Category — Politics & Foreign Affairs

In the comments to my earlier post on Israel/Palestine, North and Michael Drew got into a very intelligent (and spirited) back and forth.

Michael eventually wrote the following (way down in the thread of comment #9):

The question is why or whether they [The Palestinians] would be interested in a state for themselves, knowing at this point what it would consist of (not what it might have done). You are eliding the question by saying that they should want it if they have interest in a state on that territory. That is the question. Palestinian nationalism is largely a thing of the 1980s and to some extent 90s. Since then, it has largely been a crutch for the U.S. and Israel’s efforts at peace. Whatever reason Palestinians once had to desire the state on offer has been long since spoilt by war and economic siege. I honestly don’t see what reason they would have to accept what they can now get. It would not even come with any guarantee of security from Israeli interference pursuant to “security interests’ — no Israeli government could ever take that off the table. Given the history, and given that the Palestinian “state” would be effectively demilitarized, the “state” would amount to nothing more than a voluntarily promise of nonintervention from Israel. The cumulative effects of economic isolation and sense that historical wrongs had only been institutionalized would guarantee eventual violence directed at Israel from the new “state,” and the cycle of intervention and retaliation would begin anew.

This is a very important and well articulated point of view.  As a quick review, my own sense of how crippled the Two State Framework is, led me to argue (in the comments) for the out-there idea that the US should take over the West Bank to create a kind of state-tutelage for the Palestinians, cover security for the Israelis, and separate the two populations.  An admittedly somewhat insane idea*, only surpassed in its insanity (I think) by the current state of affairs and its seemingly unstoppable trajectory towards Israel ruling over a stateless ethnic majority disenfranchised politically.  The consequences of an increasingly unstoppable Accidental Empire.

Michael’s argument gains support from Juan Cole, who in the conclusion to a classic takedown of Jeffrey Goldberg (always in good order), says the following:

Does Goldberg have a plan “B”? Because his two-state solution is so 1993. The problem is, it is almost certainly past the point where any such thing is possible, given the size and extent of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Goldberg admits that the only two likely outcomes of the current policies of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are Apartheid or a one-state solution.  (boldface in original)

For those interested, the best argument I’ve ever read towards a a one state solution is that of Ali Abu Nimah (titled One Country).  The book makes some strong arguments and is definitely worth reading and considering, but I still admit to thinking there are serious potential flaws in the idea.  Flaws that push (as discussed in this interview with Abu Nimah) even people like Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky to favor a two state solution.  In that same interview Abu Nimah counters:

What I argue in the book [One Country], of course this isn’t about destroying Israel. It isn’t about turning things over from one day to the next. Palestine-Israel is not the only country that faces this sort of power struggle along ethnic, religious, and other lines. We have to look for structures, and I talk about this in some detail in the book. How they did it in South Africa, where by the way, the same sorts of arguments were made against ending Apartheid and against one person, one vote. We have to look at countries like Belgium, we have to look at Northern Ireland.

There are many models out there for dealing with those sort of things. So that you have one person, one vote, full democracy, full equality, while at same time, ethnic communities, the Israeli-Jewish community, the Palestinian community, will have mechanisms for expressing their national identity, for decision making over issues that concern them. We have to stop thinking this very simplistic, binary way. And this is where I’m trying to take the discussion with this book.

While I generally think the idea of Two States is much more workable in theory, I’m leaning more towards the notion that it is has become unfeasible in practice, however preferred it might be at the hypothetical/policy level.  I think these kinds of discussions need to take place–what do we do if the Two State Solution fails?  What do we do if the Two State Solution is not workable, if there is no realistic path from here to there?

If the Two State Solution is dead (or at least becoming incapacitated with little to no hope of legitimate recovery), then we are left only with the choice of Israeli domination of a (soon to be) ethnic majority without political rights, which would call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel and continue the horrible, right-less existence of the Palestinian people.  Or one state.  Again that binary choice occurs IF the Two State Solution is dead.  My own view is that The Two State Solution is increasingly on the precipice–while for others we’ve already fallen off that edge.

