Brookings: Programs - Governance Studies

Obama Preschool Proposal: How Much Difference Would it Make in Student Achievement?

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:00:00 -0400

As readers of this space will certainly know, the Obama administration has proposed a $75 billion 10-year federal investment in state pre-K programs for four-year-olds, to be matched by roughly the same level of state investment. The administration has been marketing its plan with about the same amount of balance that any large business brings to the task of selling a new product in which it is heavily invested, which is to say that it is putting forward the best possible case. This frequently takes the form of citing James Heckman’s analysis of $7 of public savings for every $1 invested in the Perry Preschool Project. Secretary of Education Duncan did just that at an event at Brookings on May 29, saying:

“Rigorous, longitudinal work by folks such as Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman … found a return of $7 to every $1 of public investment in high-quality preschool programs. Children who went to preschool have fewer special needs as they move through school. Less go into special ed. They get better jobs. They have better health and they commit less crime. A seven to one ROI. That’s a much better return than any of us would typically get in the stock market and real estate or anywhere else that we can put our money.”

Since the Fact Checker at the Washington Post awarded President Obama a couple of Pinocchios for using this same rhetoric in his State of the Union address, you would think that Secretary Duncan and others in the administration would be more circumspect. As I have noted in a previous Chalkboard report, Perry was an intensive, expensive, multi-year, hothouse program carried out 50 years ago with less than 100 black children in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The mothers stayed at home and received home visitation. The control group children had no other preschool services available to them. The Perry findings demonstrate the likely return on investment of widely deployed state pre-K programs for four-year-olds in the 21^st century to about the same degree that the svelte TV spokesperson providing a testimonial for Weight Watchers demonstrates the expected impact of joining a diet plan.

I’m willing to bet the farm that the typical state pre-K program for four-year-olds that would be expanded if the Obama administration’s proposal were enacted isn’t going to have the impact of Perry (or Abecedarian – the other iconic pre-K program with long-term follow-up and impressive outcomes).

If we aren’t going to extrapolate from Perry to the typical state pre-K program (and we shouldn’t) what then is the magnitude of the impact we might expect from increasing the proportion of children enrolled in state pre-K?

There are a variety of ways of trying to address this question. For example, Maria Fitzgerald has examined the impact of the Georgia universal pre-K program by comparing outcomes on the 4^th grade NAEP test for cohorts who came before and after the introduction of the program. She finds minimal differences in their academic outcomes. Of course, her research addresses the Georgia program and cannot be generalized to state pre-K programs everywhere. In fact, every approach to answering the question of the impact of state pre-K has limitations because no state has had the good sense to stagger the introduction of its state pre-K program over a year or two and randomly assign counties or school districts to be in the first or second wave of implementation. And, of course, state pre-K in one state doesn’t necessarily look like the program in another state, and short-term outcomes may not be good proxies for long-term outcomes. But absent randomization and long-term follow-up into adulthood of a representative sample of state pre-K participants across the states, the best we can do is try to triangulate an estimate of impact of state pre-K programs from different sources of information and imperfect research designs.

Here, I’ll add to the information that can be used for triangulation by crunching some numbers that I don’t think have been previous analyzed and reported. I’ll use the same outcome variable as Fitzgerald, the 4^th grade NAEP results in reading and math. But rather than focusing on one state as she did, I’ll use all 50 states. I’ll ask what the association is between the percentage of four-year-olds enrolled in state pre-K in each state in 2006 and the performance of the state’s 4^th graders on NAEP in 2011 (when the four-year-olds who were eligible for pre-K in 2006 would have reached 4^th grade).[1] The range of pre-K enrollment across states is substantial, from 0% in 10 states to 70% in Oklahoma, so all other things being equal, if state pre-K has a positive influence on subsequent academic achievement then states with higher levels of state pre-K enrollment should have higher NAEP scores.

