Taking Note

The Rise and Fall of the School Voucher Movement

The Washington Monthly just posted my new piece documenting how the school voucher movement may at long last  seems to be running out of gas.  Some conservatives are coming to grips with the fact that the lion's share of the evidence to date shows that the idea has failed in practice to live up to its theoretical promise. Politically, vouchers have been a loser. And courts have stepped in and struck down plans in some states where political hurdles had been overcome. A short snippet:

Vouchers would hardly be the first conservative policy fixation to founder on the shoals of empirical evidence. Yet the conservative backers of, say, supply-side economics or health savings accounts haven't traditionally allowed hard facts to deter them. Many of the erstwhile champions of school choice are having second thoughts not only because vouchers are a policy failure, but also because they didn't materialize into the political game changer that right-wing activists were hoping for.

....In 2000, both California and Michigan offered referendums on voucher programs for all children in the state. The initiatives were defeated by margins of forty-two and thirty-eight points, respectively. Voucher supporters like to blame the defeats on well-funded teachers unions, but the law professors James E. Ryan and Michael Heise found that voucher supporters had outspent the opposition in Michigan, and both sides had spent about the same amount of money in California. They concluded that the decisive resistance to vouchers had come from suburban voters who feared that the programs would take money away from local schools and worried about the arrival of lower-income and minority students in their children's classrooms.

....Bill Burrow, the associate director of the Office on Competitiveness under the first President Bush, has noted that school choice is "popular in the national headquarters of the Republican Party but is unpopular among the Republican rank-and-file voters who have moved away from the inner city in part so that their children will not have to attend schools that are racially or socioeconomically integrated." Indeed, the term "voucher" has become so politically unattractive that in his January State of the Union address this year, President George W. Bush concocted the euphemism "Pell Grants for Kids" to propose a federal initiative to support private religious schools that has no chance of passing Congress.

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5 Comments on the Syria-Israel-North Korea Revelations

Last week the House and Senate intelligence committees were briefed by US intelligence officials on the details of a September ‘07 Israeli strike on a Syrian facility that allegedly had nuclear capabilities, and then the press then received its own briefing. Lots of questions though remain unanswered, including why release the information now, what does this mean for an escalation in Israeli-Syrian tensions, or conversely a breakthrough in back-channel peace negotiations, what does it mean for the US-North Korea talks, and why would Syria have been pursuing a nuclear program? 

Here is a quick attempt to look those issues. 

Asia's Ascent and the West

As the rising powers of Asia gain ever greater economic and political clout, does their ascent pose challenges to long-established international institutions and to the overall global agenda? How might an empowered China or India, say, seek to re-shape the international agenda – or might they offer an alternative paradigm to the western-originated system?

These are the questions The Century Foundation sought to answer at a recent roundtable discussion. Much of the conversation focused on Asia’s role in major global institutions, with significant fractures emerging over Western states’ efforts to influence Asia. Kishore Mahbubani, former Singaporean Ambassador to the United Nations and recent author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, repeatedly argued that Asia is sick of “lectures” from the West – especially when it comes to value-judgments such as those concerning human rights. Other participants responded by asking, what then, does Asia propose to put in place of Western values and institutions?

A six-minute highlight reel from the event can be viewed by clicking on the image above (or, if you come across any difficulties it can also be seen on YouTube).

Big Tobacco and Health Care Reform

This New York Times story details how Massachusetts is the latest in a long line of states hoping to fund health care initiatives by raising tobacco taxes. The report notes that “bills to raise tobacco taxes have been active in 22 state legislatures in 2008, according to the Tobacco Merchants Association, a trade group. That follows a year in which 11 states enacted increases, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.” In other words, taxing cigarettes to fund health care reform is an increasingly popular strategy amongst policymakers across the nation.

Big Tobacco is not happy about this. The industry is putting a lot of time, effort, and money into snuffing out health care reform proposals—at both the state and national level—that rely on tobacco tax hikes for funding. In doing so, tobacco companies are torpedoing one of the few politically feasible strategies for raising funds needed to pay for reform.

Consider California. The Times notes that the state’s recent bipartisan plan for instituting universal health care, endorsed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, “died in the State Senate in January partly because of opposition to the $1.50-a-pack increase it included.”

This wasn’t the first time cigarette taxes have been an issue in California. In 2006, California voters turned back a ballot initiative, Proposition 86, that proposed to increase the cost of a cigarette pack by $2.60. Supporters of the proposition estimated proceeds from the tax at $2 billion—which would have been used to help fund health care reforms—and forecasted a $16.5 billion long-term decline in health care costs thanks to reductions in smoking. Good stuff.

Public Turning Even More Negative on Iraq

By the end of this month, Congress will be considering a major supplemental spending bill—totaling as much as $170 billion—to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into the next presidency, channel more federal money to the ailing domestic economy, and set policies to begin to moving U.S. troops out of the Middle East. The latter part of the bill should be especially welcome to the American public since its views on the Iraq war have turned even more negative in recent weeks.