I think much more work needs to be done on thinking about what safeguards there would be in a One State framework.  Abu Nimah begins that discussion, but I think it needs to go much further.

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* I didn’t know these previous to TEH GOOGLE telling me, but apparently this fellow has argued that the united Israeli-Palestinian state become the 51st State in the US.

I’d just like to agree publicly with every last word of this piece by Glenn Greenwald:

[T]he bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” — now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown. It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect — including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they “may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” which everyone expects to last decades, at least. It’s basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla — arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges.

In what way does this bill differ from pure, thought-experiment grade tyranny? Of the kind that, in our country at least, is only dragged out to gesture at when you’re making an argument about something else entirely? And then you put it back up on the shelf with a quiet “but of course, that doesn’t happen here…”

Stephen Walt thinks that the latest spat between Israel and the US is grounds for bringing back up a topic that very few want to discuss:  what plans/solutions/options remain if (and when) the two state solution fails?

His ideas on that subject (which are worth the read) are here.

Obligatory preface on Stephen Walt–I didn’t find his Israel Lobby book persuasive.  I do find his questions about the future of the two state solution very important and worth consideration.  (i.e. The second link above).

The Two State Solution, which as Walt correctly notes was only official policy at the extreme terminus of the Clinton administration, was officially endorsed (from the beginning) by George W. Bush (but never really followed up on) and is now the de facto position across the board, reflected by the Obama administration’s outrage over the recent Israeli decision to start construction on 1600 (1600!!!) houses in East Jerusalem.  East Jerusalem being of course at the center of the Two State Solution as the planned capital of the (hypothetical) Palestinian state.

The Two State Solution I believe is an extension of the earlier successes of US, Arab, and Israeli diplomacy–the so-called Land for Peace paradigm.  Israel gave back land captured in the Six Day War to various Arab states who in turn recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel and end the state of war between the two countries.

This basic format worked in the case of The Camp David Accords with Egypt and formed the template for the later Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, which President Clinton helped negotiate.  It’s also the deal that President George H. W. Bush offered (via Sec. of State Baker) to the Syrians (and by extension at the time their proxies Lebanon) and continues to this day to be on the table–which the Syrians have yet to take the Israelis up on.

This framework, however, worked because the states in question already existed as states.  Applying this model to the Palestinian process appears to have put the cart before the horse.  The failure of the Oslo Accords looms large in this scenario.  If you take a more pro-Israeli position, the failure occurred because the PLO/Fatah never really led in the fashion of true statesmen.  If you take the side of the Palestinians, Oslo failed because the deal offered was not a viable one that any group (including Fatah) could have claimed domestically as a win and thereby cemented their legitimacy.

In other words, the PLO wasn’t a state and therefore couldn’t negotiate under a paradigm presuming its existence existence as a state.  [Even PM Rabin more or less unilaterally declared the PLO the rightful spokespersons for the Palestinian Authority.]

Here is Walt on the options remaining if (as I believe looks increasingly likely) the Two State Solution dies: [Read more →]

Kieran Healy won’t be playing chatroulette anymore. Which is sort of a pity, because I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.

Will has highlighted the growth of anti-Wilson sentiment on the left and the right. Writing in Democracy, Trygve Throntveit tries to counter the wave:

True, Wilson sometimes described himself as conservative. But Wilson’s understanding of conservatism bears little relation to modern conceptions. To him, it meant eschewing theory and taking experience–past, present, and most important, social–as one’s guide for responding to change. Essentially, it meant pragmatism. When, in 1910, his gubernatorial rival promised never to ignore “constitutional limitations” in serving the people’s needs, Wilson retorted that he would be “an unconstitutional Governor” who would do just that if circumstances demanded it. Three years later, he inaugurated his presidency by promising tariff reform, progressive taxation, expanded credit, and several other measures designed, as Cooper puts it, “to bring justice and protection to ordinary citizens” struggling with rapid economic change–and in 18 marathon months he pushed nearly all of them through Congress.