The simple correlations of state NAEP scores and pre-K participation rates are very low and not statistically significant (0.02 for reading and -0.08 for math). But this is misleading because all other things are not equal across states, particularly with respect to the demographics of their populations. If, as happens to be the case, southern states with high proportions of low-income minority families have been leaders in implementing state pre-K programs, then the dominating influence of family characteristics on achievement test scores would generate correlations like those I found. But making causal assumptions about the impact of pre-K from such correlations would be like concluding that doctors cause illness because there is a negative correlation between the frequency with which individuals see a doctor and their health. To avoid this problem to the extent possible, I control statistically for demographic differences across states in the analyses I report subsequently.[2]

I find that participation rates in state pre-K programs are modestly associated with demographically adjusted NAEP scores in 4^th grade. The correlation between participation rates in state pre-K and demographically adjusted state NAEP scores five years later is 0.29 for math and 0.32 for reading, which means that roughly 10% of the differences among states in demographically adjusted 4^th grade NAEP scores is associated with the level of participation of four-year-olds in state pre-K programs. These relationships can be represented in a prediction formula such that, for example, a one standard deviation increase in state pre-participation rates, which happens to be 16% (or about the difference between participation rates in Maryland and Texas), would be associated with a bit more than a one point increase in NAEP scores five years later. A one or two point increase in NAEP isn’t unimportant, but it isn’t a lot.

The next two graphs, the first for math and the second for reading, provide more detail. A few states are labeled in both graphs to provide a basis for interpretation. NAEP scores on the Y-axis are represented as the difference between the score predicted for a state based on its demographics and the actual mean for the state. Thus states with scores greater than zero beat their demographic odds whereas those with scores less than zero underperformed relative to their demographics. The participation rate on the X-axis is the percentage of the population of four-year-olds attending a state pre-K program. The red diagonal line represents the best linear fit to these data points.

Note that some states with above average participation rates such as Georgia and Florida are also above average performers on demographically adjusted NAEP scores in math and reading. These states are poster children for state pre-K in that they beat their demographic odds on NAEP and they have high levels of pre-K participation. But there are other states such as Massachusetts and Kansas for math and Massachusetts and Delaware for reading that do much better than the aforementioned states on NAEP but have much lower participation rates in state pre-K. There are other states such as West Virginia that have relatively high participation rates but below average performance on NAEP. Oklahoma’s pre-K program most closely matches the ideal as set forth by the Obama administration in that it is universal, has very high participation rates, and is staffed by certified teachers. However, 4^th graders in Oklahoma do no better on reading than would be predicted from the demographics of their state and only modestly better in math.

What do I conclude?

There are modest positive associations between enrollment levels in state pre-K and later academic achievement once demographic differences among states are taken into account.
If these associations reflect a cause and effect relationship then raising the level of state pre-K enrollment would enhance academic achievement.[3]
The impact of very substantial increases in the level of state pre-K enrollment (e.g., two standard deviations of current enrollment levels or about 32%) would likely be no more than a few points on NAEP.
Raising NAEP scores a couple of points is worth pursuing in the context that national NAEP scores on reading in 4^th grade were only four points higher in 2011 than they were in 1992, but this falls far short of the impacts that advocates of the expansion of state pre-K have touted based on extrapolations of findings from studies of a few high-cost, multiyear, boutique preschool programs from many years ago, such as Perry.
If we are to move forward with a new federal program to support state pre-K programs we need to think carefully about the costs and benefits and figure out how to minimize the former while maximizing the latter.

As I see it the goals of efficient and effective pre-K programs are more likely to be achieved if states and the federal government:

Invest as much as possible in supporting the costs for disadvantaged families to send their children to high quality preschool programs rather than spreading the resources thinly by providing a new preschool entitlement for all families;
Allow parents to choose their preschool provider rather than creating a new zip code education system in which the local school district assigns preschoolers to schools;
Assess the quality of individual program providers based on outcomes, such as the school readiness of the children they serve, rather than based on inputs, such as the credentials held by their teachers; and
Nudge low-income parents who are receiving federal and state subsidies to choose high quality pre-K providers by such means as assuring that parents receive and consider information on center quality as part of the choice process, linking subsidy rates to center quality, and assuring that the reimbursement rates for the best pre-K centers are high enough to encourage them to compete for children whose tuition is covered by government.

