words from those who utter them. After all, post-modernism postulates that “there is no author, there is only the text.” My favorite modern English poet, Robert Graves, started the poem, titled “Forbidden Words,” with these four lines:“There are some words [that] carry a curse with them:
  Smooth-trodden, abstract, slippery vocables.
  They beckon like a path of stepping stones;
  But lift them up and watch what writhes or scurries!”But when showered by these smooth-trodden and slippery vocables, how often do Western media bother to lift the stones?
• Third, since the credibility of the source is of secondary importance, Russian propaganda finds itself fitting rather smoothly into a panoply of Western media. (Just to be on the safe side, RT, which does not broadcast in Russian, never identifies itself as a Russia-based and government-funded network.)
• Fourth, RT and the Sputnik news network, launched last year, find the soil of the Western media markets already fairly loosened and fertilized as far as conspiracy theories are concerned. Did the US government orchestrate 9/11? Why not? 23 percent of Germans thought so, as did 15 percent of Italians. [2] Seven years after the fall of the Twin Towers, between a quarter and one-fifth of Britons, French and Italians told the pollsters they had no idea who was behind the attack. [3] Well, then, after the CEO of France’s largest oil company, Total, who had opposed economic sanctions on Russia, was killed when his plane slammed into a snowplow operated by a drunken driver at a Moscow airport, Russian commentators asserted that he was killed by the CIA. [4]  And why stop there? Did the CIA aid Ukrainians in shooting down the MH 17 Malaysian airliner (one of the “versions” suggested by Russian propaganda)? Plausible. Did the Russian opposition kill its own leader, Boris Nemtsov, to embarrass Putin? Possible.
•  Fifth, with all the so-called value judgments to be taken out of the reporting, there are no more “just” wars or wars of “aggression” — only “conflicts.” Just as there are no “victims” and “perpetrators,” only “violence.”  So when RT and Sputnik editors read or see or hear news in the leading Western media about “renewed violence” in the “conflict” between Ukraine and Russia, they find it easy to build up on and extrapolate from them to twist the truth. Especially, when almost one in three Germans was reported last summer to find Russia not responsible for the violence in Ukraine, that’s another opening for RT to exploit.

*

Yet for all this seemingly fertile soil for Russia’s distortions, the impact of the Russian disinformation campaign on the democracies of Western and Central Europe appears paltry, if not to say negligible. Where the ratings were credibly established, RT was barely visible, apart from the “pre-sold” audiences on the extreme left and right. [5] The main reason is a highly competitive media environment that exposes people to a wide range of facts and interpretations.

The situation is quite different when we go east, to the countries collectively known as the Former Soviet Union. There the effectiveness of Russian propaganda is greatly enhanced by two factors. First, the presence of ethnic Russian minorities, some of whom nurture grievances; and, second, the existence of far fewer alternative sources of credible information than in West-Central Europe.

It is here that what is known as the “weaponization of information” occurs:  news and analysis as a means of provoking strong negative emotions, potentially leading to hatred, incitement and, ultimately, the justification of violence.

A couple of months ago, while searching Russian-language sites for information on the growing presence of Russian fighters with ISIS in Syria, I was directed by one of the links to one of Russia’s most popular sites, an equivalent of Facebook called VKontakte, which has hundreds of thousands of visitors each day both from Russia and the Former Soviet Union. Before I could get to the articles I was looking for, I saw pictured at the top of the opening page a cartoonish Uncle Sam holding on his lap a baby clad in a black uniform with a Kalashnikov on its back. The caption read: “ISIS is a project of America’s two-party system.”

