Showing papers in "Policy Review in 1999"

Why Ritalin Rules.

Abstract: There are stories that are mere signs of the times, and then there are stories so emblematic of a particular time and place that they demand to be designated cultural landmarks. Such a story was the New York Times' front-page report on January 18 appearing under the tame, even soporific headline, "For School Nurses, More Than Tending the Sick." "Ritalin, Ritalin, seizure drugs, Ritalin," in the words of its sing-song opening. "So goes the rhythm of noontime" for a typical school nurse in East Boston "as she trots her tray of brown plastic vials and paper water cups from class to class, dispensing pills into outstretched young palms." For this nurse, as for her counterparts in middle- and upper-middle class schools across the country, the day's routine is now driven by what the Times dubs "a ticklish question," to wit: "With the number of children across the country taking Ritalin estimated at well over three million, more than double the 1990 figure, who should be giving out the pills?" "With nurses often serving more than one school at a time," the story goes on to explain, "the whole middle of the day can be taken up in a school-to-school scurry to dole out drugs." Massachusetts, for its part, has taken to having the nurse deputize "anyone from a principal to a secretary" to share the burden. In Florida, where the ratio of school nurses to students is particularly low, "many schools have clerical workers hand out the pills." So many pills, and so few professionals to go around. What else are the authorities to do? Behold the uniquely American psychotropic universe, pediatrics zone -- a place where "psychiatric medications in general have become more common in schools" and where, in particular, "Ritalin dominates." There are by now millions of stories in orbit here, and the particular one chosen by the Times -- of how the drug has induced a professional labor shortage -- is no doubt an estimable entry. But for the reader struck by some of the facts the Times mentions only in passing -- for example, that Ritalin use more than doubled in the first half of the decade alone, that production has increased 700 percent since 1990, or that the number of schoolchildren taking the drug may now, by some estimates, be approaching the 4 million mark -- mere anecdote will only explain so much. Fortunately, at least for the curious reader, there is a great deal of other material now on offer, for the explosion in Ritalin consumption has been very nearly matched by a publishing boom dedicated to that same phenomenon. Its harbingers include, for example, Barbara Ingersoll's now-classic 1988 Your Hyperactive Child, among the first works to popularize a drug regimen for what we now call Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD, called ADHD when it includes hyperactivity). Five years later, with add diagnoses and Ritalin prescriptions already rising steeply in the better-off neighborhoods and schools, Peter D. Kramer helped fuel the boom with his bestselling Listening to Prozac -- a book that put the phrase "cosmetic pharmacology" into the vernacular and thereby inadvertently broke new conceptual ground for the advocates of Ritalin. In 1994, most important, psychiatrists Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey published their own bestselling Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood to Adulthood, a book that was perhaps the single most powerful force in the subsequent proliferation of add diagnoses; as its opening sentence accurately prophesied, "Once you catch on to what this syndrome is all about, you'll see it everywhere." Not everyone received these soundings from the psychotropic beyond with the same enthusiasm. One noteworthy dissent came in 1995 with Thomas Armstrong's The Myth of the add Child, which attacked both the scientific claims made on behalf of ADD and what Armstrong decried as the "pathologizing" of normal children. Dissent also took the form of wary public pronouncements by the National Education Association (NEA), one of several groups to harbor the fear that add would be used to stigmatize minority children. …

Russia: Too Sick to Matter?

Abstract: For Russia and its people, the nightmare of Soviet totalitarianism has come to an end, only to be followed by a phenomenon much more familiar in Russian history: a "time of troubles." And although this current "time of troubles" is surely less brutal for ordinary Russians than the original "Time of Troubles" preceding the accession of the Romanov dynasty - likely milder, indeed, than the other "times of troubles" during the intervening four centuries - today's episode shares with all its predecessors an overarching and indeed defining characteristic: a sudden, dramatic, and, from a Russian nationalist standpoint, distressing enfeeblement of the Russian state. In barely a decade, Moscow has plummeted from the status of an imperial superpower to a condition of astonishing geopolitical weakness. To be sure, Soviet might, resting as it did upon the grotesque arrangements of a special tyranny, may be said to have been in some sense abnormal. Even so, with today's spectacle - in which the Russian state's role in international affairs is so conspicuously diminished as to seem at times negligible - it would appear that the pendulum has swung toward another, almost equally unnatural, extreme. The symptoms of the Russian Federation's newly limited capabilities for influencing international events (or for that matter, events within its own borders) are both diverse and abundant. Politically, some would argue, the very existence in Russia of a constitutional democracy - any constitutional democracy - should be regarded as a triumph in itself. Perhaps so, but in Russia today, "real existing constitutional democracy" is, at least for now, an essentially moribund edifice. Its wax museum president; its simultaneously fractious and paralyzed legislature; its fictitious, "Dead Souls" approach to taxation and budgeting; its "federalism" of local unaccountability and central government decay; its largely ineffectual judiciary: In all, the Russian political system is at present poorly suited to effecting decisions, mobilizing resources, or applying governmental will. From an economic standpoint, Russia's weaknesses are manifest. Although ambiguities surround both old Soviet economic statistics and the new Russian statistics, official data strongly suggest that the Russian Federation's economy today is amazingly small. In 1997, total reported exports of goods and services were almost identical in Russia (population: nearly 150 million) and Sweden (population: 9 million). (Russia's trade ledgers are probably distorted by under-reporting, but her true export revenues may still not have matched those of such miniature countries as Singapore and Belgium.1) At official exchange rates, Russia's estimated GNP in 1997 just barely exceeded $400 billion - thus ranking slightly above Australia's ($380 billion). "Purchasing power parity" (PPP) adjustments alter the picture only to a degree: By that benchmark, according to World Bank calculations, Russia's 1997 economy would have been about as big as Spain's, although smaller than Canada's or Indonesia's. If accurate, those World Bank estimates would have meant that per capita output in 1997 was actually lower in Russia than in such places as Lebanon or Peru.2 All of these figures, furthermore, refer to Russian conditions before the August 1998 collapse of the country's finances, since which time the country's economic performance has only worsened. Then there is the matter of military strength. Since the collapse of communism, Moscow's has evidently all but evaporated. Where the Red Army once entertained global ambitions, the Russian Army's conventional forces now find containing an insurrection in a small region within the nation's borders to be an almost overwhelming challenge. The dismal performance of the Russian Army in Chechnya attests to no less; the very fact that the military campaign to suppress Chechen rebels had to last nearly two years speaks for itself. …

Sending Public School Students to Private Schools.

Abstract: The untold story of special education One of the most common arguments against school choice is that it will create a system of privilege that prefers only the easiest students to teach. Opponents of vouchers argue that because public schools are meant to serve children of all backgrounds-including children with disabilities- school choice promises only to harm these students as scarce resources are siphoned off to private schools. If vouchers were adopted on a large scale, so these people claim, the neediest students would only be left behind to suffer neglect in crumbling, deserted schools. Upon greater scrutiny, this oft-repeated scenario does not hold up. For years, many students with the worst disabilities have attended private schools at partial or even full public expense. Far from abandoning the needs of special education students, the private sector is supplying what the public school system has failed to provide. More specifically, public school districts currently foot the bill for more than 100,000 special education students attending private schools at an estimated cost of $2 billion to taxpayers, according to U.S. Department of Education figures and industry estimates. In most of these cases, public schools have come to rely on specialized private schools to educate their toughest disability cases, when doing it themselves would be prohibitively expensive. "A voucher isn't really the right analogy," says Mike Petrilli, program director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which supports education reform efforts from a conservative perspective. "It's really closer to contracting, like the Edison Project," the for-profit school management company that manages more than 50 public and charter schools across the nation. "But it makes a lot of sense to contract out this function to a company that can pool its resources." Petrilli is right. The current set-up can't be called a voucher system, because public school districts are occasionally compelled by the courts to send their students to these schools-whether because of negligence, incompetence, or some other reason. But more importantly, public school officials serve as the gatekeepers during the placement process, such that most parents don't really ever get to make an unencumbered "choice" for their child to attend one of these schools. Of course, some parents with savvy attorneys may be able to swing a private school placement through more aggressive arm-twisting, but many less wealthy parents aren't aware they can so affect the process. But these differences aside, one important similarity between private special education placements and a larger system of school choice cannot be easily dismissed: school districts have made a market-based decision to contract with these schools because they provide specialized services that public schools cannot easily replicate on their own. Today, the private special education sector includes more than 3,600 outside providers that educate many of the nation's most difficult disability cases, including large numbers of students with serious emotional disturbances and the more intractable learning disabilities. These schools include both day and residential institutions, some of which operate in a hospital-like setting. Put in perspective, however, these 100,000 students still amount to a relatively small slice of the large special education population nationally-only about 1.8 percent of the 5.6 million special education students who are mostly served in public schools. Department of Education figures show that 61,608 students attend private special education schools at full public expense, while 65,960 disabled students attend private schools through partial public support. Although perhaps few in number, this small percentage of students consumes 7.3 percent of the $32.6 billion that the Center for Special Education Finance says is spent annually by federal, state, and local governments on special education. …

The Schools They Deserve: Howard Gardner and the Remaking of Elite Education.

