Schools where the client comes first

The Economist has an interesting profile today on Sunny Varkey ("a fabulously wealthy Dubai-based entrepreneur") and his firm Global Education Management Systems (GEMS). According to the article,

Global Education Management Systems (GEMS), already runs a bunch of schools in the United Arab Emirates, which educate more than 40,000 children. Within five years, he wants GEMS to be running 200 schools in Britain plus a few elsewhere, including in Washington, DC, where he has recently acquired a 30-acre site.

I dig The Economist, but one reason I no longer subscribe is that their understanding and application of economics often breaks down when they deal with education. Though they rightly extoll the virtues of competition and parental choice, they ignore two other crucial features of both education markets and effective markets more generally: the profit motive and direct payment by the consumer.

The article notes that most existing private schools are complacent, in that they tend to expand their waiting lists instead of their enrollments over time. What it fails to explain is that this complacency can be directly tied to the lack of the profit motive. While even the most popular and respected non-profit private schools enroll few more pupils today than they did fifty or a hundred years ago. Popular for profit schools, by contrast, grow dramatically. In just thirty-odd years, the Brasilian for-profit school chain Objetivo has grown to enroll 500,000 students.

The article concludes by saying

If a private company can provide an excellent education for the same cost at which the government provides a bad one, it undermines a huge assumption about education all over the world: that public financial support must mean public provision.

That strengthens the argument for the state to distribute education vouchers that parents can use to pay school fees. Parents in Sweden and the Netherlands already benefit from such systems, and they are spreading in America, where six states have some form of voucher. In January, Congress voted through a revolutionary new federally financed voucher scheme for Washington, DC's wretched schools. Mr Varkey's expansion to America could dwarf his impact on Britain.

The problem is, eliminating the direct payment of tuition, as universal full voucher programs do, does not leave you with a functional market, but rather with a single-payer government funded pseudo-market. Around the world, these systems suffer a variety of problems and tend to perform less effectively than parent funded education markets. For a school choice program to actually deliver on the promise of market education, it will need to ensure the presence of for-profit schools and co-payments by families (tied to parents' ability to pay).

Lawmakers More Often Choose Private Schools

A survey conducted by the Dallas Morning News (free subscription required) reveals today that Texas state lawmakers are nearly 6 times as likely to patronize private schools as their fellow Texans (34% versus 6% have a child in private schools).

Kinda gives the impression that the more you know about the workings of government, the less you want government running your child's school. It also highlights the fact that America already has school choice, but it is restricted to the wealthier folks like congress people and senators. If you've got money, you can opt for private schooling or move to a district whose public schools you find acceptable.

Yet another indication of how the institution of public schooling falls far short of the ideals of public education. Government is just a tool folks, and for some jobs it just happens to be the wrong tool.

China, The Anti-America (part deux)

Twenty-one of your Earth "days" ago, I blogged about how the Chinese dictatorship had graciously unburdened the people of Hong Kong of their right to political self-determination. Well, Earthlings, they're at it again.

In their last foray into belligerent foreign policy, they told Hong Kongers that the Chinese government could veto any political reforms they might care to implement. Now, they've indefinitely forbidden Hong Kong from electing its own political leaders.

So, again, I ask you: is China not the Anti-America? As the United States leads the international effort to help establish democracy in Iraq, China leads the effort to squelch it in Hong Kong, and cower it in Taiwan.

And, again, I ask: where is the international outcry? Apart from some angry reporters at Reuters, of all places, and the angry people of Hong Kong itself, the silence is deafening.

Makes me sick.

Both Pro-Choice and Anti-Choice?

Up to a million Americans participated in the March for Women's Lives on Sunday, a demonstration touting a variety of causes, most notably the right to abortion. Here's what some of the demonstrators had to say:

"It's important to march to voice that abortion is our choice, not the government's," said Melissa Murphy, junior in LAS and member of the Feminist Majority. "I think it's good to know that you have an option, that you do have a choice."

According to another article:

"I'm marching because I'm showing my people we do have a choice, said Melinda Garcia, a 26-year-old mother from Massachusetts who said her main reasons for attending the march were political. "If you let Bush win, he's going to take all choices away," she said. "He won't stop."