As an expert on Russian propaganda in Estonia put it, this effort has produced “a separate reality created by Russian media” in which he claims many ethnic Russian Estonians already live and which creates enormous problems for democratic politics.
In Kyiv earlier this year one of my most memorable meetings was with the Dean of the School of Journalism at the Kyiv-Mohila Academy, Professor Evhen Fedchenko. Together with his students he runs a website called StopFake.org, which records some of the Russian propaganda masquerading as news. Here are a few examples:

• A report in the Russian media that the U.S. President has extended a decree that bans balalaikas (which are traditional Russian musical instruments) in the United States until 2020.
• Russia’s most widely watched Pervyi Kanal, or First Channel, television network, broadcast an interview with a terrified woman identified as a refugee from the territory controlled by the Ukrainian government. She said she witnessed Ukrainian soldiers publicly executing the wife and son of a pro-Russian separatist. The child was crucified on a bulletin board, while the woman was allegedly dragged behind a tank until she died. The story was proven to be a complete fake.

Another popular Russian television channel posted on VKontakte and other social media sites an invented conversation between a Ukrainian military commander and a German doctor in which they discuss in detail the harvesting of internal organs, presumably of deceased members of the pro-Russian population caught up in the fighting. The officer is “quoted” as saying that “we would have a great deal of material to work with, thanks to our Western partners.”

Again, bear in mind that Russian television, especially the news programs I just mentioned are viewed by millions of people, especially ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, outside Russia.

    *

Fortunately, there is an antidote to this poison. It is impossible, of course, to sanitize all of the lies, given the lopsidedness of the manpower, but there is enough of it to deflate the effort considerably.

As usual, the strongest antidote is a rich, diverse, and uncensored democratic media environment. But as such an environment does not yet fully exist in most post-Soviet states, the U.S. international media effort could be of great help.

Despite being barred from domestic outlets in Russia, the online audience of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America online has been growing, reaching 4.7 million this summer. In my office last week, a top Russian pro-democracy leader, Vladimir Milov told me that “Radio Liberty is by far the finest and most influential of unofficial sources of political information and analysis in Russia today!”  According to independent research, nearly two million Russians are watching RFR/RL’s flagship 30-minute nightly news program Nastoyashchee vremya or Current Time online every week.

Last year, a nation-wide Gallup survey in Ukraine showed that the size of the VOA audience across all of its media platforms in the Ukrainian and Russian languages had doubled since 2012 to nearly 7 million adults using VOA every week – that is 18 percent of all adults in Ukraine plus nearly 3 million using RFE/RL.

In Kyiv I was repeatedly struck by the deep appreciation by Ukraine’s political and media elites of the content provided by Radio Liberty. RFE/RL content is being recognized as superior not just to the Russian propaganda but, to the output of the oligarch-dominated Ukrainian media, which is just as important. As a result, several top Ukrainian television networks competed for the prime time broadcast rights for Current Time.

Mr. Chairman, we are facing a determined and often refined propaganda effort. From the sophisticated exploitation of Western media patterns and vocabulary to outright lies and crude fakes, the goal remains the same: to undermine the people’s trust in democratic politics and policies and in free and fair media. As this effort is vital to the maintenance of the present Russian regime, it will be with us for a long time.

Time, and, talent, and risk-taking innovation and yes, money for US international media will continue to be needed to counter it.

Thank you.

1. Stephen Castle, “A Russian TV Insider Describes a Modern Propaganda Machine,” New York Times, February 13, 2015.
2. “International Poll: No Consensus on Who Was Behind 9/11.” World Public Opinion, September 10, 2008.
3. Ibid.
4. Alan Cullison, “Russia Uses MH17 Crash for Propaganda,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2015.
5. The Daily Beast reports that in 2012, RT’s daily viewership did not reach the minimum Nielsen rating threshold of 30,000 people in the United States, and that in Europe, its audience has amounted to less than 0.1 percent of total viewership, except in Britain where it does slightly better, garnering 0.17 percent of the total viewing population in 2015. RT’s oft-cited figure of “630 million people in 100 countries” refers to the potential geographical reach of its programming based on where RT is available—not on how many people are actually viewing it.

See: Katie Zavadski, “Putin’s Propaganda TV Lies about its Popularity,” The Daily Beast, September 17, 2015.