At the crest of anti-Wilson sentiment, a liberal magazine has published a defense of Wilson that is so thoroughly unconvincing it seems like a prank. How to explain that after years of claims that Bush assaulted the Constitution, liberals are now ready to praise Wilson’s willingness to shred it?

For Throntveit, the answer seems to be “pragmatism.” Discarding the constitution for pragmatic as opposed to ideological reasons is not only unobjectionable, but laudatory. This line of argument is a little eccentric, but its possible to see how it follows from the liberal love-affair with Sandra Day O’Connor. If a liberal jurist can shred the constitution for praiseworthy, non-ideological ends, why can’t the executive? Maybe we’re all doomed to love and hate Woodrow for the wrong reasons.

By my lights, they’re in descending order of plausibility.

James Joyner shares my view of sanctions and adds another reason to mistrust them:

Sanctions almost never work, since the ruling class is the last to feel the pain and there are always state and non-state actors willing to circumvent the sanctions regime for a price. As a general rule, sanctions make those enacting them feel like they’re doing something but wind up hurting the very people we’re ostensibly trying to help, the ordinary citizens suffering under repressive regimes.

What’s less widely understood, as Damon Wilson, the Atlantic Council vice president and International Security Program director, noted in introducing the panel, is how incredibly hard sanctions are to undo. Years after we toppled Saddam Hussein and replaced his regime with one friendlier to the United States, a myriad of sanctions remain in place.

James Hanley doubts the doubters of charter schools. I’m sympathetic, but the school choice debate here at the League is one I’ve chosen to stay out of. There are only so many hours I can spend on blogging:

There is a persistent tendency among educators, and left-leaning folks in general, to claim that education is a distinct type of good, so that unlike other goods, a competitive market is an inferior way to produce it. I once had a college prof tell me that all monopolies were bad, except the state’s education monopoly. But I have yet to hear one of these folks make an argument for why education is so distinct. It’s rather remarkable how persuasive they find the words, “it’s just different,” to be.

And education is different in some ways. Quality assurance is just really damned hard (and standardized testing doesn’t do it). And it is primarily a private good, but one with substantial positive externalities. But neither of those make it peculiarly appropriate for monopoly production, or even for wholly (as opposed to partially) public production.

Ditto all that to health care.

Theodore H. Frank notes a curiosity in the Toyota recalls:

The Los Angeles Times recently did a story detailing all of the NHTSA reports of Toyota “sudden acceleration” fatalities, and, though the Times did not mention it, the ages of the drivers involved were striking.

In the 24 cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89—and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger.

These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly.

Further considerations here. Were it not for the magic of the state, which makes all action seem public and impartial, we might suspect something fishy. But I am sure our regulators only have our best interests in mind, and not the welfare of their GM subdivision.

Finally, does the advent of GPS mean we’ll no longer need signs? The answer seems “yes” to me.

In former times, buildings located on city streets didn’t have numbers. You’d just go to King’s Street and look up and down it for the sign of Saint Jerome. (Woe to you if you don’t know that Saint Jerome’s attributes include an owl, a lion, a skull, a trumpet, a cross, and a book.) There was a better way, we found it, and we used it. The same principle applies here.

Note, however, that while we may achieve a world where signs are unneeded, achieving a world where they do not exist is another question.

I’m happy to see that disenchantment with Woodrow Wilson – the most bizarre candidate for the pantheon of great American presidents – is reaching a wider audience on the American Right. But this nascent critique of Wilsonian progressivism seems to have missed one of his worst legacies. Namely, Wilson’s blatant disregard for civil liberties (from Wikipedia – emphasis mine):

On the home front in 1917, he began the United States’ first draft since the US civil war, raised billions in war funding through Liberty Bonds, set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union growth, supervised agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, took over control of the railroads, enacted the first federal drug prohibition, and suppressed anti-war movements.

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To counter opposition to the war at home, Wilson pushed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress to suppress anti-British, pro-German, or anti-war opinions. He welcomed socialists who supported the war and pushed for deportation of foreign-born radicals.^[86] Citing the Espionage Act, the U.S. Post Office refused to carry any written materials that could be deemed critical of the U. S. war effort. Some sixty newspapers were deprived of their second-class mailing rights.^[87]

Wilson is usually associated with a stirring ideological defense of democratic self-determination. In practice, this amounted to little more than crude ethnic partitioning, but more importantly, Wilson’s respect for the forms of Republican governance was severely lacking.