What I'm wondering is this: are all these pro-choice demonstrators (with whom I agree, incidentally) also pro-choice when it comes to education, or do they think mothers and fathers should go gently into the good night of government monopolies when it comes to their children's schooling? Do they think women should have the choice of whether or not to abort their pregnancies, but not have the choice about when, where, and how to educate the children they do choose to bear?

First Rate Thinking from the Third World

An Op-Ed in today's issue of the Daily Times of Pakistan evinces more good sense on education policy than is to be found in most U.S. newspapers. More shocking still, its author, Abbas Rashid, is himself a journalist and editor. Dig some of what this chap has to say:

Given the mess that the government has made of its own school system, it is highly unlikely that expanding its scope of supervision to include private-sector institutions will yield positive outcomes in the absence of institutional reform and a change in approach....

One of the key concerns expressed in relation to private-sector schools is that they charge high fees and offer education of a poor standard. This stands in contrast to the situation in public-sector schools that charge a low fee, or no fee, and offer education of an even poorer standard. There are, of course, exceptions in both cases. There is little doubt that that [sic] the private-sector schools became the synonym for quality in Pakistan when the public sector began to falter. In 1972, the government decided to take over almost all the privately managed educational institutions including 18, 926 schools. Whatever else this may have accomplished, it did not help in the task of imparting education of a minimum standard in the face of growing social demand for education.

Equity certainly should be a priority concern. But, a matter of equal concern is that of maintaining minimum standards. Schools offering free education, for instance, are of not much use when they are virtually ‘education-free.'...

Rashid also has a few things to say that are contradicted by the historical and international evidence, but the simple fact that he recognizes many of the limitations of government involvement in schooling sets him apart from most of his colleagues in the United States.

Sadly, we in the "First World" too often have third rate media coverage of education policy.

Oh, and as for Rashid's comment about private schools charging high fees, he might be surprised to learn that families in the city of Lahore who earn a dollar per person per day or less are about as likely to send their children to private as to public schools. A sliding scale of need-based subsides would go a long way to allowing all parents to participate in the educational marketplace. An that is a far easier goal to achieve than the improvement of government monopoly schooling.

Adopt Market Education... or Else

Tom Friedman has an interesting Op-Ed in the NYTimes today, lamenting the fact that the U.S. is falling behind its international competitors educationally, and has no plan to deal with it. He writes:

[T]he percentage of Americans graduating with bachelor's degrees in science and engineering is less than half of the comparable percentage in China and Japan.... Anyone who thinks that all the Indian and Chinese techies are doing is answering call-center phones or solving tech problems for Dell customers is sadly mistaken. U.S. firms are moving serious research and development to India and China.

The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I've been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance....

Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, noted that Intel sponsors an international science competition every year. This year it attracted some 50,000 American high school kids. "I was in China 10 days ago," Mr. Barrett said, "and I asked them how many kids in China participated in the local science fairs that feed into the national fair [and ultimately the Intel finals]. They told me six million kids."

For now, the U.S. still excels at teaching science and engineering at the graduate level, and also in university research. But as the Chinese get more feeder stock coming up through their high schools and colleges, "they will get to the same level as us after a decade," Mr. Barrett said. "We are not graduating the volume, we do not have a lock on the infrastructure, we do not have a lock on the new ideas, and we are either flat-lining, or in real dollars cutting back, our investments in physical science."

What Friedman is either unaware of or underestimates is the increasing reliance that developing countries are placing on competitive non-government schooling. The total number of private schools in China doubled between 1996 and 2000, and the official government view (as reflected in state-run media) is that "government-run schools can't meet the needs of the public due to the large population of China." By every indication, private sector enrollment growth will continue to dramatically outpace that of the public sector in China for the foreseeable future.

India is even further along the market education road. In cities like Lucknow, the state capital of Uttar Pradesh, roughly 80% of students are estimated to attend private fee-charging schools even though both public schools and government-funded private schools are also available. Uttar Pradesh is on the vanguard of private school consumption in India, but even in rural areas much of the country makes heavy use of fee-charging private schools because the public schools are so bad. So long as the government schools remain corrupt enough and unresponsive enough, Indians will continue to consume private schooling in increasing numbers, and continue to enjoy ever-improving quality as a result. For the time being, most Indians can only afford very low tuitions and hence limited amounts/quality of private education. As their standard of living improves, however, their ability to consume higher quality schooling will also.