Abstract: UR POSTMODERN TIMES, it is often observed, are rough times for orthodox belief. But religious beliefs aren't the only ones being put to the test these days. Certain established secular creeds, too, seem to be taking their lumps. Consider the ostensible fate of one particularly long-running such orthodoxy, educational progressivism. It is true, of course, that classrooms across the country continue to exhibit progressively inspired practices, from "natural" ways of teaching math to "whole language" rather than phonetic reading methods; true, too, that one of the doctrine's most cherished dicta - its preference for "critical thinking" over what is disdainfully called the "mere" accumulation of facts - is enshrined in the heart of almost every teacher and embedded in textbooks and teaching plans from kindergarten on. All this has long been so, and must bring some consolation to the rank and file. But it is also true that educational progressivism, in practice and in theory, is fast losing ground. For almost two decades, in fact, that particular set of ideas - grounded in Rousseau, transplanted in America by John Dewey and his followers, and disseminated through the educational establishment by generations of loyal acolytes ever since - has suffered what must only appear to the faithful as one ignominious setback after another. There was, to begin with, that famous - some would say infamous - 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, America at Risk, documenting the distinct mediocrity of the nation's students and by corollary the impressive failings of its schools. These failings, certain observers were quick to point out, had risen more or less exactly alongside the ascendance of progressive ideas in the public schools. At the same time, and even more annoying to progressives, such critics were turning out to have echoes at the highest levels of politics. After 12 years of Republican governance - including most notably William J. Bennett's tenure as secretary of education - "standards," "testing," "achievement," and other terms regarded by progressives as ideological fighting words were once more in national circulation. Yet even that much in the way of public criticism, one suspects, could have been comfortably countenanced by the flock; they had, after all, grown accustomed in the course of their long history to challenges from traditionalists of different stripes. But then, as the 1980s wore on into the '90s, came an outpouring of influential books and articles from critics who could not possibly be written off as tools of reaction. Some of these claimed sympathy with progressivism's aims while dissenting from what had been committed in its name. For these critics, what mattered was not the "otherwise unassailable precepts" of progressivism, as the historian Diane Ravitch once put it, but the fact that these precepts had gotten twisted around in practice to become "justification for educational practices that range from the unwise to the bizarre." It was a message that reached an ever-wider audience of the concerned, as the statistics on everything from reading to the sats piled up worse by the year. But the harshest blow to progressive ideas, and what ought to have been the most demoralizing, came in the even more unexpected form of the writings of literary scholar E.D. Hirsch. A Gramsci-quoting, self-described political liberal, Hirsch did more than deplore the excesses of progressivist practice; he attacked the creed itself head-on, and on moral grounds to boot. In 1987, his profoundly influential book Cultural Literacy argued that progressive ideas in the schools were depriving all students, particularly those least advantaged, of the knowledge required for citizenship and a decent life. Some years later, in The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (1996), Hirsch went even further, arguing in meticulous detail that "the mistaken ideas" of progressivism had led to "disastrous consequences," and that "since mistaken ideas have been the root cause of America's educational problems, the ideas must be changed before the problems can be solved. …

Beyond "Ancient Hatreds": What Really Happened to Yugoslavia

Abstract: WITH THE DEATH OF DICTATOR Josip Broz Tito in 1980 and the crisis of European communism beginning a half-decade later, Yugoslavia - a "country" assembled after World War I from pieces of the former Austro-Hungary, Turkish possessions "liberated" in 1912-13, and the former monarchies of Serbia and Montenegro - came face to face with all the fault lines of the former states. As Yugoslavia broke violently into pieces in the 1990s, the first explanation on the lips of most commentators was this: "ancient hatreds," a phrase that quickly became a cliche. Thus, viewers of television news as well as readers of print media were told for the nth time that the Serbs hate the Croats because of what the latter did to them in World War II; or, going further back, that the Serbs hate the Albanians for taking over Kosovo, which the Serbs consider their heartland because of the battle fought there in 1389. Or consider this: swift, on horseback, the barbarians ride to the attack; an enemy with horses as numerous as their flying arrows; and they leave the whole land depopulated. Some flee, and with their plowed furrows unguarded, know their fields will be despoiled. The poor products of their labor, in creaking carts are driven with their flocks, all the poor peasant owns. Among the refugees, some are seized as captives and with their arms bound, march to an unknown fate; they cast a sad eye behind them, at their homes and farms. Some fall in agony, pierced by barbed arrows; for the metal head of the shaft is loaded with poison. What the barbarians cannot steal, they destroy and a flame rages through the innocent houses. Thus the Roman poet Ovid (Tristia, III, x.), describing a raid 2,000 years ago by the Sarmatians, considered Slavs by some historians, against the ancestors of today's Albanians. The "ancient hatreds" argument furnishes a convenient hook for nightly news commentary on atrocities. It has certain obvious merits. It would be absurd to deny that the Balkans, like much of Eastern Europe, have remained outside the mainstream of European history, and that their penchant for brutality in politics and war indicates that, in some ways, some of these cultures remain unassimilated to Western values and attitudes. Further, it is clear that violence in the region has a repetitive character, going back even before the Slavic intrusion in the sixth century A.D. In addition to its merits, the "ancient hatred" argument has a certain convenience for some of those who embrace it. It assumes, implicitly or explicitly, the moral equivalence of the warring parties, with "a pox on all your houses" its apparent policy corollary. This view has a natural appeal for those who do not wish to take sides. But is the presence of "ancient hatreds," legendary resentments, and atavistic habits really sufficient to explain the extent and intensity of brutality in the Yugoslav war of the 1990s? This is somewhat akin to blaming Gothic paganism for Nazism. The distance from cultural divergence to mass murder remains a long one for most societies, no matter how backward. No, these "ancient hatreds" could not and did not combust spontaneously. The blaze was prepared, lit, and stoked by the Serbian political leadership in a massive assault against its neighbors, planned and executed to unite "Great Serbia" behind its communist rulers. In pursuit of this end, Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic would effectively revive an authentically fascist style of ethnic incitement, one with a terrifying potential for the destabilization of European - and even international - civil society. Moreover, there is no equivalence between Milosevic and the political leaders he confronted in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, eventually, Kosovo. The Slovenes under ex-communist turned free-marketeer Milan Kucan had consistently acted in only one interest: the efficient integration of the former Yugoslav "republics" into Europe. …

Not the Usual Suspects

Abstract: The Most Wanted Quotes on Vouchers and School Choice Arthur Levine, President of Columbia University Teachers College "Throughout my career, I have been an opponent of school voucher programs. . . . However, after much soul-searching, I have reluctantly concluded that a limited school voucher program is now essential for the poorest Americans attending the worst public schools. . . . Today, to force children into inadequate schools is to deny them any chance of success. To do so simply on the basis of their parent's income is a sin." -Wall Street Journal, June 15, 1998 Steve Jobs, Co-founder Apple Computer "What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. It's a political problem. . . . I'm one of those people who believe the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system." -Wired, February, 1996 Alveda King Niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. "I believe that if Martin Luther King and A.D. King were here they would say 'Do what's best for the children.' It [the idea for school vouchers] may sound radical, but so were they." And, "Is it moral to tax families, compel their children's attendance at schools, and then give no choice between teaching methods, religious or secular education and other matters?" -Wall Street Journal, September 11, 1997 Laurence H. Tribe Harvard Law School "Any objection that anyone would have to a voucher program would have to be policy-based and could not rest on legal doctrine. One would have to be awfully clumsy to write voucher legislation that could not pass constitutional scrutiny . . . aid to parents . . . would be constitutional." -New York Times, June 12, 1991 David Selden, Former President American Federation of Teachers "Kids like them, teachers like them, parents like them-even I've come to like the vouchers." -Nation's Schools and Colleges, June, 1975 Rev. Floyd H. Flake, Former U.S. Representative "This is not a question for me about Democrats or Republicans. It is really a question about whether or not we are going to continue to let every child die, arguing that, if we begin to do vouchers, if we do charter schools, what we in fact are doing is taking away from the public system. We say, let them all stay there. Let them all die. It is like saying there has been a plane crash. But because we cannot save every child, we are not going to save any of our children; we let them all die." -Congressional Record, October 31, 1997 Chicago Tribune "The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled well and wisely Wednesday in holding that there is no constitutional bar to the use of taxpayer-provided vouchers to pay for education at church-sponsored private schools. Not only does the decision move the controversial issue a giant step closer to ultimate resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court, but it also clearly puts the legal momentum firmly behind voucher proponents. That should be heartening to anyone who appreciates the practical and profitable role that religious institutions have played and can play in addressing the social needs of America's urban poor." -Editorial, June 12, 1998 Howard Fuller, Former School Superintendent Milwaukee School District "Interests of poor children are best served if they are truly given options, public and private." And "Real reform will only come from pressure from outside the system, generated by empowered parents with expanded school choice." -USA Today, August 25, 1995 Brent Staples Editorial Board of The New York Times "Democrats who had made careers as champions of the poor opposed the [school choice] plan, arguing that a solution that did not save every child was unacceptable. The Democrats got the worst of the exchange. …