Perhaps Wilson’s enthusiasm for curtailing civil liberties was entirely unrelated to his progressive politics. But it’s hard not to see the same impulses that animated Wilson’s domestic agenda – a desire for control, rank disregard for individual liberty, confidence that the messy business of civil society can be micromanaged from Washington – behind his horrific record on civil liberties.

So my question for newly-converted Wilson-phobes is simple: If you’re concerned about government overreach, why restrict your criticism his domestic legacy? Why do torture, indefinite detainment, and the PATRIOT ACT get a free pass? Compared to his draconian wartime crackdown, many aspects of Wilson’s progressive agenda look downright benign, or even admirable, in retrospect. Wilson’s blatant disregard for civil liberties, on the other hand, remains one of the most enduring – and bipartisan – legacies in contemporary American politics.

Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line. ~ James Howard Kunstler

Perhaps the most compelling argument I’ve read against Walmart is the very same argument that one hears against sprawl – namely, that it is the result of a vast network of government intervention and central planning.  The very nature of Walmart is one which requires a car culture, and as we all know, the car culture would not have been possible without enormous amounts of state subsidies, draconian zoning laws, and so forth.  In other words, without the highway projects, the protection of the auto industry, and the many zoning practices in place in modern America, Walmart would not exist – at least in its current form.  As it stands, given our car culture, given our sprawl, Walmart acts as a benefit to many consumers.

That is the stumbling block I come back to when I consider my own distaste for Walmart.  In a real free market economy, sans all the government regulations and subsidies, Walmart would not even be an issue.  The many more diverse and denser places in America would not wanted or needed a Walmart to come set up shop.  But given the world we have created for ourselves, what is the alternative?  Can we very well deny poor people one of the only places that they can afford to buy cheap goods at?  Or, more to the point, should we demonize what is quite obviously a symptom of the larger problem?

Taking a closer look at the problem, we turn once again to Austin Bramwell, who has penned a brief response to James Howard Kunstler’s take on John Stossel on the subject of sprawl.  He writes,

Stossel defends suburban sprawl and accuses its opponents — like Kunstler — of forcing lifestyle choices onto others “by limiting where they can build.” The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times. For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.  If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.

It’s odd that self-described libertarians such as Stossel are so slow to grasp that government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous. You would think that libertarians would instinctively grasp the deeply statist nature of suburban development.  First of all, with a depressingly few exceptions, virtually every town in America looks the same. That is, it has the same landscape of arterial roads, strip malls, and residential subdivisions, accessibly only by car. Surely, given America’s celebrated diversity, you would also see a diversity of places. As it turns out, all but a few people live the same suburban lifestyle.  Government, as libertarian assumptions would predict, is the culprit.

Second, the few places in America that have a distinctive character are also exceedingly expensive. John Stossel himself admits to living in an apartment and walking to work most days. Now, I don’t know where exactly Mr. Stossel lives, but it sounds as if he lives in Manhattan, where residential space costs over $1000 a square foot (that means a two-bedroom apartment where a family of four could fit costs at least $1.5 million).  If Mr. Stossel’s lifestyle, as he puts it, is less popular than the suburban lifestyle, then why does his cost so much more? He apparently never asks himself the question. Had he done so, he might have discovered that government artificially restricts the supply of Manhattan-like places but artificially increases the supply of sprawl. That’s the reason Americans “prefer” to live in the suburbs. They don’t have a choice.

At this point ‘choice’ becomes a very tricky thing indeed.  Now that we’ve been, essentially, pushed into the suburbs – where cars and big boxes are simply a matter of life – what should we do about it?  Should we choose somehow to limit the existence of these big boxes?  Would this help us in our addiction to vehicular transport?  Many of the restored walkable communities around the country are either prohibitively expensive or Disney-fied versions of the America that once was.  Those who benefit the most from Walmart and its big box counterparts in this sprawling world of ours are also the poorest among us.  Would they benefit, also, from some other world?  I think so – but getting there is fraught with danger.