[1] State pre-K participation rates are from the NIEER preschool yearbook, and state NAEP outcomes are from the NAEP data explorer.

[2] The control variables include the state’s median family income (from the Census), the state’s percentage of the school aged population that is non-white (from NCES), and the percentage of 4^th graders who qualify for a free and reduced priced lunch (from NCES).

[3] The analyses I have reported are not intended to identify causal relationships. They substantially eliminate the possibility that the association between pre-K participation rates and NAEP scores is driven by demographics while leaving many other variables unexamined. Of particular concern is the possibility that states that have invested the most in their pre-K programs have also been more active than other states in instituting other education reforms. These other reforms could be responsible in whole or in part for the tendency of states with higher pre-K participation rates to perform better on NAEP.

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Image Source: © Larry Downing / Reuters

Special Education: The Forgotten Issue in No Child Left Behind Reform

Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:00:00 -0400

In 2002, when President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), few would have predicted the law would last. Yet persist it did, and the controversial legislation remains on the books more than a decade later. Now that Democrats and Republicans have recently started its reauthorization process, it is time to examine one particular aspect, special education, that raises several different challenges.

Assessment of students with disabilities is perhaps the thorniest issue in education policy. For decades students with disabilities were not assessed or educated along with their peers. Schools, like all organizations, value what they can measure. The education system did not value students with disabilities because their success or failure was not counted.

That changed with the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It mandated that students with disabilities participate in state assessments. States argued it was unfair for students with severe cognitive disabilities to take a general test because they were unable to achieve proficiency. Disability advocates were right to include all students in assessments and states were correct that some students would struggle to succeed in the new system.

To address this issue the Education Department issued regulations allowing states to alter assessments for some students with disabilities. Students who received support services but were unlikely to achieve proficiency on the general test could take a modified assessment covering the same content with easier questions. Students with the most severe cognitive disabilities could take an alternate assessment that covered less content and included less challenging questions. The Department also placed caps on the number of students whose scores could count as proficient on modified (2%) and alternate (1%) assessments. The intent was to ensure all students were counted and also to recognize that students with severe disabilities may not reach grade level proficiency.

Despite these changes, the core policy conflict remains. Some schools inappropriately administer modified assessments to students who could achieve proficiency on the general test to artificially raise scores. However, many of those students rightly take an alternate assessment. The assessment of students with disabilities will remain difficult until researchers gain a better understanding of all cognitive disorders. Until then policymakers will have to balance setting high expectations without overburdening schools and students.

Congress should deauthorize modified assessments and reauthorize alternate assessments but without a cap. Research indicates that very few students have the most severe cognitive disabilities. Due to natural variation, there are undoubtedly some schools where the percentage of students with severe disabilities is greater than 1%. In some areas, for example, industrial accidents or high concentrations of toxins can lead to spikes in disability rates. In those cases, a 1% cap places a harsh burden on teachers and students. Until cognitive science and assessment technology has improved substantially students with severe cognitive disabilities should not take the general assessment.

Lawmakers should adopt an assessment system that uses computerized adaptive tests (CAT). Adaptive assessments create a custom test for each student based on their answers to test questions. Using an adaptive test vitiates the need for an alternate assessment because it administers test items at the student’s real grade level. This removes the need to administer a fixed form test with simpler questions. Adaptive testing also has built in presentation and response accommodations. This flexibility allows all students to take the same exam.