What Voters Want

Abstract: The Politics of Personal Connection It is pardonable to be defeated, but never to be surprised. - Frederick the Great NEWT GINGRICH STOOD before the TV cameras on election night 1998 confused, angry, and disoriented. He had expected to win a significant number of House seats, which would secure his speakership and his agenda for the next two years. He had weathered, he believed, the worst that anyone could throw at him - from a coup by his trusted advisors, to a massive Democratic effort to pursue ethics charges against him, to 120,000 negative television spots produced by organized labor and the Democrats. But he had survived, and he had set up the 1998 election just the way he wanted. Now he faced the cameras having suffered a huge defeat - and he didn't know why. In 1996, about two weeks before the election, Bob Dole, a true war hero and one of the most respected legislators ever to serve in Congress, realized he wasn't going to win the presidency. In frustration, he blamed the American people, crisscrossing the country to tell them they were wrong. Inside the Dole campaign, it was referred to as the "Wake Up, America" tour. Just 18 short months earlier, it looked like any Republican would beat Bill Clinton, but Dole now faced a humiliating defeat, and he didn't know why. In 1994, Clinton and his staff huddled on election night - removed from the public. They had been handed a historic defeat. After having laid out a bold and ambitious series of proposals, Clinton had done something a Democratic president had not done since 1946. He had lost both the House and the Senate - and he didn't know why. How could these three very different political leaders be so far off in their expectations about the results of an upcoming election? The reason is that each had crafted a strategic vision and tactical plan based on assumptions that missed the most important shift in American political behavior since the 1920s. American voters now are largely unwilling to make political decisions based on liberal or conservative ideology - that is, by locating themselves somewhere on the left-right political spectrum and supporting the candidate located closest to them or opposing the candidate farthest from them. Voters have evolved new, highly personalized ways of choosing, and more often than not, they regard attempts to make them view the world in ideological terms as too constricting. Politics will never be the same again, and politicians who miss this change are apt to be left behind scratching their heads as the masters of this new politics emerge victorious at the polls. Ideology and its discontents THE BASIC PARADIGM of political decision-making since FDR has been ideological. Think of a straight line from left to right, with "liberal" at one end, "conservative" at the other, and varying shades of "moderate" in between. Candidates have tried to place themselves along that spectrum at a point that includes at least 50 percent of voters. Exactly where that point is varies considerably. Fifty percent plus one in a very liberal district (say, the Upper West Side of Manhattan) is very different from the same point in a conservative district (Orange County, California). In an ideological world, politics and political appeal are largely a matter of the positions a candidate takes. Gun control: For it? Liberal. Against it? Conservative. To state the position is to make the pitch for support, because in an ideological world, voters know where they stand and respond to candidates accordingly. Today, for some voters, a "conservative" or "liberal" label is a drawback, because many people now tend to view both terms - rightly or wrongly - as extreme. Nor is the solution for politicians somehow to take a "moderate" view, that is, simply a blend of liberal and conservative positions. Increasingly, people do not see themselves as fixed somewhere on the political spectrum of left to right. …

Vouchers and Test Scores.

Abstract: What the numbers show Students in private schools learn more and score higher on standardized tests than their counterparts in public schools. Some say this does not prove that private schools are better but only shows that children from more motivated families (who are willing and able to pay the tuition) attend private schools. As former Wisconsin state school superintendent Herbert Grover, an arch-critic of school choice, has argued, "Do private school children outperform children in public schools? It's hard to imagine that they wouldn't, given the initial advantages they enjoy from their parents." To see whether students actually learn more as a result of attending a private school, my colleagues and I are currently evaluating a school- choice pilot program in New York City funded by the School Choice Scholarships Foundation (SCSF). In February 1997 the SCSF offered public-school students from low-income families who were entering grades one through five a chance to win a $1,400 annual scholarship, good for at least three years, to help defray the cost of attending a private school, either religious or secular. Over 20,000 applications were received. Ninety percent of the applicants were either Latino or African American. Scholarships were awarded by means of a lottery. Some 1,200 SCSF scholarships were used to attend some 225 participating private schools. Students began school in the fall of 1997. Because SCSF awarded scholarships by means of a lottery, it was possible to evaluate the pilot program using a scientific method regularly employed in medical research, the randomized field trial (RFT). In a medical RFT, one group is given a pill, the other a placebo. Individuals are assigned to one or another group by lot, or, in scientific parlance, at random. This method is preferred over all others, because the test and control groups, on average, can be assumed to be similar, save for the medical intervention under investigation. Positive results from RFTs are required in order to win approval of a medication from the Food and Drug Administration. In my view, education innovations should be subjected to similar testing before being introduced on a wide scale. Unfortunately, this seldom happens, in part because public schools typically resist rigorous, independent evaluations, but also because the Department of Education, unlike the FDA, has not provided strong research leadership. Fortunately, SCSF was willing to permit a rigorous, independent evaluation of its pilot program, and my colleagues and I were able to obtain funds for the evaluation from a broad network of private foundations. The lottery was held in mid-May 1997. The firm responsible for the evaluation, Mathematica Policy Research, administered the lottery in order to leave no doubt about its integrity; SCSF announced the winners. To estimate the effects of attending a private school, the mathematics and reading components of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills were administered in the spring of 1997 to scholarship applicants. Each component of the test took approximately one hour to complete. Students participating in the evaluation were tested again in the spring of 1998. Both the scholarship students and students in the control group were tested in locations other than the school they were currently attending. To guarantee similar testing conditions, both for scholarship students and students in the control group, the tests were administered under the supervision of the evaluation team. Each student's performance was given a national percentile ranking between one and one hundred. The national average is 50. The data indicate that these students are educationally disadvantaged: overall, average test scores were below the 30th percentile. Results were collected from approximately 85 percent of the participants in the evaluation, an unusually high response rate from a low-income, inner-city population. …

Are Vouchers Constitutional

Abstract: Yes, and here's how to design them The widespread recognition that our country's public-school system is in grave need of reform-reform that competition and diversity might most effectively bring about-has led people from all walks of life to promote "school choice" by means of "voucher" programs. Generally speaking, these programs provide parents with an individual scholarship, or "voucher," which they can use to defray the cost of a child's tuition at any school- public or private, religious or secular-so long as that voucher is awarded on the basis of neutral secular criteria. Because these programs are now the object of much legal and political debate, it is important to identify the optimal strategy for sustaining their constitutionality in the courts. In a line of cases beginning half a century ago, the Supreme Court has interpreted the "Establishment Clause" of the First Amendment to strike down various attempts to provide financial assistance to students in religious schools. More recent Supreme Court decisions, however, suggest that a majority of today's Court is more sympathetic to the needs and rights of such students. A review of the Supreme Court's cases dealing with aid to students in religious schools reveals a confusing, contradictory, and seemingly ad hoc "zig-zag trail" of decisions. On the one hand, over the years the Court has permitted programs that reimbursed parents of religious-school children for public-transportation expenses, that loaned secular textbooks to students in religious schools, that provided construction and other grants to religious colleges for secular purposes, and that reimbursed religious schools for the expense of administering and grading standardized tests. On the other hand, the Court has struck down government programs that provided remedial-education classes taught by public-school teachers to religious-school students, that loaned secular instructional materials and equipment-such as maps, film projectors, and lab equipment-to religious schools, and that reimbursed low-income parents for tuition expenses at private schools. School-aid cases reveal two distinct constitutional theories at play. In early cases, beginning with Everson vs. Board of Education in 1947, the Supreme Court focused on the content of the aid provided and asked whether the aid in question was secular in nature. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the Court moved away from this approach, and, demonstrating an increased suspicion towards religious schools, began asking whether even secular aid might nonetheless have the potential to "advance religion" or create the appearance of a government "endorsement" of religion. In the late 1980s, and in its most recent opinions, the Supreme Court has rediscovered and returned to a theme that was present in its earliest cases. In these recent decisions the Court has increasingly focused not on the kind of aid in question, but rather on the manner in which that public assistance is provided. Independent private choice has been accepted as a means of ensuring that the government does not "establish" religion. In these cases, the Court has generally upheld programs that provide benefits to individuals according to secular and neutral criteria, even if those individuals then use those benefits to support or attend a religious school. Regarding the constitutionality of voucher programs, how not what public aid is directed to religious institutions has become the decisive issue. To take an example, in Mueller vs. Allen (1983) the Court upheld a Minnesota tax-deduction for education expenses, emphasizing that the deduction was available to parents whether their children attended public, private, or religious schools. In Witters vs. Washington Dept. of Services for the Blind (1986), the Court permitted a blind student to use a publicly funded educational grant to attend a religious college: his disability entitled him to the grant entirely on the basis of neutral and secular criteria. …