So here's our choice: we can stick with our grossly inefficient and generally poor public school system, or reintroduce market education and start ourselves on the path of educational improvement too. What'll it be?

You do the math ('cause your kids can't)

Here's a surprise: Stop teaching kids how to do basic arithmetic by hand, and they get worse at it. Let them use calculators for arithmetic from a young age and they get better at using calculators--but can't actually multiply or divide.

That's precisely what we did in the United States from 1990 onward. During the "back to basics" movement of the 1980s, students' performance in paper and pencil arithmetic improved. When schools increasingly started pushing the use of calculators for basic arithmetic in the '90s, things changed. Earlier improvements in students' ability to do arithmetic by hand stoped and then reversed direction.

As of 1999, American students are reasonably proficient at doing arithmetic on a calculator--which is to say they can type in the numbers and symbols they read on a test sheet, and then hit the [=] key. Not an especially profound display of mathematical prowess. When students are actually forced to think through arithmetic problems by hand, they most often fail miserably.

These are the conclusions reached by Brookings Institution researcher Tom Loveless in a newly released paper. Here's how Tom puts it:

Given an identical set of computation items, how do nine year olds perform when they are allowed to use a calculator compared to when a calculator is not allowed? Calculators change everything. For a large number of nine year olds, when calculators are available on computation items, they get correct answers. When calculators are not available, they get wrong answers. The smallest calculator advantage is on addition items, a skill nearing mastery. Students score 78.4% using only pencil and paper and 87.0% with calculators. The calculator advantage in other areas is huge. In subtraction, students scored 89.2% with calculators available and 59.7% without calculators. In multiplication, students scored 87.9 % with calculators and 42.5% without them. On division items, the scores were 77.1% with calculators, 48.3% without.

The conclusion is clear: allowing fourth graders to use calculators on items that are intended to assess computation skills will produce misleading results—misleading, that is, if one assumes that knowing how to compute means being able to make calculations without technological assistance. The fear of critics that calculators might serve as a crutch also appear well founded. Believing that a nine year old can compute when he or she cannot do so without a calculator is tantamount to believing that a nine year old can ride a bike when he or she cannot do so without training wheels.

Now aren't you glad we have state education monopolies under which 90 percent of students are subjected to the latest pedagogical fads? What's next, teaching kids to read by making them eat alphabet soup?

France withholds anti-terror cooperation

Washington Times reporter Kenneth R. Timmerman claims today that a key French counter-terrorism prosecutor has an extensive brief on September 11th suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, but has been ordered not to share it with U.S. investigators by the government of President Jacques Chirac (hat tip: Rantburg).

When I went to see him in Paris shortly after September 11, 2001, Judge Bruguiere was grinning from ear to ear. "You've heard about Moussaoui?" he said, meaning Moussaoui's arrest. Judge Bruguiere had a file on him that he couldn't wait to transmit to the U.S. prosecutors. One hint: He wasn't the 20th hijacker but was preparing a follow-on wave of attacks.

In the end, Judge Bruguiere was never able to transmit his file to the U.S. prosecutors in a form they could use to prosecute Moussaoui. The Moussaoui case — lacking that hard information — remains blocked to this day.

The French government of President Jacques Chirac, stepped in and ordered Judge Bruguiere to break off formal cooperation with the United States. Our one-time ally in the war on terror was about to demonstrate it had new priorities that would play themselves out dramatically during the Iraq crisis a year later.

U.N. F--king Believable!

What has the U.N. done for us lately? Well, let's see (hat tip: Deus Ex Macrame):

Cuban delegate to human rights commission sucker punches an American delegate from behind, knocking him unconscious.

The United States is accusing Cuba of "outrageous" behavior at the U.N. Human Rights Commission, where a Cuban delegate at the conference site in Geneva punched a representative of a U.S. group opposed to the Fidel Castro government. The U.N. panel narrowly approved a resolution Thursday condemning Cuba for its crackdown on dissent....

The representative of the U.S. group, Frank Calzon of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba, was reported to have been briefly knocked unconscious by a blow delivered from behind by the Cuban representative.

Dictatorships vote to give Chinese government a pass on human rights abuses.