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As I can’t currently comment on the site during the day, I struck up a conversation/debate with Mike at the Big Stick via email about my Dubai assassination post. Mark eventually got in on the act and we thought that the back and forth was good enough to post here for your review.

Scott: I can’t respond to your comments on the site because I no longer have access to the League from work. But if it would be of interest to you, I’d be happy to have a bit of an email exchange to explore things further. I’ve got some work to which I need to attend this morning, but I’d be happy to fire back an initial response to you comment a little later. Let me know if that is of interest.

Mike: Sure Scott – fire away.

Scott: This is less in depth than I had hoped for, but the long and the short of my post can be summed up as follows:

• I’m not condemning Israel, I identified that I was not prepared to forgo the conclusion that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh deserved to die and that the Mossad were the right folks to do it,
• I worry that using tactics like assassination leave us feeling less morally culpable,
• I feel like we ought to be wracked with every bit as much doubt, uncertainty, and moral consternation over the decision to assassinate someone as we are when deciding whether or not to engage in conventional warfare, granted over different dynamics,
• And that a belief that it does as a tactic does leave us less morally culpable in terms of state sanctioned violence can and in this case seems to have lead to an attitude that is counter-rpoductive to actually ending the conflict in question.

In terms of your Hitler example, believing that Hitler should have been assassinated does not absolve us from a critical analysis of the use of assassination as an acceptable tactic in all future instances, which is, really, all I’m calling for.

Mike: I’m more inclined to say that it makes us more morally culpable. When we’re talking about general war quite often the higher-ups are insulated from the decision making. How often does the President or the Sec. of Defense get a call asking permission to fire a rocket at a Taliban position or lob a grenade into a cave where bad guys are hiding? On the flip side, when you arrange for an assassination somebody pretty high up the food chain has to say, “Yes, I want you to kill this man”. To me that’s what makes it real for them.

I also think, as many commenters pointed out, that assassination is actually better because there’s no collateral damage. One target, one dead. If you’re going to wage war, they should all be fought that way.

[Read more →]

We destroyed these people’s lives, and we propose to buy off their suffering with congressional campaigns? Jesus wept.

Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have replied to a criticism made by me and others of their attack on mass transit. Here’s their response:

Many, many blog posts have been written about two words in this passage: “The Left’s search for a foreign template to graft onto America grew more desperate. Why couldn’t we be more like them — like the French, like the Swedes, like the Danes? Like any people with a larger and busier government overawing the private sector and civil society? You can see it in Sicko, wherein Michael Moore extols the British national health-care system, the French way of life, and even the munificence of Cuba; you can hear it in all the admonitions from left-wing commentators that every other advanced society has government child care, or gun control, or mass transit, or whatever socialistic program or other infringement on our liberty we have had the wisdom to reject for decades.” The two words are “mass transit.”

Contrary to our least literate critics, nothing in that passage suggests that we consider subways an infringement on our liberty. Nor does it mean that we are skeptical of mass-transit subsidies because the policy strikes us as European. It means something closer to the opposite: that we suspect that much of the enthusiasm for these subsidies among liberals is based on mass transit’s association with Europe.

Unfortunately, Lowry and Ponnuru don’t say very much here to reassure their sincere critics. They tell us that they never meant to say that mass transit was an infringement on liberty, but don’t deny or even address the fact that they did suggest, whatever their intent, that transit is a socialistic program that we are wise to reject. That is clear enough to any reader of English. While their writing here is regrettably loose, it isn’t sloppy enough to totally obscure their point.

I wish they had acknowledged that what they said made no sense, or at least backed away from it quietly. Instead, they continue to dismiss liberals who argue for mass transit on the basis that these liberals might be looking to foreign templates. This is extremely unhelpful. Mass transit is not the love child of left-wing infatuation with Europe. It’s a policy with a long American history that should be debated on its merits.