Public School Benefits of Private School Vouchers

Abstract: Across the country, school choice programs are compelling public schools to improve Though still in their infancy, school choice programs have improved overall student academic achievement in public schools. Evidently, competition is good for learning. Programs that include religious schools and those limited to public institutions alone have both demonstrated that choice leads to higher quality education. When public schools are faced with the possibility of large student transfers, and a corresponding loss of funding, they have shown a willingness to make improvements both in how and what they teach. The research backs these findings. Furthermore, in places where school choice exists, variety in education has done little to undermine the common school ideal that promises to teach all students equally in a like and equally available setting. In fact, studies show that the ideal is more in evidence in private schools-especially in the inner-city-than in the public school system. Competition is the key. Consider the results of the well-known public school choice experiment in New York City's District 4. In 1974, District 4 began allowing teachers in East Harlem's junior high schools to redesign and create new public schools and allowed parents to choose the schools their children would attend. Before long, the program was credited with raising reading scores and lifting the district from last place in 1973 to 15th in 1987 among New York City's 32 school districts. The school choice plan also attracted white students to the largely minority school district. Ten years later, in October 1997, a report by Paul Teske and Mark Schneider of the State University of New York confirmed earlier findings. The researchers found greater improvements in the district's math and reading test scores than those registered in New York's other 31 community school districts (where choice is not as available). Teske and Schneider also found that the increased number of choice schools in District 4 correlated directly with increases in math and reading scores. On a much smaller scale, similar results occur when school choice involves private schools-although it is too soon to assess academic outcomes. In Milwaukee-the site of the first publicly-sponsored school choice program-choice prompted all nine members of the Milwaukee public school board to sign a fundraising letter on September 10, 1998, supporting Partners Advancing Values in Education (PAVE)-a private scholarship program that makes choice an option for many families in Milwaukee. "Parents have the right and responsibility to determine the course of their children's education," the board members state in the letter. "[A]s members of the Board of MPS, our task is to support them in carrying out that responsibility," they continue. "MPS can provide quality education for all our children. . . . But until we make it happen, we ask that you contribute to PAVE's scholarship fund, both for the sake of the thousands of children immediately at risk and for the sake of public education reforms in Milwaukee." Albany's Brighter Choice Private programs like PAVE can, in fact, benefit public schools. In 1997, Virginia Gilder offered vouchers of up to 90 percent of the cost of private school tuition (up to $2,000 a year) to parents in Albany, N.Y. whose children attended Giffen Memorial Elementary School. Gilder's vouchers, known as "A Brighter Choice Scholarships (ABCS)," could be used for a minimum of three years and a maximum of six for each student. The rationale for the program was simple: Giffen had the worst pupil performance scores of any school in the region and had repeatedly reported that over 50 percent of its student body was not reading at state-set "minimum competency levels." In addition, 96 percent of Giffen Elementary's students were on the federal free-lunch program. …

Education's Evil Empire

Abstract: Over the next two years, Congress will reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a $13 billion federal program that encompasses most federal legislation affecting K-12 education. At the heart of ESEA is the infamous Title I program, Aid to the Poor. This $8 billion annual disaster has spent over $100 billion since its inception in 1965. Its catastrophic result: 57 percent of central-city fourth graders in public schools cannot read. Education has historically and rightfully been a state and local responsibility in the United States. Title I reauthorization offers an excellent opportunity to transfer resources and responsibility back to states, and to show how vouchers and other choice models would improve education for poor children compared with current federal aid. Reauthorization also gives federal legislators an extraordinary opportunity to focus national public attention on the failures of inner- city education. Indeed, congressional hearings and surrounding media events could be modeled on Ronald Reagan's ideological offensive against the Kremlin. Reagan pursued successful military, economic, and political strategies against the Kremlin. But perhaps his most important contribution to Cold War victory was his ideological strategy to delegitimate Communism-to make Soviet leaders so embarrassed, so ashamed of themselves, that they were no longer willing to kill to protect their own power. This is why the "Evil Empire" speech was so significant: its biggest impact was on Kremlin leaders who knew in their hearts that Reagan was right. A daily barrage of public diplomacy through Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and other avenues drove the message home. By the mid-1980s top Soviet officials were beginning to make public apologies for the crimes of their regime. In 1987 Reagan asked Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. In 1988 he took his message of freedom to the very bosom of the enemy-under Lenin's statue at Moscow State University. Under Reagan's withering moral pressure, the nomenklatura lost so much confidence in itself that in just a few years it voluntarily gave up power and the wall came tumbling down. The public education establishment today is where the Soviet Union was in 1987. It looks all powerful. It rules by fear and intimidation. But it is ideologically a house of cards that will collapse if conservatives go on a sustained moral offensive and highlight its failure to teach basic skills to poor children. In so doing, we can deny defenders of the education monopoly all moral legitimacy-in their own minds! …

Military Supremacy and How We Keep It

Abstract: IN FEBRUARY 1776, only months before the American Declaration of Independence, British historian Edward Gibbon published the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was almost immediately recognized as an important achievement. Gibbon, like no one before, discerned the sources of Rome's early success and later failures over the course of a history spanning a full millennium. The sixth and final volume appeared in 1788, the year before the U.S. Constitution. Not surprisingly, several of the framers of the Constitution thought they saw lessons in Gibbon's work for the new republic. George Washington was particularly impressed with an insight about Roman military power that Gibbon offered in the first chapter of the first volume: The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors. They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war; and while justice regulated their conduct, they announced to the nations on their confines that they were as little disposed to endure as to offer injury. When he became president, Washington paraphrased Gibbon's lesson in his first annual message to Congress, observing that "to be prepared for war, is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." It was not a lesson that his fellow countrymen or their descendants would learn easily. Over the following two centuries, the nation's vital interests would be endangered repeatedly by lack of military preparedness. But in the second half of the twentieth century - the "American Century," as Henry Luce called it in 1941 - the United States emerged as a global military power without peer. As that century ends, America commands more power and influence than perhaps any nation since the halcyon days of Gibbon's Rome. The sources of American success are not primarily military in nature. But after a century in which democracy was endangered first by imperialism, then by fascism, and finally by communism - a century in which over a hundred million lives were lost to war and civil strife - most Americans can readily grasp the value of possessing global military supremacy. The United States certainly has that today. Its defense budget is bigger than the combined total for the six next-biggest military powers (most of whom are U.S. allies). It is the only nation that can project military power rapidly and decisively anywhere on earth; the only nation with a major military presence in both hemispheres; the only nation exploiting the full military potential of the information revolution; and the only nation that anyone seriously expects to deserve the title "superpower" in the early decades of the next century. If the United States can sustain the economic and cultural sources of its success, America has the potential to preserve its global influence for a long time to come - perhaps for as long as Rome did. But that also depends upon sustaining its current military supremacy. History is strewn with the remains of great civilizations that lost the capacity to protect themselves from external challenges. The hard part for America, as for Rome, seems to be maintaining a sense of purpose when threats recede. Given enough time, Americans are masters of military mobilization and execution. Where they have proved wanting is in preserving their might during periods of peace. Despite an imposing defense budget, there are signs that the U.S. military posture is losing the coherence of its Cold War years. In an international environment posing few direct threats, it is quite possible to imagine a gradual deterioration, born of inattention, continuing past the point at which real damage to the U.S. global position occurs. Now, in short, is the time to think about where and why erosion is occurring and what investments the United States must make in order to preserve global military supremacy during the first half of the next century. Current national strategy BEHIND U. …