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1Pk8Xy1

Obamacare, Year Three: Thomas Miller on NPR’s ‘On Point’

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1NbEzS8

Exploring superior approaches to the Affordable Care Act

Some observers might question the usefulness of ongoing policy discussion about health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions. After all, as of January 2014, insurers are barred from excluding such conditions from their policies, even for short periods, by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Moreover, insurers are no longer allowed to charge higher-than-average premiums to consumers with higher-than-average expected health costs. In short, many would say the ACA has solved the problem, so there’s nothing more that needs to be discussed.

There is little reason, however, to presume that the ACA’s approach to addressing the issue will work as planned. Implementation of the law’s insurance regulations is still in an early stage, with the major changes in effect for less than two years. Moreover, the ACA’s reforms closely track previous efforts tried in several states, including Kentucky and Washington, in the 1990s. Those state-led efforts eventually collapsed because premiums soared and insurers fled the marketplace. The problem was one of distorted incentives. Like the ACA, these state laws barred insurers from excluding pre-existing conditions from coverage, required insurers to take all comers, and strictly limited the use of medical underwriting in setting premiums. The healthy responded to the new rules by dropping coverage because they knew they could re-enter the market later with no penalty. Meanwhile, many consumers with expensive health problems jumped at the chance to buy insurance with strictly regulated premiums. The result was an unbalanced risk pool that could not be sustained.

The ACA is different from these state efforts in one important respect: individuals are ostensibly required under the new federal law to enroll in health coverage—the so-called “individual mandate.” The state efforts from the 1990s had no such requirement. The intended effect of the mandate is to prevent the healthy from fleeing the market.

Will it work? It is too early to make a definitive assessment. The Department of the Treasury reports that 6.6 million households paid the tax for going without coverage for some period of time in 2014, and reports indicate that many of them declined to sign up for coverage for 2015 when informed given the opportunity to do so.

To soften the political blowback from the mandate, the administration announced that individuals can apply for exemptions based on a number of different circumstances, including experiencing any kind of hardship that might make it difficult to pay premiums. The effectiveness of the mandate will depend in large part on whether this exemption process becomes a gaping loophole for evading the tax. It will not be easy for the administration to strictly enforce the individual mandate, which remains one of the most unpopular provisions in the entire law.

An Alternative to the Individual Mandate

It is possible to construct an alternative approach to providing secure insurance for the sick that does not rely on a provision as unpopular as the individual mandate. The foundation for this approach would be a new federal rule: people who stay continuously covered by health insurance would be protected from their health status factoring into the premiums they owe or the coverage they can secure. This new protection would allow consumers to move seamlessly between insurance platforms—employer plans, the individual market, and public insurance—without fear of being penalized financially based on their medical history.

Previous congressional action has already partially built this new protection into insurance law. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act prohibited employer plans from excluding pre-existing conditions from coverage for newly hired workers and their families so long as the worker had not experienced a lengthy break in coverage. This new protection made it much easier for workers to move between job-based insurance plans.

Unfortunately, the 1996 law’s effort to provide similar protection for those moving from job-based insurance to the individual market was flawed. Among other problems, workers lost their right to protection if they did not avail themselves of so-called COBRA coverage from an employer before moving to individually owned insurance. Because COBRA coverage is generally quite expensive, most workers who left their jobs never bothered to sign up for it and thus were forced to face medical underwriting when they wanted to buy insurance in the individual market.

A new federal law could put an end to the problem by providing ironclad “continuous coverage” protection that would allow those who stay insured (with minimal breaks in coverage) to move from job-based coverage to the individual market, and vice versa, without fear of coverage exclusions or higher premiums based on their health status.

Correcting the Tax Treatment of Health Insurance

Of course, critics will note that continuous coverage protection is extended only to those with insurance, and thus implicitly to those who can afford to pay the premiums. What about low-income households, or the unemployed, who have limited resources? For this approach to work, it is also necessary to address a long-standing inequity in federal tax law. Workers enrolled in employer-sponsored health insurance plans enjoy a generous federal tax break that, before enactment of the ACA, had not been extended to those who must buy insurance on their own. Employer-paid premiums are excluded entirely from both federal income taxes and payroll taxes. By contrast, before 2014, a consumer purchasing insurance directly from an insurer had to pay the premium entirely from after-tax dollars. The ACA provides premium credits to people with incomes above Medicaid eligibility but below 400 percent of the federal poverty line who buy their insurance through the law’s exchanges. The law, however, does not provide tax equity for households with higher incomes and without access to an employer plan.