[Read more →]

Austin Bramwell has penned a very convincing post over at The American Conservative on why school choice can actually lead to the dumbing-down of our schools in the name of egalitarianism and accountability.  By ‘convincing’ I mean that I have been convinced by it, and that it has pulled me back from the brink of school choice advocacy and the adoption of pro-voucher views.  For some time I’ve been drifting further and further from my initial anti-school-choice (especially anti-voucher) position toward one more amenable to school choice.  Various horror stories have helped contribute to this drift, and I’m ashamed to say that the alarmism these stories inspired have helped form my opinions of public schools and the need for more school competition.  The fact of the matter is that our public schools are sometimes very good and sometimes very bad.  It depends on where you are.  It depends on who you are.  It depends not only on the state you live in but also the district.  It may even depend only on the teacher.

Bramwell writes:

America’s public schools are one example of how even governments, when subject to market discipline, can produce a superior product. Compare Soviet arms during the Cold War.  The Soviets excelled at producing weapons because otherwise foreign governments wouldn’t have purchased them.  Similarly, some public schools consistently excel, because otherwise they could not attract the best parents and students, thereby allowing those schools to excel, thereby attracting more good parents and students, and so on in a virtuous cycle.  In both cases, governments — in contrast to the usual rule — have had to compete for customers.

The “accountability” movement, however, wishes to match customers with schools as planners, rather than the customers themselves, deem fit. School vouchers, for example, a favorite policy of “accountability” proponents, punish those very school systems that have already worked very hard, thank you very much, to attract the best students and most civic-minded parents. (It’s no surprise that vouchers have proven to be politically unpopular, including if not especially among Republican voters.) Similarly, shutting down failing schools and redistributing their students punishes those schools that have performed marginally better and thereby attracted marginally better students and parents. The “accountability” movement, in short, wants to equalize the quality of educational products, no matter the price paid for them.  Whatever this merits of this policy, it surely does not show much faith in the free market.

[…]

Similarly, there is a hidden mechanism that makes the American School System work, and which modern planners ignore — namely, freedom of movement, which creates a well-functioning market for public education.  Planners such as “accountability” advocates who want to turn bad schools into good ones (and, often, by implication, vice versa), no matter what their scheme, are doomed to disappointment.

No matter how you spin it, American education is and always will be a local issue.  One-size-fits-all solutions mandated at the federal level will simply fail despite their many good intentions.  School choice may have some benefits if it’s home-grown and cultivated in an organic fashion by local communities. Some districts may truly benefit from the addition of a few good charter schools. But no race to the top federal program based on sticks and carrots will achieve this anymore than weakening public schools through vouchers will.

Perhaps we should stop thinking that all schools should be equal, or that all students will get an equal shot at a good education.  Maybe they all should, but they certainly won’t, no matter how much we wish it were so.  That may sound terrible, but there will always be better and worse schools, and there will always be more capable and less capable students, and luckier and less lucky draws.  And in many ways it’s odd that school choice advocates should be so egalitarian in their thinking, so starry-eyed and optimistic.

If we really want better schools in the areas that have the poorest results, we’ll have to fix communities first.  And communities will need to do that from the ground up, not Washington down.  That’s no simply task, but it is at least more realistic than thinking we can fix schools through federal legislation or by issuing standardized tests or pushing all students toward higher education or by sucking money from the public schools and redistributing it into private ones.

Maybe some kids would be better off learning a trade rather than finishing four years of high school and attempting college.  Maybe that’s another way we can bring schools and communities back together – by reviving the long-dead apprenticeship model and getting kids working in valuable trades and accruing that much-needed work experience.  That’s only one idea, and it will work in some places and not in others.

Just like the problems facing schools and school districts around the country, the successes lie in local solutions.  One district may be crippled by a too-strong teacher’s union; another school may have incompetent administrators; still others may have spent too much for too little and are now facing huge cuts and budgets on the precipice of collapse.  All these problems are unique and have unique solutions.  But keeping education local also means that we have thousands of little laboratories to measure the success or failure of various reforms.  No one solution will ever be the magic fix because no magic fix exists.