The "Neighborhood Effect" of School Choice

Abstract: Most people who leave the central cities for the suburbs cite three main reasons for their move: crime, the quality of life, and the quality of the public schools. Cities have been getting the upper hand on crime in recent years, while redevelopment efforts have made many central city neighborhoods more attractive places to live and work. But it will be necessary to restore all three aspects of city life before central cities can hope to reverse the exodus of middle class families. "Good schools are the lifeblood of our cities," says education researcher Denis Doyle, "save the schools and we save our cities." Young families with children are the demographic group that is fleeing the central cities in the highest numbers. "The people leaving the city are those the city needs most to retain its vitality, namely, working- and middle-class families with children," says Doyle. "Cities that lose families with children are in trouble." Most cities are trying to fix their schools with more of the same ingredients that have already failed-more money and greater centralized control. It is time, Doyle argues, to try school choice as an urban renewal strategy instead. The evidence in favor of such a strategy is growing. A Calvert Institute survey of people who had moved out of Baltimore, for example, found that among families with school-age children, the poor quality of the schools was a primary reason to leave for more than half of them. 82 percent expressed some dissatisfaction with the Baltimore public school system. Perhaps most significant is the finding that of those who cited poor schools as a reason for leaving Baltimore, 51 percent might have stayed in the central city if full school choice were available. Urban scholars David P. Varady and Jeffrey A. Raffel, authors of Selling Cities: Attracting Homebuyers Through Schools and Housing Programs, offer corroborating evidence. Varady and Raffel note that Cincinnati has been more successful than other Ohio cities in stemming the exodus of middle class families because it embraced magnet schools instead of forced-busing to achieve desegregation. But even more significant, Varady and Raffel think, has been the role of Catholic parochial schools. "The Catholic schools are important for the city because they serve as 'neighborhood anchors,'" they write. "The [Catholic] schools serve to promote a high quality of life, particularly for parents who are neighborhood-oriented. St. Catherine School and Nativity School are examples of quality schools that are helping to maintain racially integrated neighborhoods." Some of the early experiences of pilot school choice programs in central city neighborhoods are encouraging. …

The Golden Age of Cooking

Abstract: Cookery is the art of preparing food for the nourishment of the body. Prehistoric man may have lived on uncooked foods, but there are no savage races today who do not practice cookery in some way, however crude. Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery. - Fannie Merritt Farmer, author of The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, 1896 AMERICANS TODAY, from garden-variety couch potatoes to sophisticated trend setters, have never been more obsessed with food, glorious food. At no other time has America enjoyed as many restaurants, touted as many celebrity chefs, published as many cookbooks and magazines devoted to good food and libations, produced as many cooking programs for television, or had such unlimited access to abundant and cheap food products from the world over. We are sowing, marketing, buying, selling, preparing, and, of course, eating food at unprecedented rates. The beau monde brand of cooking that is gracing restaurant menus across the country is called "new American cuisine." Its roots reach back to the earliest days of colonial settlement. It has come of age only recently, starting in the finest restaurants in our biggest cities, then spreading out geographically and socially to take root not just in restaurant kitchens but also in home kitchens around the country. Like our forefathers' and mothers' cookery, new American cuisine is driven by seasonal ingredients purchased from local growers and small distributors. Its purveyors profess a commitment to presenting nature in its purest finery - peppery greens freshly pulled from the soil, fragrant fruits just plucked from the tree, and succulent fish netted in nearby sea or stream. The recipes they create are culled from a vast reservoir of regional and immigrant traditions made possible by the rich American experience. Each dish is meant to please the eye and delight the palate; each also connects us to the past. New American cuisine is our most mature blending of "indigenous ingredients, regional preferences, ethnic influences, and historical currents and traditions" to date, as David Belman wrote in the trade publication Restaurants USA. With the ripening of new American cuisine has come a stunning profusion of restaurants and cookbooks devoted to the exquisite, authentic rendition of cooking from around the world. We do not just have Chinese food. We have Hunan, Szechuan, Cantonese, and more, and before we leave Asia, we can add Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese cuisine, and Pan-Asian noodle houses offering up Indonesian and Malaysian variations. Where "Italian" once meant tomato sauce, we now choose from specialists in the cooking of Piedmont, Tuscany, Liguria, or Sicily. "Pacific Rim" cooks and Mediterranean restaurants span continents to offer samples of the beguiling similarities and intriguing differences on the stovetops where a body of water meets the land. Meanwhile, any local supermarket bursts today with exotica unheard of 20 or 30 years ago. Consider the produce department. The ubiquitous white button mushroom is now just the humblest offering in a mushroom section, which also typically includes portabella, cremini, and shiitake, for starters. Iceberg lettuce must make room for green leaf, red leaf, escarole, endive, radicchio, Boston, and more. Most of those lettuces are now also available prewashed, impeccably fresh, and absurdly convenient, packaged in high-tech plastic bags. Through hybridization, we have discovered entirely new fruits and vegetables: Grocers have recently introduced us to broccoflower, the plumcot, and broccolini. There is no avoiding a simple conclusion: Whatever else may be true of our cultural condition, future gourmands, "foodies," and social historians alike will conclude that by the end of the twentieth century, the golden age of cooking and eating was upon us. On the surface, the American food obsession may seem merely a passing fancy fueled by prosperity. …

The Conservative Case for NATO

Abstract: In April 23, 1999, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Washington Treaty, the heads of state of the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will gather in Washington to celebrate the creation of the Atlantic Alliance. Undoubtedly, these leaders will commend themselves for having built the most successful military alliance in history. They will look back with satisfaction on NATO's central role in the containment and defeat of Soviet imperialism and its crucial contribution to the defense, reformation and ultimate reunification of Germany. They can point to NATO's unique role in keeping the peace between Greece and Turkey over decades, in establishing the Partnership for Peace program, and in the "Open Door" for new democracies. They might also observe that NATO has served to help stave off American flirtations with isolationism and has acted as a magnet that continues to pull emerging democracies toward the West. Finally, there will be justifiable celebration of the accession of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary as NATO allies, a watershed event that can only be regarded as a major step towards the achievement of the West's historic objective of a Europe whole and free. Ironically, however, while the allies will have no difficulty finding past achievements to toast, they will doubtless find themselves discordant on the key question now facing NATO -- the ambitious task of agreeing on a revised "strategic concept" for the alliance. Recently, the NATO members have bickered openly about the future mission of the alliance, and some have even gone so far as to wonder whether NATO deserves to live on. Rarely in world history has such a successful military and political alliance been so lacking in self-confidence and so uncertain about political support among its constituent members. NATO's identity crisis is particularly perplexing for those who are generally optimistic that what has worked in the past will work in the future and are accordingly reluctant to tear down institutions of proven value to make way for new world orders -- that is, for those who take a conservative view of foreign policy. Why this debate? Why now? The historical context The problem of the "New NATO," as every writer on the subject reminds us, began with the disappearance of the Soviet threat in 1989. This wholesale change in the geopolitical landscape fundamentally altered the West's security. In the United States, standing military forces and the defense industrial base were dramatically downsized. U.S. strategic forces were reoriented, and the National Laboratory system, which had been built to sustain the U.S. nuclear deterrent, was cut back and assigned other missions. Multilateral institutions, too, such as the U.N. and the IMF, have become objects of significant criticism. They also have been forced to face reform and overhaul. The construction of a "New NATO" is therefore but one of the many transformations of previously reliable Euro-Atlantic institutions since 1989. Nor is change of this sort without precedent in the context of military strategy. The history of American foreign policy in the inter-war periods of the 20th century offers guidance on how to adapt our alliances to new strategic circumstances. To understand where the alliance is going as it redefines itself, it is useful to look at its historical antecedents. From 1919 to 1939, the United States made decisions to withdraw from "European entanglements," to limit our participation in multi-lateral alliances, and, if not to rely upon, at least to benefit from a vague association of collective security. Americans have tended to draw from the negative experience of the 1930s an appropriate prejudice against isolationism and three general lessons, which should today inform our vision of the future of NATO. First, the withdrawal of the United States from Europe is a geostrategic mistake of the first order. Second, alliances and ad hoc coalitions of the liked-minded and the willing, within the constraints imposed by American exceptionalism, are on balance prudent. …