A mid-April Gallup poll found that the highest proportion of the U.S. public ever now believes the decision to send troops to Iraq was a mistake: 63 percent believe it was a mistake versus just 36 percent who think it was not a mistake.

Debating the Road to Universal Coverage

Can we reach a consensus on what we need to do to achieve meaningful health care reform in the U.S.?

This week, I have been mulling over The American Prospect’s May 2008 Special Report: The Path to Universal Health Care At first glance, it might seem that the eight articles in the report take eight different roads to reform. But I’m glad to see agreement on many pivotal points.

Yet there are still major issues that could divide reformers: Should we acknowledge that we won’t be able to cover everyone unless we learn to “control costs”? Should we move directly to a single-payer system?  And finally, should we try to move quickly, to cover everyone, or should we aim for incremental progress while sticking, stubbornly, to first principles? 

In the months ahead, I think it is crucial that would-be reformers try to hash out their differences on these issues and unite under a single banner. Only then, can we divide opponents who have billions invested in preserving the status quo.

With that in mind, I decided to weave together some of the strongest insights in the Report—focusing on recurring themes—while also addressing the areas where reformers remain divided.

Iraqi Sovereignty Cuts Two Ways

In a recent article on the release of Bilal Hussein, I discussed how the case was emblematic of the tension between the expansive mandate claimed by U.S. military forces in Iraq and the limited sovereignty of the Iraqi government, particularly with respect to the detention regime.  I also argued that these sorts of conflicts will increase in the future as Iraqi governmental institutions mature and become assertive in challenging the decisions of the U.S. military.  These looming battles over Iraqi sovereignty will play an important future role in shaping the dynamics of bilateral relations and will inflame nationalist sentiment in Iraq against a long-term U.S. military presence. 

Bilal Hussein and the Question of Iraqi Sovereignty

The U.S. military’s decision to release Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photographer who has been held by U.S. military forces since April 2006 on accusations of links to terrorism, was not just a blow to the U.S. military’s case against one prisoner.  The announcement by the U.S. military, which followed the rulings of an Iraqi judicial panel granting Hussein amnesty, also raised a question war proponents may not want to answer.  Namely, if the sovereign institutions and political processes that the U.S. troop surge was supposed to help foster actually take hold, will the United States respect them? 

This question highlights the inherent tension between a military occupation that envisions complete freedom of action for a foreign military force in conducting offensive operations and a nation-building exercise that seeks to establish and fortify national and local institutions.  The trajectory of the case of Bilal Hussein is a further reminder that the Iraqi government’s sovereignty is still limited and that ultimate authority rests with U.S. military decision-makers. 

However, even the limited sovereignty of the current Iraqi government will produce decisions that conflict with the stated aims and goals of the United States, and the frequency of such conflicts will rise inevitably as national institutions gain greater capacity and confidence. 

These looming battles over Iraqi sovereignty will play a large role in shaping future bilateral relations between the United States and Iraq and could produce a nationalist backlash that imperils U.S. interests.  I discuss the ramifications of this issue in greater detail in an article appearing in World Politics Review, which you can read here.

Ocean Hill-Brownsville 40 Years Later

As we mark the 40th anniversary of the tumultuous events of 1968, including the horrific assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and of Robert F. Kennedy in June, it is worth considering the lessons from another significant event that year sandwiched between those two:  the May 9 firing of white teachers by the local school board in the black ghetto of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn.  The terminations, which I describe in a new article in The Chronicle of Higher Education,  launched a series of lengthy teacher strikes and a civil war within American liberalism, dividing Jews and African Americans and labor unions and civil rights groups.

The New Yorker: Secrecy and the Scales of Justice

Many commentators from both parties have raised objections, in recent years, to the Justice Department's frequent use of the "state secrets" privilege to counter, and often kill, legal challenges to controversial administration programs.  Consider the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who alleges he was kidnapped, detained, and tortured by the CIA for five months before the agency acknowledged that they had picked up the wrong guy, and let him go. Last year an appeals court held that el-Masri cannot sue the United States government or seek any redress in America's courts, because the subject matter of his case--the extraordinary rendition program--is classified.  The Times ran a blistering critique of the states secrets privilege on Friday. The American Bar Association has published a report calling for the curtailment of its use. Senators Ted Kennedy and Arlen Specter have introduced a bill that would reform the privilege, which the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on this week.

I wrote about the way in which the state secrets privilege has affected another case--this one about the administration's warrantless wiretapping program--for The New Yorker this week.  The piece explores a series of lawsuits involving the American arm of an Islamic charity that stands accused of sponsoring terrorism, and the occasionally Kafkaesque extremes to which the prerogatives of official secrecy have been taken. 

The article, "State Secrets: A Government Misstep in a Wiretapping Case," is here.