It is possible to develop a comprehensive solution for pre-existing conditions and tax equity that fully replaces both the ACA’s regulations and its premium credit subsidies. One option would be to provide households without access to an employer plan with a refundable tax credit of roughly equivalent value to the tax break for job-based insurance. The tax credit could then be used by the unemployed and others who don’t have access to employer coverage to stay continuously insured and retain the regulatory protection that being insured would provide.

This tax credit for those outside the employer system could be financed in part by putting an upper limit on the tax break for employer coverage. For instance, employer-paid premiums could be fully excluded from income and payroll taxes owed by a worker, but only up to a limit of about $20,000 for a family plan or $8,000 for an individual policy. Only the most expensive job-based insurance plans have premiums exceeding these thresholds.

Although the tax credit would be available to anyone without access to an employer plan, it is likely that many millions of households would still fail to avail themselves of the credit and thus remain uninsured. That has been the experience with other federal credits and programs, where take-up is far from 100 percent among eligible households. To expand insurance enrollment, and thus also to maximize the number of people retaining continuous coverage protection, the new tax credit for insurance could be coupled with a new, state-administered “default enrollment” option. States would be allowed to assign credit-eligible households that fail to use the credit to a default private insurance product. The insurance companies offering default insurance would adjust the up-front deductibles as necessary to ensure that the premiums for the plan remain identical to the value of the credits. This would ensure that enrollees get at least catastrophic insurance protection without having to pay any premium themselves.

Everyone enrolled in a default insurance plan would retain continuous coverage protection, but there would be no requirement that households accept the default coverage. At any time, they could voluntarily opt out of the insurance plan.

Conclusion

The ACA established heavy and extensive new regulations to expand insurance enrollment and “solve” the pre-existing condition problem. The law remains on uncertain political ground, however, in large part because the public remains uneasy about the extensive federal role in, and the related high costs of, the supposed solution. The political door is open, therefore, for the presentation of an alternative approach that solves the problem with far less burdensome federal rules. The approach outlined here is just such an alternative, and should therefore be taken seriously by policymakers who are unsatisfied with the ACA.

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1NbuvZn

Evidence at the crossroads pt. 2: Moneyball for education

Earlier this year, we made the bipartisan case for why and how federal education policymakers need to start playing “Moneyball.” By adopting and adapting the Oakland Athletics’ pioneering approach in baseball of making decisions informed by data—rather than hunches, biases, and “the way we’ve always done things”—we can get better returns on our federal education investments and better outcomes for students.

Specifically, playing Moneyball for Education would mean:

• Collecting better, more useful data and building evidence about how well programs and policies work;
• Using evidence to improve practice and inform policies; and
• Shifting funds toward those things that deliver more promising results.

Sounds easy, right? Not so fast. Like baseball, Moneyball is actually a game of nuance, a concept that is rarely synonymous with federal policymaking. Too often policy is made absent the data that would allow it to be more effective.

Luckily some important groundwork has been laid to allow Moneyball for Education to begin to take hold. For example, Congress has funded several tiered evidence initiatives that offer a way to explore the possibility of rewarding evidence of performance and building the body of evidence in the field. These could help make some important shifts to better policymaking, if the initiatives themselves are used as sources of data, evidence, and models for continuous improvement.

As we grapple with the information emerging from these initiatives, it is important to keep in mind both the possibilities and the limits of the Moneyball approach.

First, we don’t yet have all the advanced metrics needed to play the game really well. By necessity, the coming evaluations of the tiered evidence initiatives in education will focus largely on what is readily measured: reading and math scores and graduation rates. Those results should be valued and used, but our reactions to them should be tempered by acknowledging that there are limits to the current state of measurement. Simply put, we don’t yet know how to measure some of our most sought-after student outcomes, like critical thinking and collaborative problem solving. That limits what can be known about the true effectiveness of some interventions. Accordingly, just as baseball now benefits from a wealth of recently-developed advanced metrics, education needs a broader set of indicators that lead to improved student outcomes. The federal government (via the Institute of Education Sciences) could help, but the entire educational ecosystem, including non-governmental entities, should play a role in identifying the right metrics and developing and refining them over time.