China is praising the United Nations Commission on Human Rights' decision to block a U.S. motion to condemn Beijing's human rights record....

Washington says it is concerned about what it says are Beijing's continued restrictions on freedom of association, expression, and religion.

China submitted a measure to block any action on the motion and won. 28 of the nations on the 53-member commission voted for it and nullified the motion....

International human rights advocates say the failure of this and past motions is due to politics - not because Beijing has substantially improved its record.

Nicolas Becquelin of the Human Rights in China group says the decision shows the balance of power on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

“You have a lot of authoritarian countries who are members of the U.N. and of the commission. These states share with China the opposition to the scrutiny of their human rights situations, so they would vote with China to defeat resolutions attacking them,” Mr. Becquelin said.

U.N. asserts Islam falsely associated with terrorism and human rights violations.

[The U.N. Human Rights Commission] expressed deep concern that Islam was frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism; noted with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions, and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001; and expressed deep concern at programmes and agendas pursued by extremist organizations and groups aimed at the defamation of religions, in particular when supported by Governments. ...

"In favour (29): Argentina, Bahrain, Bhutan, Brazil, Burkina Faso, China, Congo, Costa Rica, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Honduras, Indonesia, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Togo, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

"Against (16): Australia, Austria, Croatia, Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States.

U.N. Police Officer Shoots, Kills two Female American U.N. Colleagues, Ten Others Wounded.

LJUBJLANA, Slovenia -- Two American women working as prison guards with the United Nations in Kosovo were killed Saturday and 10 other Americans and an Austrian working as prison officers were wounded when a Jordanian, also with the United Nations, opened fire on them, officials said. The attacker was shot and killed.

Could someone please explain to me why we should not kick this wretched, corrupt, rotting institution off of U.S. soil, reclaim the U.N. buildings in NYC for some useful purpose, and allow the U.N. to set up shop in a country whose values are more conducive to its current mission (e.g. Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China, etc.)?

A.J.C. has "potatoe" on its face

Current headline at the Atlanta Journal Constitution: NRA ranks cheer Chaney: VP attacks Kerry's gun rights record.

"Hey, who's this Chaney guy?" you ask. Is the National Rifle Association celebrating Lon Chaney's performances in Phantom of the Opera, or The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Plausible, certainly, but no. As it happens, the NRA was lauding a presentation by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, whose name the A.J.C. managed to get right in the body of its article, but to misspell in the headline.

Now there's a copyeditor who's gonna have himself torn a new one later this morning.

Iraqi Education Ministry Takes Charge of Schools

The Coalition Provisional Authority has officially handed control over Iraq's schools to the country's own Ministry of Education [free registration required]. No word when, if ever, control will be returned to families.

Saddam, like virtually every totalitarian dictator in history, nationalized or shut down all private schools upon seizing power. The reason why is obvious: it's a lot easier to whip up support for your own regime and antipathy toward your enemies if you control the schools. Centralized government control over schooling is thus key.

An equally obvious historical pattern is that official government school systems have been a consistent source of social conflict. This is true even in the most stable and internally peaceful democracies, such as the United States, where controversies such as the teaching of the origin of humanity are recurring sources of conflict. A little over a hundred years ago things were hotter still. When Catholic families in Philadelphia successfully pressured the schools to use their own version of the Bible instead of the Protestant version (public schools were originally pervasively religious) it sparked the infamous "Bible riots" in which many people were killed and St. Augustine's church was burned to the ground.

Iraq's internal religious divisions provide ample prospect for conflict if the nation sticks with an official government school system. Iraqis already realize that settling on a universally acceptable curriculum is a key sticking point.

The solution: implement a market-based education system with need-based financial assistance, and let families pursue the kind of education they value for their children without obliging them to force their choices on their fellow citizens.

Specialization and the Division of Labor, Baby

When people stop trying to satisfy all their personal needs themselves, and specialize in particular tasks, and when they trade with one another to take advantage of each others' specialties, everyone's standard of living generally improves. That's the theory laid out eloquently in the first few chapters of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

A great practical example of that theory is this splitting axe made by the Finnish company Fiskars. Damn this is a fine piece of workmanship. Much lighter than a typical splitting maul, but totally kicks butt over same. You can split more wood faster with this thing than Paul Bunyan hopped up on crack.