No Excuses for Failing Our Childen

Abstract: America has been committed to equal opportunity in education ever since the historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954. But our country will never be able to achieve this commitment until we open up choice and competition in our inner-city schools. The majority of children in our inner cities are not learning. Test scores are abysmal, graduation rates are atrocious, and overall performance is so low that many schools have been shut down altogether. Entire school districts have been taken over by state boards of education. This collapse of public education is devastating to urban communities and the people who live there. Families refuse to purchase homes in neighborhoods where schools are failing. The stability of inner-city communities, like that of the suburbs, is determined by their ability to attract strong families. Communities that cannot offer families good schools are condemned to failure and deterioration. What happens to the children is even worse. When children can't read or do even elementary math, they are doomed in a 21st-century economy. We are further marginalizing an entire community that is already socially and economically isolated. We only hurt ourselves when we produce a bumper crop of workers cursed to compete in international markets with unacceptable skills. The current political order is unwilling to rock the boat. Co-conspiring politicians remain wedded to a system of waste and mediocrity because of the fundraising prowess of teachers unions and other interest groups. Inner city politicians, whose children more often than not attend private schools or the best public schools, are protecting a system that discourages reform, chokes choice, and ultimately condemns children to a life of social and economic dysfunction. I am not against public schools. I am against unresponsive and irresponsible public schools where educational mediocrity goes unchallenged. I am against public schools that only expect the least from our children. I am against public schools where improvement is stifled by strict union rules and regulations. I am against public schools that imitate the despair of their surrounding neighborhoods and fail to conquer that despair with the tools of learning and the virtue of hope. There is no excuse for this. Poor children can learn. Set the standards high, and children will meet those standards. I know, because my wife and I run a school where inner-city children do succeed. We have 482 students at Allen Christian School, many of them poor. Their parents are making an enormous sacrifice to send them here. We have hundreds on our waiting list. …

Allen Drury and the Washington Novel

Abstract: WHEN ALLEN DRURY DIED LAS YEAR on his 80th birthday, the thoughts of editors and obituary writers naturally turned to Advise and Consent, the book that made him famous, that gave a memorable last film role to Charles Laughton, and that in many ways invented a genre in fiction. Henry Adams and John Dos Passos had written novels on politics in Washington. But the use of a racy intrigue, if possible involving both sex and foreign policy, is what characterizes the contemporary form. Forty years on, Advise and Consent is the only book of this genre that a literary-minded person really ought to read. Indeed, as Saturday Review noted in August 1959, "It may be a long time before a better one comes along." Forty years so far. The plot of Advise and Consent revolves around a showdown between the president of the United States and the senior senator from South Carolina, the memorable Seabright Cooley. They belong to opposing wings of the same party and disagree on most things, and specifically, in this case, the president's nomination of one Robert A. Leffingwell - slick, popular with the media, devious, liberal (he was played by Henry Fonda) - to be secretary of state. The president of the United States has the right - everyone in this book agrees - to his policies. But the Senate has the duty to protect the higher interests of the nation, in this case its basic security, since the nominee may be a communist and is certainly a liar. The first question is how the senators should use their prerogatives and their oversight responsibilities to block Leffingwell's nomination or so circumscribe him that he will be ineffectual if confirmed in the position. The next question is to what ruthlessly manipulative lengths the president and his allies are willing to go to get their man in. The final question is how much the men of character in the novel will grow from the awful dramas resulting from the confirmation fight - notably the rather bumbling vice-president, who will soon find himself, when the president dies, with the ultimate responsibility of facing down the Soviet Union. Loosely inspired by the Hiss case, the plot of Advise and Consent unfolds against the double background of nasty domestic politics and an ominous international situation. The story, set contemporaneously, was written in 1958 - Drury said he had started it several years before and returned to it - and published in 1959. The date is noteworthy, because it evokes a time when Washington really was a simpler place than it is today ("a sleepy southern town," the saying went). Also, the great political forces set in motion by the New Deal, regarding the power of the federal government in relation to the states, and the power of the executive in relation to the other branches, had not entirely resolved themselves. The immense power of the presidency was a fact, but it was not quite a custom yet. The Senate still had prestige, and Drury loved - and taught millions of readers to love - its grand traditions of oratory and parliamentary politics. These protected the states and the republic against the excesses of the executive's grasp for power. Drury understood perhaps as well as anyone in his time that executive power was corrupting, in the manner Lord Acton said it was. Transcending the immediate issue - whether the president should jeopardize national security by placing an appeaser, and possibly an agent, of the Soviet Union at the helm of American diplomacy when the Soviets (this too dates the story in the late 1950s) seemed to be pulling ahead of the U.S. in the arms race with the successful testing of a moon rocket - the question was whether the president should be able to run foreign policy without waiting for, as the Constitution has it, the Senate to Advise and Consent. This is a question, as the next decades would amply confirm, that transcended ideological or partisan differences, as every president, conservative or liberal, found himself in bitter disputes with the Senate over foreign policy questions. …

Diversity on Trial

Abstract: Three views from Boalt Hall EDITOR'S NOTE: Boalt Hall, universally regarded as one of the top law schools in the nation, is a crucible of this country's dispute over diversity. As a public institution, part of the University of California at Berkeley, Boalt is subject to the provisions of California's Proposition 209, the ballot initiative passed in 1996 that banned preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. The effect of 209 on the Boalt class of 2000 was noteworthy. One black student matriculated that year. Proposition 209 has been much protested, by Boalt students and faculty alike. It is safe to say that a substantial majority of students opposes the post-209 admissions policies. The academic year 1997-98 saw widespread protests at the school. This in turn has led to concerns on the part of some students about another kind of diversity at Boalt - namely, the openness of the campus to diversity of expression and point of view. Some student supporters of 209 felt their views were unwelcome, to put it mildly. In 1998 David Wienir, a student in the class, put out a call for papers from his fellow students asking their views on diversity of expression at Boalt. He formulated the questions as follows: "How healthy is the marketplace of ideas at Boalt? Do you have a fair opportunity to share your ideas in the classroom? Does expression flow freely in an environment of diversity, or does the climate of tolerance at Berkeley paradoxically inhibit true diversity of opinion?" Wienir received more than two dozen responses, which have now been collected into a book, The Diversity Hoax, published by the New York-based Foundation for Academic Standards & Tradition (FAST). In the words of the non-profit's executive director, Marc Berley, FAST's mission is "to empower diverse college and university students nationwide to restore both high academic standards and humanistic study of liberal arts in the Western tradition to their schools." Three of the law students' papers follow. They are reprinted with permission of FAST and the authors. What Ever Happened to J.S. Mill? By NICK-ANTHONY BUFORD LAW SCHOOL IS PERHAPS the greatest invention ever devised for taking individual creativity and free thought and locking it up in a box. Here's the idea of law school: Get a liberal arts undergraduate education. Read Kant. Read Locke. Read Emerson. Read Frost. Read Thoreau. Debate the meaning of life, and liberty, and culture. Travel to far-away places. Study abroad. Immerse yourself in new friendships and experiences. Grow. Drink. Think broadly about the meaning of something you love, and enjoy. Get an education that personally fits you, and your interests. Then stop. And throw it all away, and get a McLaw Degree - one size fits all. One opinion fits all. Or so it seems at Berkeley. You see, at Boalt - or at least to the vocal liberal thought-police of students who think that they must police the law school for signs of intellectual heresy and conservatism - the only thing that the great lawyers do of value is push the envelope of civil liberties law. Contrary thought is not encouraged. Oneness is the rule. Let's consider the lawfulness of homosexuality, for example. Whereas sodomy is a crime in many places, a large number of students at Boalt evidently think that homosexuality is, or should be, constitutionally protected as a part of one's personal privacy. They have a right to think so. But precisely because everyone is clearly entitled to their own opinions and expressing them publicly, the viewpoint of the students at Boalt who have been agitating publicly for homosexual rights can't be considered to be the only viewpoint that should be respected. Gay rights is, after all, an issue over which reasonable people differ, sometimes heatedly. Perhaps homosexuals should be granted special legal protection in a number of areas. …