Second, it’s as important to learn from a strikeout as from a home run. In the rush to celebrate winners, important lessons to be learned from mistakes, missteps, and disappointments are often overlooked. Accordingly, all evaluation results should be studied closely, including those finding no, mixed, and even negative effects. Learning from failure is one of the most important drivers of continuous improvement and an essential tool for creating a winning team—and better schools. Yet, too often the federal government doesn’t make the investment in evaluation that is necessary to provide insight into how programs could be improved. A small but significant percentage of all program funds should be set aside for performing the high-quality program evaluations needed for us to even be in a position to learn from all of our at-bats.

Third, there are different expectations of veterans and rookies. While some slack should be given to the young rookie with unproven potential, veterans should be held to higher standards of performance. After all, the veterans are expected to continue producing results and often cost more given their track record of success. In other words, just as tiered evidence programs differentiate the available funding based on tiers of supporting evidence, so too should they differentiate the perspective through which they review the grantees’ evaluations. Because it is vital that we encourage creative new solutions to persistent problems, we should accept as part of building the knowledge base the notion that we will spend some dollars on grants with promise that ultimately don’t pan out. However, when we are investing to scale up a proven solution, we should hold it to higher expectations. Merely saying that a lot was learned from scale up grants is insufficient. If scale up grants do not produce the desired outcomes, that may have implications for policy design (e.g., perhaps the evidence bar was set too low to merit an investment at scale, or perhaps we weren’t able to fully measure the benefits of the program given limited metrics). The ability to differentiate like this is one big reason that the tiered funding framework holds a lot of promise.

Fourth, learn to field the best team possible within the salary cap. A baseball general manager would be run out of town if he signed new players to contracts without considering the team’s overall payroll and without analyzing whether a player’s salary reflected his production. Yet in education, we typically focus just on program outcomes without paying much attention to the costs of producing them. It’s time to get smarter about measuring the return on investment through cost-benefit analyses. To do so, more precise, transparent, and common cost accounting rules are ultimately needed, but in the meantime the available cost data should be considered in making sense of the upcoming evaluations.

Fifth, don’t judge the whole season on the basis of one game. There is much we can learn from these evaluations, but we must resist the urge to make overly broad judgments on the basis of one study. This caution applies somewhat to how we view the effectiveness of discrete interventions, but more so to how we assess the impact of a big federal program that funds states and providers that vary in their activities and their quality. The complexity of federal programs means it is often difficult to determine whether the funding stream itself is effective—or to reach pat conclusions about which programs do or don’t “work.” In other words, as we prepare for the coming season, we should avoid the tendency to oversimplify, and instead seek to answer questions like, “What adjustments would bring about better results next time?”

Our paper explains more of our thoughts about how to play Moneyball in the context of federal education policy, including a set of seven specific policy recommendations for Congress and the executive branch. These recommendations, however, do not expect the federal government to play Moneyball by itself. Rather, they form a playbook for how the government can help nurture an ecology of information, institutions, and incentives that will make it easier for everyone involved in education to play this game well.

Now that’s a winning formula.

A version of this piece was previously published by the William T. Grant Foundation.

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1H43f29

A look back at federal early childcare policy

When federal policy first turned its attention to early childcare in 1935, the aim was to promote the healthy development of poor children and give them a chance to succeed; fast-forward to today and federal early care and education policies have become fragmented, inefficient, and unnecessarily complex.