So you go you crazy Fiskars Finns, and you keep those axes coming. And if you ever want to talk about education reform, drop me an e-mail.

Can corruption be regulated away?

In the wake of two recent scandals in the Milwaukee voucher program (one voucher school's principal turned out to be a convicted rapist, while another school allegedly stole $330,000 in taxpayers' money), the media and school choice critics have been quick to call for much stricter regulation to prevent a repeat of these problems. Is their proposed solution likely to work?

To answer that question we might want to look at the most highly regulated schools in the U.S.: the traditional public school system. If these schools suffer about the same level of abuses as voucher schools or other private schools, then we'll have to question the effectiveness of regulation as tool for reducing such ills.

So, without further ado, here are some recent headlines I dug up in the past few minutes:

Woman pleads no contest to embezzling from school

A former Grand Haven area public schools employee pleaded no contest Tuesday to charges she embezzled more than $70,000 from the district.

$250,000 embezzlement hushed-up by school district officials

Item: About $250,000 was stolen from the 2001-02 budget of the Roslyn School District - and no one went to jail for it because school officials handled the matter privately.

They chose not to notify the police or the Nassau County district attorney.... [T]he seven-member Roslyn school board let the whole matter sink below the surface of public accountability because - as District Superintendent Frank Tassone told a reporter for the high school student newspaper last month - "I think the reputation of the school district was at stake."

School band leader admits to forging canceled checks

Two former Elizabeth School District administrators were convicted Monday on 27 charges stemming from allegations they embezzled from the district.

Former Oakland ISD superintendent arraigned on felony charges

Bowie Unified School District business manager allegedly embezzles more than $32,000

Former D'Iberville school employee accused of embezzlement

Convicted school superintendent will leave district in June

Maybe regulation isn't a particularly effective solution to school corruption after all. Hmm?

Flushing Children's Futures

On average, private school students outperform public school students academically. The trouble is, you can't simply generalize from this that state-run monopoly schooling is deficient. Many non-school factors (student intelligence, mother's level of education, number of books in the home, etc.) have an effect on achievement, making it hard to apportion credit and blame to the school system itself.

That is absolutely not the case when it comes to facilities maintenance. Wet wood rots at the same rate in independent schools as in public ones. Bathrooms that are not properly cleaned and maintained become wretched no matter who owns them. As a result, the relative abilities of the public and private sectors to keep their buildings functional and sanitary provides an especially fair and direct basis for comparing their merits. In that comparison, our government-run education monopolies fail miserably.

Just yesterday, the New York Daily News ran a story on the decrepit and disgusting state of bathrooms in the city's public schools. Clogged toilets, obscene graffiti, missing stall doors, a lack of toilet paper and paper towels, etc.

At recent City Hall breakfasts for school parent leaders, foul bathrooms consistently ranked among the top concerns, right up there with crime and curriculum.

"It's utterly unacceptable to send kids to schools that don't have working toilets," said Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz (D-Manhattan) chairwoman of the Council's Education Committee.

Conditions were so bad at Brooklyn's Lincoln High School this year that students used to walk to nearby Coney Island Hospital to use the bathrooms.

Though statistics on the physical condition of U.S. private school facilities are unavailable, the stats for public schools are utterly damning. We have 17,200 public schools with defective or inadequate electrical systems, 19,500 with plumbing problems, and 22,700 with inadequate or malfunctioning heating, ventilation or air-conditioning systems. In all, 39,500 U.S. public schools have at least one (but usually more than one) major building feature in less than adequate condition. That is one half of all the public schools in America. This is despite the fact that we now spend roughly $10,000 per pupil annually--a 50% increase in real, inflation-adjusted spending over the past two decades.

What's more, international data are available comparing government and independent school facilities, and they consistently favor the independent schools. That is despite the fact that the independent schools in question spend less per-pupil.

Building maintenance is clearly easier than teaching effectively, so if government schools can mess it up as badly as they do, should we be surprised if they also perform poorly at the more difficult task of educating children?

Government monopoly schooling is a failed system. The only thing it can consistently flush is the future of our children.

Fallujah Insurgent Endorses Kerry

In an interview with a United Press International reporter, a young Sunni fighting in Fallujah stated that he was trying to kill American troops because "We don't want the American's freedom, we don't want democracy. We prefer a dictator. Now we know what we lost when Saddam was gone."