Lessons Our 401(k)s Taught Us

Abstract: THE NEED TO REFORM the tottering Ponzi scheme that is our Social Security system is widely accepted among policy makers, even if the political willingness to tackle the subject is lacking. Today's system, in which current workers pay the benefits of current retirees, is going to crash in the next century on the demographic rocks of the Baby Boom's retirement. And even if somebody can figure out a way to avoid that problem by tinkering at the margins of the system, the fact would still remain that Social Security is a rotten deal - when they retire, people can look forward to a lousy rate of return on the money they have paid in during a lifetime of work. As for where workers can get a better rate of return, the answer is not, obviously, through the government-run system. The only serious hope is with the private sector, as a host of studies, from The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, other think tanks, congressional committees, and official commissions have concluded. For conservatives, private accounts for individuals, into which people would deposit a portion of the money they currently hand over in payroll taxes, are the best solution. The research persuasively shows that over anyone's working life, regardless of income level, such accounts, properly invested, will make retirees much better off than even the best they can expect from the current system. The difference can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The two key words to remember are "properly invested." The benefits that people can realize are not the same as the results they will realize if they fail to follow sound investment advice on how to structure their accounts, how to allocate assets between stocks, bonds and other instruments, how to maintain a diversified portfolio, etc. In fact, most serious plans for partial Social Security privatization include regulatory safeguards designed to steer people in the right direction. In a Cato plan, for example, a national "Board of Trustees" would oversee investment decisions, and the system would require that Americans "invest in only approved asset classes," keep their investments within "maximum percentage limits on each asset class," and change their "portfolio composition as retirement age nears," among other things. The regulations in the Cato plan are not just a nod to the politically achievable - a concession market-minded reformers must make out of the recognition that a wholly unregulated system is a political non-starter. They are also an acknowledgment that sound investing is not something all Americans will do automatically. In fact, there is a depressingly large and growing body of evidence that given complete freedom to manage their own private Social Security retirement accounts, too many Americans would make poor investment decisions, thereby depriving themselves of some or all of the benefits of privatization. Typically, those who, in the context of Social Security reform, raise concerns about the savviness of Americans as investors are coming from the anti-privatization side of the debate - those who have a political interest in keeping Americans beholden to the government-run scheme, regardless. Their complaints are often no more than a polemical smokescreen for a hidden anti-reform agenda. But it's a mistake to dismiss concerns about investor knowledge altogether - a fact that is implicitly acknowledged by the regulations to govern investment decisions in current reform proposals. The reform debate needs to look at where Americans are in terms of their investment knowledge, as well as the political pressures Americans and their elected representatives may try to exert on a partially privatized Social Security system. The case against sticking with the current failing system will be no weaker for the exercise; in fact, a clear-eyed assessment can only strengthen the case for reform by clarifying what is at stake in private accounts. What investors (don't) know ANY AMERICANS, ALAS, know little about stocks, bonds, and retirement. …

Educating Mary Barrosse

Abstract: In February 1997 a 38-year-old mother of three from East Dorset, Vt., called her state representative with a question. She had heard on the news that Vermont's Supreme Court had declared the local school funding system unconstitutional. Mary Barrosse had two daughters in Dorset Elementary school and another child entering nursery school. Part of the reason she and her husband, a doctor with a family practice, had made their home in East Dorset was because the district invested heavily in its schools. What exactly did the change mean? Mary Barrosse's representative did not give her good news. Vermont's courts had overturned the state's long-standing system of school finance. Under the old system, town property taxes paid directly for something like three-fourths of the cost of local schools. Now, at least for a while, the towns would still collect the money. But they would have to send it to the state government, which would set property tax rates for everyone and then return a flat block grant of $5,000 or so per child to each town for education. The court had said it would no longer be all right for one school district to spend more money on its children than another. That wasn't giving Vermont children an equal opportunity to learn. The court acknowledged that the system of local property taxes paying for local schools was old, but said that it must be ended. It said today's children "cannot be limited by eighteenth century standards." It referred to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark federal case that had taken on school segregation. The court likened the school spending disparities to racial discrimination. Its message was serious: social justice on a grand scale was involved here. The money had to go to the state capital, so that it could be given out fairly. Schools and how we pay for them are two things Americans feel strongly about. Over the course of the past three decades, state courts and governments like Vermont's have moved repeatedly in the name of equity to change how schools are financed. For equity's sake, they have fiddled with the local connection parents have with their schools. And every time they have done so, they have met with incomprehension and even fury from parents. Like Mary Barrosse, they begin to wonder: Why is this happening? Where is the money going? Why didn't someone ask me? Over the months that followed her first telephone call, Vermont's legislature moved to implement the court's ruling, and Mary Barrosse tried to figure out where she stood. She learned that there were many in Vermont's state legislature who agreed with the court as a matter of principle and had pushed the case along. Many of the lawmakers were teachers, or members of teachers' families, or school administrators, who thought Montpelier could do a better job of controlling the money. Others had even campaigned on the theme, arguing the new regime would cut property taxes. Many Democrats generally backed the change, and many Republicans opposed it, but it wasn't entirely a partisan debate: There were Republican supporters of the switch, and Democratic opponents. The state's governor, Howard Dean, was proud of the change, and would later call the new era of statewide funding "a joyous time." It became clear to Barrosse that, now that the Supreme Court had ruled, party line and individual decisions didn't matter much. Even those lawmakers who opposed the change had little choice now but to join in undertaking a sort of Robin Hood action to help poorer Vermont towns. It soon became clear that some of the school money from wealthier towns would go to subsidize schools in towns with lower tax bases. The budgets of the schools in the wealthier towns would probably have to be cut. At home, Barrosse found herself contemplating what might be cut at Dorset Elementary. Her area spent several thousand dollars per child over the $5,100 cap the state was imposing. She put down the phone and worried. …

NATO after Kosovo

Abstract: Toward "Europe Whole and Free" WHEN NATO's FOUNDING FATHERS convened in Washington to create the Alliance in 1949, their primary concern was protecting Western Europe from the Red Army -- not smothering ethnic quarrels in the Balkans. Lord Ismay, NATO's first secretary general, famously and bluntly described the organization's mission as "keeping the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." For two generations, the Alliance succeeded in this three-pronged mission. But NATO did more than block Moscow's march across Europe, maintain a transatlantic bridge, and rehabilitate Germany. Remarkably, old enemies became allies under NATO's umbrella; and Western Europe, the main battleground for two world wars, became a zone of peace and stability. Today, NATO is attempting to expand that zone into Eastern Europe. NATO's Washington Summit in April 1999 served to underscore the organization's newfound concern for the East. Alliance leaders used the occasion to unveil a new Strategic Concept -- a kind of twenty-first century mission statement that views Europe as a whole, taking into account the dangers posed to the West by instability and ethnic conflict in the East. The Strategic Concept serves to clarify NATO's expanding role in the so-called "Euro-Atlantic area," which includes not only NATO nations, but the Balkans, former members of the Warsaw Pact, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and even Russia. Bound by the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Seas, this once-forgotten half of Europe is where NATO will put its new mission statement into practice, and, in its own words, make "full use of every opportunity to build an undivided continent by promoting and fostering the vision of a Europe whole and free." Kosovo afforded the Alliance such an opportunity, and NATO seized it. The resulting 11-week war revealed that 50 years after Lord Ismay, NATO's mission may now be described as keeping an eye on the Russians, keeping Eastern Europe stable, and keeping the Allies on the same page. A chill from the East EVEN AS NATO pursues the idyllic goal of an undivided continent, Alliance leaders have retained enough clear-eyed realism to remind would-be foes -- and each other -- that "NATO's essential and enduring purpose is to safeguard the freedom and security" of member states, in the words of the April 1999 Strategic Concept. That traditional mission of the Alliance -- which many Western leaders had deemed a relic of the Cold War -- returned to the fore in Kosovo, where the deep differences between Russia and NATO were finally exposed. Remarkably, some blame NATO for the new Cold War chill in Europe. Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin condemned NATO as the cause of "serious deterioration in Russia-U.S. contacts." Members of Congress and American journalists blamed NATO's Kosovo policy for scuttling any hopes of long-term cooperation with Moscow. Indeed, Rep. Curt Weldon, who heads a congressional delegation that meets regularly with members of the Russian Duma, concluded that, "our actions in Kosovo may be creating an environment that will clear the way for a resurgence of hard-line extremism in Russia. We are now in a situation where the Russian people may elect a Communist President and Duma, erasing all of the advances that we have made since the end of the Cold War." Weldon's fears may be akin to lamenting the onset of winter after an extended and mild autumn. The reality is that NATO's disagreements with Moscow have been papered over for almost a decade. Contrary to Chernomyrdin, and many in Congress, the Kosovo war did not trigger East-West tensions; it merely uncovered a number of serious differences of view and provided a stark indication that Russia is years away from playing a constructive role in Europe. Chernomyrdin himself conceded that in Kosovo, "NATO's goals run counter to Russia's" -- a telling assessment that could apply to scores of other European security issues, from human rights and ethnic violence to weapons sales and arms reduction. …

A Choice for the Chosen.