In this new report, AEI scholar Katharine B. Stevens traces the history of federal early childcare policy and its three major funding streams —the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Head Start—in order to better understand current policy and how it can be improved. Her major findings include:

• Federal policy has evolved to reinforce a counterproductive, false distinction between “custodial” and “developmental” care for children. All programs for children from birth through age four have two important functions: supporting the work of parents in a 24/7 economy and fostering the healthy growth and learning of children during the most crucial period of human development. Current policy fails to recognize that those two aims are complementary, equally important strategies for building human capital in our nation’s most disadvantaged communities.
• As early nurture and care have been deemphasized, formal education through the public schools has come to dominate public and policy attention as the leading strategy to improve the well-being of poor children. Initiated by the passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary School Act and the establishment of Head Start 50 years ago, this is most recently reflected in today’s accelerating push for public pre-K.
• Our concept of child well-being has devolved to a narrow focus on children’s economic status and cognitive skills. The technocratic aims of increasing family income and children’s test scores have largely eclipsed a broader, once-held goal of advancing the overall welfare and life chances of poor children.

Read the full report: Renewing childhood’s promise: The history and future of federal early care and education policy

To schedule an interview with Katharine Stevens, or another AEI education expert, contact Meg Cahill at meg.cahill@aei.org or 202.862.7155.

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1Q3NQS9

Russian propaganda and the Putin regime

Congressional testimony embargoed until delivery

In a testimony at 2:30pm before the Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Russia expert Leon Aron will discuss the importance of Russian propaganda to the Putin regime:

…we are facing a determined and often refined propaganda effort. From the sophisticated
exploitation of Western media patterns and vocabulary to outright lies and crude fakes, the goal remains the same: to undermine the people’s trust in democratic politics and policies and in free and fair media. As this effort is vital to the maintenance of the present Russian regime, it will be with us for a long time.

Time, and, talent, and risk-taking innovation and yes, money for US international media will continue to be needed to counter it.

Read his full testimony, “Russian Propaganda: Ways and Means.”

To arrange an interview with Leon Aron, or for other media requests, please contact AEI Media Services at mediaservices@aei.org or 202-862-5829.

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1HoZ0ca

Does inequality matter?

We conservatives tend to get less worked up about economic inequality than liberals do, and I think we’re right about that. We should want most people, and especially poor people, to be able to get ahead in absolute terms. We should want to live in a society with a reasonable degree of mobility rather than one where people are born into relative economic positions they can never leave. But so long as those conditions are met, the ratio of the incomes of the top 1 percent to the median worker should be fairly low on our list of concerns; and if those conditions aren’t met, we should worry about our failure to meet them rather than their effects on inequality.

Because they so dislike inequality in principle, and would like to get others to care about it as much as they do, liberals are biased toward finding that inequality is the cause of a great many other phenomena that everyone regards as problems. Conservatives, because we don’t worry so much about inequality per se and oppose many of the most obvious ways of combating it, have the opposite bias: We’re inclined to skepticism about evidence that inequality in itself causes trouble.

These biases go some way toward explaining why George Packer, in an essay for the New Yorker, is frustrated with conservatives for not being up to dealing with the economic challenges facing the U.S. — which he takes to be all about inequality — and why I’m just not convinced by his case.

So, for example, Packer takes Alan Krueger’s argument that rising inequality has damaged mobility as Gospel truth:

The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility. As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen’s ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.

Krueger has made such a case, but it’s a disputable one. Scott Winship, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, summarizes the counter-case:

New research by Raj Chetty and his colleagues shows that mobility did not fall for Americans born between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, a period that both saw inequality rising below the top one percent and income becoming concentrated within the top one percent. Similarly, my own forthcoming research finds that men born in the early 1980s had the same mobility as those born in the late 1940s. …

Chetty and his colleagues found that there is essentially no correlation across countries between income concentration and immobility. Nor is there a correlation across American labor markets.

Chetty does find lower mobility rates in American labor markets with greater general inequality. But if one controls for differences between large urban areas and small rural ones by confining the analyses to the 100 biggest labor markets, even this correlation disappears.

When he moves to macroeconomics, Packer is on even shakier ground:

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care. At the top, it creates deep pools of wealth that have nowhere productive to go, leading to asset bubbles in capital markets bearing little or no relation to the health of the over-all economy. (Critics call this the “financialization” of the economy.) These fallouts from inequality were among the causes of the Great Recession.