The fighter, who called himself Ahmed, went on to describe the conditions under which he and his accomplices would lay down their arms:

"God willing Bush will fall down by the hands of Fallujah.... If John Kerry wins the election and withdraws the Americans troops from Iraq, and maybe just leaves a few in bases, then we will not fight. But Bush we will always fight."

Another shaky election in Asia

Taiwan suffered riots this weekend, as protests by the recently defeated political opposition erupted into violence. Unfortunately, it looks like Indonesia is headed for political instability as well.

Calls for Indonesia poll recount

John Aglionby in Jakarta
Monday April 12, 2004
The Guardian

Political instability is looming in Indonesia after at least 19 of the 24 parties who competed in last week's general election said they wanted a nationwide recount and possibly a fresh election, citing alleged fraud in the counting process.

But as the returns continued to trickle in, election monitors cautioned against rejecting the results before the count has been completed.

The election commission is not due to announce the results for two weeks. These will determine which parties can nominate candidates for the July presidential election.

President Megawati Sukarnoputri's party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, looks likely to lose 40% of its support.

Ms Megawati's party stood at 20.36% while Golkar, the party of the former dictator General Suharto was at 20.40%. Contrary to expectation, swing voters did not move to Golkar - which is likely to end up with the most seats in the new parliament - but mostly to two new reformist parties.

These are the Democratic party, led by Ms Megawati's former chief security minister, and the Prosperous Justice party [an islamic party].

Canadian MP: some Jews shouldn't be fire-bombed

A Jewish school in my home town of Montreal, Canada, was fire-bombed early Monday morning. Much public outrage has been eloquently expressed by leading politicians but one MP (Minister of Parliament) had a unique and disturbing spin on the attack:

Liberal Stéphane Dion, the MP for the district, showed up at the school early in the morning. He said he found it unfortunate that Canadian Jews were being targeted because of the actions of the Israeli government, because Jews are not unanimously in support of the Sharon government's actions.

"Why link all Canadian Jews with the policy of a government? It's so absurd," he said in an interview.

Hmm. Sounds to me like Dion is complaining that it's unfair that terrorists and sociopaths are not restricting themselves to attacking Jews supportive of Israeli policy, which, by implication, he seems to think would be just fine. What!?!

Newsflash to the "Honorable" minister: It's not okay to fire-bomb anybody, Jewish or otherwise, because of their views on a foreign country's defense policy.

France Doubly Accused on Rwandan Genocide

During a 10th anniversary commemoration of the Rwandan genocide on Wednesday, Rwandan president Paul Kagame

pointed a finger of blame during his speech, saying that the French "consciously trained and armed" government soldiers and militias who carried out the killings of more than half a million people 10 years ago, and "knew they were going to perpetrate a genocide". (full article in the Guardian)

In the years since the genocide took place, numerous reports have found France complicit in the slaughter in one way or another. The most damning of these reports was a series of articles in Le Figaro published in 1998 and summarized in English in the International Herald Tribune. The details of the IHT piece are stunning.

The newspaper says French forces took an active but secret part in fighting rebel Tutsi infiltration of Rwanda from 1992 forward, operating at front-line level. They were present during the 1994 genocide, and did not intervene. They helped the authors of genocide to escape....

The genocide proper began on April 6, 1994. By July more than a million Tutsi of Rwanda were slaughtered by Hutu fellow citizens, encouraged in this terrifying campaign by their government.

France's collaboration with the Hutu authorities continued for at least another month. There was a delivery of arms by way of Goma in Zaire as late as July 18, long after a United Nations embargo had mandated a halt to all arms shipments.

A French military intervention was launched at the end of June. It was announced as a humanitarian mission but actually covered the retreat into Zaire of Hutu soldiers, militias and the officials responsible for the massacres - including those responsible for the fanatical ethnic propaganda that had incited genocide.

This policy of supporting the authors of genocide was chiefly the responsibility of Mr. Mitterrand, who under the French constitution is the ultimate authority in foreign policy.

It was carried out, and covered up, by successive conservative and Socialist governments, including the Socialist government now in power.