Abstract: How school choice can renew Jewish community School vouchers will give more parents the resources and the choice to send their children to private schools. In these circumstances, more Jewish parents would be enabled to send their children to Jewish day schools. More Jewish children would then have the chance to obtain a grounding in Hebrew language, in Jewish history and ritual, and in the Bible, the Talmud, and other central texts. And this, in turn, would strengthen Jewish community. So Jews ought to support vouchers-or tuition tax credits or other programs that would expand school choice. Yet the most prominent Jewish advocacy organizations are opposed to school choice programs. Organizations like the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith do not oppose Jewish education or separate Jewish schools. But they have been firmly opposed to government programs to support education in religious schools-even when the support goes to parents who then can choose what schools are best for their children. There seem to be two main grounds of opposition. On the one hand, there is skepticism that many more Jewish parents would send their children to separate Jewish schools, even if some form of public funding made them more affordable. On the other hand, there is concern that government aid to-or "entanglement" with-religious schools would foster a more religious atmosphere in the country, which would be, in practice, a Christian atmosphere, hence marginalizing to non-Christian groups. Many Jewish organizations are staunch advocates of public education, seeing it as a guarantor of a common public culture, which ensures toleration for religious minorities. These assumptions and concerns are, I believe, misplaced in contemporary America. But they still need to be confronted. It may be useful, however, to start with some common ground-on why the encouragement of Jewish schooling would be a good thing for the Jewish community on its own terms. Benefits of Separate Schooling In the two thousand years since Jews have lived in exile from the Land of Israel, Jewish communities have always organized separate schools for their children to teach the essentials of Jewish religious practice. Yet in America, Jews have been welcomed with full citizenship rights and a fully equal status to a degree unmatched perhaps by any host country in the long history of the Jewish Diaspora. And for perhaps the first time, too, the Jewish community in America trustingly sent its children off to public schools, where they received the same instruction as children of other faiths. Most Jewish children in America receive almost no separate instruction in Jewish religious practice. Most of those who do receive such instruction do so after school or in Sunday school classes, where time is short and distractions are many. In consequence, most American Jews now observe the ritual law quite imperfectly or not at all. In synagogue worship, the traditional prayers and the readings from the Torah are in Hebrew, a language which most American Jews, again, know only imperfectly or not at all. Jews who have received no serious prior instruction are likely to find the synagogue service bewildering. Certainly, the uninitiated find it hard to take part and must remain, at best, spectators of a staged ceremony and not full participants in communal worship. Surveys in the early 1990s found that the majority of Jews who married in the previous decade married non-Jews and that conversions of non-Jewish partners were declining. As one might expect, opinion polls report that the children of intermarriages regard religion as a matter of private belief or inner feeling-and not something that requires formal ritual or demonstrative affiliation. Parents who do not establish a Jewish home cannot expect their children to behave differently when they grow up. The demographic trends are so disturbing that even the traditionally liberal Jewish advocacy organizations have recently begun demanding programs to preserve "Jewish continuity. …

A Model of Cultural Leadership

Abstract: The achievements of Privately Funded Vouchers These visionaries are among the great conservative heroes of our time: J. Patrick Rooney. James R. Leininger. Michael S. Joyce. John T. Walton. Theodore J. Forstmann. The privately-funded voucher movement they have built is a model of strategic philanthropy. It is also one of this decade's most dramatic examples of effective political and cultural leadership. The architects of the private voucher movement realize something that all too many conservatives have inexplicably forgotten in the 1990s: America is a free country. You do not have to wait for the politicians to advance a conservative reform agenda. You can take leadership into your own hands. You can create the institutions that will reshape the political and cultural landscape: the politicians will respond. The privately-funded voucher movement is building a powerful constituency for school choice-black and Hispanic parents. Despite ferocious criticism of vouchers by the NAACP and most black political leaders, 65 percent of blacks between the ages of 26 and 35 support the use of taxpayer funds to send children to private and religious schools, according to a 1998 poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Privately-funded vouchers have played a key role building this support. Privately-funded voucher programs are focusing public attention on the merits of Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Muslim, Jewish, and other religious schools that, despite shoestring budgets, are giving superior education to poor children in the same neighborhoods as their local dead-end public schools. A decade ago, it was considered politically unthinkable to push for publicly funded vouchers that could be used at religious schools. Today, both Wisconsin and Ohio have enacted such programs, financing vouchers averaging $4,900 for up to 15,000 low-income children in Milwaukee, and $2,250 for up to 4,000 children in Cleveland. The privately-funded voucher movement is also beginning to change the mindset of parents, showing how they can take responsibility for their children's education. An important feature of most private voucher programs is that they pay only partial tuition, usually half. Parents have to pay the rest, either in cash, or, if the school agrees, in volunteer services. This may sound harsh for families whose average income is $18,000. But this "hand up, not a handout" strategy, as Patrick Rooney has described it, makes a tremendous difference in opening educational opportunity. When parents have to scrimp and save to pay tuition, they think of education as an investment. They take charge. They pay attention to whether they are getting their money's worth, to what school will be best for their children. And children take school more seriously when they know their parents are sacrificing for the sake of their future. J. Patrick Rooney Rooney was the pioneer in privately-funded vouchers. The chairman of the Golden Rule Insurance Co. set the tone for most of the movement when he established the Educational Choice Charitable Trust in 1991 in Indianapolis. Altogether the Golden Rule program has spent $5.7 million on vouchers for K-8 schools; today it offers half-tuition scholarships to over 1,700 Indianapolis children, awarded by lottery, with another 4,200 on the waiting list. Rooney limited participation to lower-income families, and for administrative simplicity, to children eligible for free or reduced-price lunches as part of the federal school lunch program. This model, which has been followed by almost all other private programs, has been significant for two reasons. Critics have sometimes accused vouchers of being a subsidy for upper-income and middle-class families who could already afford private schools. The private voucher movement turned this argument upside-down by focusing voucher resources on poor children in inner cities. Private programs also called public attention to the children who could benefit most immediately from vouchers. …

Paying the Piper

Abstract: Will vouchers undermine the mission of religious schools? By most accounts, last year was a banner year for school choice. In June, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that a state-funded voucher program does not violate the separation of church and state. The initiative, the largest in the nation, allows poor children in Milwaukee to attend the public or private school of their choice, even religious schools. In September, 6,300 Milwaukee students used vouchers averaging $4,900 to enter private and parochial classrooms. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court, by an 8 to 1 vote, let the Wisconsin court ruling stand, buoying similar efforts in at least seven other states. The Wisconsin initiative seems a textbook example of how to beat the education establishment into retreat. "We think the Milwaukee experiment is a good one," says Michael Guerra, an executive director at the National Catholic Educational Association, the nation's largest association of religious educators. "It is a model for the country." For many religious educators, however, the victory in Wisconsin is not so much a model as it is an omen-a case study in how choice programs could become a Trojan horse for government meddling in private education. Even before the voucher program became law, opponents tried to saddle religious schools with a hodge-podge of federal and state regulations. That effort has failed-so far-but not without winning important concessions: All participating schools must loosen up their admission policies and allow voucher students to opt out of religious activities. The result is a growing uncertainty about the longterm impact of government vouchers on sectarian schools. Nearly all of Milwaukee's Catholic schools are accepting children in the program. "There is no question that we will be able to maintain our independence and our mission," says Brother Bob Smith, principal of Messmer High School, one of the city's oldest Catholic schools. But the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the second largest provider of religious education, is mostly taking a pass. Says John Wesenberg, principal of Garden Homes Lutheran School: "We feel it would compromise our mission as a Christian school." Private education leaders nationally are also voicing concerns. Asked whether most of the 1,160 members in the American Association of Christian Schools would endorse voucher programs, Washington lobbyist Martin Hoyt grows pensive: "It depends on how the law is written." David Zwiebel, general counsel for Agudath Israel of America, says most Jewish schools "would not be happy" with an opt-out provision. A 1998 Department of Education survey of private schools confirms that view. Drawing from 22 urban areas nationwide, the study found that few sectarian schools would join voucher programs that allowed exemptions from religious instruction or activities. What does this mean for school choice? About 90 percent of the nation's 26,000 private schools claim a religious identity; many are parochial, i.e., they're run by churches, parishes, synagogues, or mosques. If voucher programs expose these classrooms to new layers of government oversight, the choice movement could be dead on arrival. It was, after all, a federal attempt to regulate private schools in the 1970s-not the abortion issue-that first activated the religious right. "The beauty of vouchers is that they could disconnect education from government by breaking up the public school monopoly," says Bruce Cooper, an education specialist at Fordham University. "But if it goes badly, religious schools could become part of the government sector and lose their autonomy and their authority." Campaign to Intimidate The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is the one to watch. As space becomes available, it will allow up to 15,000 children-about 15 percent of total student enrollment-to leave public schools. …