Saying that “inequality” has caused income stagnation is question-begging. If most Americans are experiencing stagnant incomes, that would cause difficulties regardless of how the top 1 percent is doing. In the 1980s and 1990s, though, income growth for most people coincided with rising inequality. And the theory that inequality leads to financial crises has a weak evidentiary basis. The economics professors Michael Bordo and Christopher Meissner looked at booms and busts in 14 countries between 1920 and 2008 and found that “rising income concentration, measured by changes in the income share of the top 1% of tax units, plays no significant role in explaining credit growth.”

The skeptics seem to me to have the better of the arguments: Packer is leaning hard on highly speculative claims about the negative impact of inequality, and accusing conservatives of being blind to empirical reality because we won’t join him in doing so. He concludes his essay by expanding on the hard times that have afflicted the steelworkers of Canton, Ohio. They’re being ravaged by global competition and suffering from the decline of unions. Even those conservatives who think Republicans should do more to address the economic concerns of middle-class voters, Packer says, can’t help these people because they’re unwilling to acknowledge the bleak realities of modern capitalism:

Global competition is making these workers disposable, and so they are turning for insight and inspiration to Sanders, or Piketty, or Trump. The reformocons, for all their creativity and eloquence, don’t grasp the nature of the world in which their cherished middle-class Americans actually live. They can’t face its heartlessness.

I don’t mean to sound heartless myself when I say that no sensible policy agenda is going to protect all towns and industries from the effects of global competition and technological change. (I can’t imagine that Hillary Clinton disagrees.) But most members of the vast American middle class — the 85 percent or so of the country who see themselves as neither rich nor poor — aren’t looking for work in the steel mills or wishing they could be. A conservative agenda that reduces taxes for these middle-class families, makes it possible for them to buy cheaper health insurance, gives their kids new higher-education options, and so on — keeping in mind that this “so on” needs a lot of filling in — would do a lot for them. Because while they’re frustrated with their government, what they want from it, most of them, is not to be rescued from a heartless world.

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1MvMvwX

What we can do to live up to the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education

Sixty-one years ago, the United States Supreme Court removed Jim Crow from the front of the classroom in Brown v. Board I. A year later, in 1955, the Supreme Court said in Brown v. Board II that we need to move with “all deliberate speed” to make sure that we open up the doors of opportunity to millions of African-American students. AEI Resident Fellow Gerard Robinson explains what still needs to be done to live up to the legacy of Brown v. Board.

Watch the event video:

• With all deliberate speed: Brown v. Board of Education II 60 years later

---

Learn more about Brown v. Board of Education

---

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1Olw9xf

New article argues poverty not to blame for poor relative test scores

An article in Education Next by Michael Petrilli and Brandon Wright of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute takes an important look at child poverty in America compared to other developed countries, and challenges the belief that high relative child poverty in the United States explains away poor academic performance compared to other countries.

Twenty20.

They find that when an absolute poverty measure is used, which they found to be more strongly correlated with school performance, American poverty is on par with other countries’. They concluded:

America’s mediocre [academic] performance is remarkably consistent. Yes, affluent students outperform poor students. But they don’t outperform their peers overseas.

This doesn’t imply that reform, as currently formulated, is on the right track. Why U.S. student performance is mediocre is a topic worthy of study and debate, as is how to help students at all points on the economic spectrum perform better.

What it does show is that poverty can’t explain away America’s lackluster academic performance. That excuse, however soothing it may be to educators, politicians, and social critics, turns out to be a crutch that’s unfounded in evidence. We need to stop using it and start getting serious about improving the achievement of all the nation’s students.

I couldn’t agree more. And I also wonder how American child poverty would stack up against other countries if all government transfers were reported.

As I wrote earlier this week, a new study by Bruce Meyer and Nikolas Mittag found that close to 50% of government transfers go unreported in the Current Population Survey, which is used to develop these types of poverty measures.  This makes Petrilli’s and Wright’s arguments even that much more relevant.

from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1KW5gs5