President Kagame and Le Figaro are not alone in these assertions. On Monday, retired General Romeo Dallaire, former head of UN forces in Rwanda, joined the choir stating that

It is my view that France protected the perpetrators of the genocide.... The extremists who seized power after the April 6th coup were linked to Goma (Zaire) via French officiers. As the Rwandan army made its retreat, we came across some of them within the French base. According to the reports, they (the French) were not always disarming all the militants and were not forcibly preventing the acts of extortion that were taking place here and there. [translated from the french]

Better still to buy a man's fish...

In a recent presentation on U.S. policy toward education in Muslim nations, I made the point that one of the best things we can do for both ourselves and the citizens of developing countries is to get rid of our trade barriers. Doing so would not only create more wealth and jobs in the United States, it would help to stimulate the economies of poor countries, making it possible for more families to afford fee-charging private schools (the most effective, efficient, and ideologically moderate schools in the developing world). To extend an old expression: it's better to teach a man to fish than to buy a man a fish (encouraging self-sufficiency), and it's better still to buy a man's fish once he's caught it (encouraging economic growth and a rising standard of living).

Not everyone agrees. An Education Week article covering my presentation includes a critique from one skeptical conference attendee, along with a reporting error. Here's the letter to the editor I just sent off in reply:

To the editor,

Education Week ran an article on March 31st ("U.S. Faulted...") covering my Cato Institute presentation on U.S. policy toward education in the Muslim world. This article inaccurately reported one of my recommendations. I recommend that _private_ U.S. donors and organizations provide partial tuition subsidies to students in private fee-charging schools. I do _not_ recommend that such funding be provided by U.S. government agencies, for reasons explained in my paper. Note that total private U.S. giving to foreign countries is three times larger than official U.S. government foreign aid.

The same article correctly describes my recommendation that the U.S. and other Western nations eliminate their trade barriers with developing countries, so that families in these nations will have more money to spend on effective, ideologically moderate, fee-charging schools.

The reporter then goes on to quote education consultant Andrea Rugh as calling that second recommendation "remote and indirect," "impractical," and incapable of guaranteeing that the poor would benefit.

This is an interesting range of criticisms, and I only regret that Ms. Rugh did not seize the opportunity to raise them during my presentation, which she apparently attended. I also regret that the Education Week reporter who interviewed me by telephone after the conference did not ask for my comment on Ms. Rugh's critique.

Those options gone, I will address Ms. Rugh here. First, trade liberalization is indeed an indirect means of helping the education and welfare of the poor, but it has the advantage of having actually worked in the past (my paper provides supporting citations on this point). That history of success is in contrast to the record of direct foreign government aid, the kind which Ms. Rugh apparently advocates. A recent series of economic analyses published in The Cato Journal finds that direct foreign government aid has had either no substantial effect or a modest negative effect on economic growth in developing countries over the past several generations.

As for guarantees, these simply do not exist in public policy. To expect them is specious.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Coulson

Obviously, domestic economic policies and prevailing legal and political conditions affect whether or not freer trade can help raise living standards in developing countries. But the same can be said of all other attempts to improve the economic and educational situation in the developing world. Free trade has the best track record of any policy the U.S. can adopt, as I argue in the aforementioned paper.

China, The Anti-America

While most of the world's free people are busy villifying the U.S. for trying to help build a liberal democracy in Iraq, China is quietly doing its best to crush one in Hong Kong.

China's "parliament" just voted to give itself the power to veto any political reforms that the people of Hong Kong decide they wish to implement. Gosh, ain't that sweet of 'em. Saving those poor Hong Kong residents from the rigors of liberty and self-determination.

What does the world have to say about this outrageous anti-democratic beligerance?
[crickets]

I wonder if the French will do more joint naval exercises with China to make sure that Hong Kong gets the message?

Terror's Refrain in Spain

Two weeks ago, Spanish voters handed a surprise election victory to the Socialist party in the wake of the Madrid terrorist attack. The Socialists had campaigned on a platform of withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, and still plan to act on that promise if their conditions are not met, at the end of June.

To many people, myself included, it seemed as though the Madrid attacks had changed the outcome of the election in the precise maner hoped for by the terrorists. Indeed at least one Spanish voter told a reporter that he had changed his vote to the Socialist party so that Spain would pull out of Iraq and Islamist terrorists would leave the Spanish alone.

Whether or not appeasing the terrorists was the main motivation in the last minute swing to the Socialist candidate, most commentators argued that it wouldn't work, that the appetite of the terrorists would prove insatiable and that their apparent success in swinging the general election would prompt them to make further demands.

According to the latest news coming out of Spain, it did, and they have. A June pull-out from Iraq is too little, too late according to a letter believed to be from Al Qaeda. The letter demands an immediate pull out from both Iraq and Afghanistan:

Spain Labels as Credible a Letter Threatening New Attacks

By DALE FUCHS

MADRID, April 5 — Spanish authorities are giving credence to a letter received from a self-described Al Qaeda spokesman threatening more attacks like the Madrid train bombings unless Spain withdraws its troops "completely and immediately" from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The letter is seen as credible in that it could have been sent by a cell with a certain relation to Al Qaeda that could have been involved in the attacks," a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said today. "We do not think this is a joke or the exaggeration of some group seeking notoriety."

"Darwin Fish" REAL!

You know that "Darwin Fish" ornament you can stick to the back of your car? The one that looks like the outline of a fish with little feet sticking out the bottom of it? IT WAS REAL!

Scientists in Pennsylvania have just discovered fossil evidence of a fish that could do "pushups."

Cool! Maybe R. Lee Ermey could co-star in the sequel to Finding Nemo: "You grabastic little tadpole freak! You make me sick! Now get down and give me TWENTY!"

The Battle for Islam

If you watch much pundit TV, you've probably heard one or more conservative spokespersons ask: "Why don't moderate Muslims come out more to condemn Islamist violence, terrorism, etc.?" I've already blogged about several prominent Muslims in North America who are encouraging their coreligionists to repudiate radicalism and intolerance. Today there's more news of the same coming out of the U.K. According to the International Herald Tribune:

The Muslim Council of Britain [the U.K.'s largest Islamic organizations] has written to 1,000 mosques, asking that a message of vigilance and nonviolence be part of Friday's sermons.

Wednesday's letter, signed by the council's secretary general, Iqbal Sacranie, said that "Islam categorically forbids violence and killing of innocents, let alone indulging in violence which can cause death and mayhem." He urged Muslims to cooperate fully with the police.

The article goes on to say that reaction to this message on The Continent has been mixed. German Islamic leaders state that they've already been doing exactly what the letter calls for, Italians say they've got a handle on Rome but the situation in the rest of the country's mosques "is not really under control." French Muslim leaders (vive la difference) responded that it's not their job, and that they have another priority:

In France, whose estimated five million Muslims are the largest such community in Western Europe, no public steps have been taken by mainstream Muslim leaders to combat extremism....

Youcef Mammeri, president of the council's office in Marseille, said Thursday he knew of no cooperation agreement between Muslim groups and the police. He saw his role as fighting the stigma that all Muslims are terrorists, which he called the "biggest challenge."

Huh. What's all this talk about the failure of France's Muslim population to integrate with the rest of the country? This Mammeri chap seems to fit right in.

International Court Gestures

The International Court of Justice has just ruled that the U.S. is in violation of a treaty obligation concerning the prosecution of foreign nationals. In that ruling, it orders U.S. courts to reopen and reexamine the death sentences of 51 Mexican citizens found guilty of murder in the United States.

The details of this ruling seem to me far less significant than the question of who has the right to interpret U.S. laws and treaty obligations. According to the Constitution, international treaties to which we've signed on are legally binding. There's apparently some debate, however, over who has the legal authority to determine when we're upholding a treaty and when we're breaking it.

Naturally, the International Court of Justice and its many fans in Europe believe that it has the right to make such judgments. More surprisingly, one of our own Supreme Court Justices, Justice Breyer, seems to agree according to an analysis by Prof. Julian Ku that appears over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Scary thought! The U.S. must not cede control over the interpretation of its own legal obligations to a foreign court. First, the present climate of widespread international antipathy toward the United States makes this equivalent to a suicide pact. Second, I don't want European legal views projected in this country. Take a look sometime at what passes for free speech protection in France. It ain't pretty.

While the International Court of Justice may be right that the U.S. violated its treaty agreement in this case, its ruling should be considered informational only.