Congress should also empower parents to make choices about the assessment of their child. Currently parents have few options after a school decides whether the general or alternate assessment is appropriate. Ideally the school would make the initial judgment about administering an alternate assessment. Parents could then choose if they wanted their student to participate in the general assessment. Empowering parents and students has served as a successful strategy in the past. IDEA gave parents the right to sue if students didn’t receive the services they needed. Parents often have greater knowledge of their child’s capacity than educators or researchers.

The politics of No Child Left Behind will probably not allow for a full reauthorization. However, the politics of special education are unique. Disability impacts all Americans regardless of class, race, or party registration. Democrats and Republicans have shown a willingness to look past partisan blinders on this issue in the past. Congress should honor that legacy by demonstrating we value the learning of all students.

2013 No Child Left Behind Reauthorization Proposals on Assessment Special Education Assessment

Authors

Joshua Bleiberg
Darrell M. West

Lessons for the Future of Government Reform

Elaine Kamarck — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: Elaine Kamarck testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on June 18, 2013. Below are her prepared remarks:

It is an honor to be with you today and to discuss my experiences in government reform. In 1993 President Clinton and Vice President Gore hired me to run the National Performance Review. This project was the result of a 1992 campaign promise by then candidate Bill Clinton to “reinvent government,” a term taken from the best-selling book “Reinventing Government” by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler.

At the request of the President, this project did not end with the issuance of a report in September of 1993. Under the direction of the Vice President the project continued for the full two terms of the Clinton Administration. More reports were issued, but more importantly we tracked the implementation of every aspect of those reports. The duration of this effort (later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government under my successor Morley Winograd) makes it the longest government reform effort in modern American history.

There are many ways to measure the results. Obviously there are the simple statistics. Under the leadership of President Clinton who said “The era of big government is over,” we went to work to make that a reality.

We reduced the federal workforce by 426,200 between January 1993 and September 2000. Cuts occurred in 13 out of 14 departments making the federal government in 2000 the smallest government since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.[1]
We acted on more than 2/3 of NPR regulations, yielding $136 billion in savings to the taxpayer.
We cut government the right way by eliminating what wasn’t needed – bloated headquarters, layers of managers, outdated field offices, obsolete red tape and rules. For example, we had cut 78,000 managers government-wide and some layers by late 1999.
We conducted a regulatory review that resulted in cuts equivalent to 640,000 pages of internal agency rules.
We closed nearly 2,000 obsolete field offices and eliminated 250 programs and agencies, like the Tea-Tasters Board, the Bureau of Mines, and wool and mohair subsidies. (Some of which have crept back into the government.)
We passed a government-wide procurement reform bill which led to the expanded use of credit cards for small item purchases, saving about $250 million a year in processing costs.

But the reinventing government movement was not just about cuts, it was also about modernizing and improving the performance of government. In that regard the movement was responsible for starting three “revolutions” if you will, in government that continue to this day, built upon by succeeding Administrations. They are:

The Performance Revolution
The Customer Revolution
The Innovation Revolution

The Performance Revolution

On August 3, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Government Performance and Result Act into law. GPRA provided the foundation for strengthening agency efforts to use strategic planning and performance measurement to improve results. On signing the bill, President Clinton said: “The law simply requires that we chart a course for every endeavor that we take the people’s money for, see how well we are progressing, tell the public how well we are doing, stop the things that don’t work, and never stop improving the things that we think are worth investing in.” The cornerstone of federal efforts to fulfill current and future demands was to develop a clear sense of results an agency wants to achieve, as opposed to focusing on the outputs (products and services) it produces and the processes it uses to produce them.

Adopting a performance-orientation required a cultural transformation for many agencies, as it entailed a new way of thinking and doing business. GPRA required federal agencies – for the first time ever – to prepare a strategic plan that defined an agency’s mission and long-term goals. Then agencies were required to develop an annual performance plan, containing specific targets, and then annual reports comparing annual performance to the target set in the annual plans. The Results Act included an extended schedule for implementation for its various components. Pilot projects on strategic planning and performance measurement were part of the initial learning phase in 1994, 1995, and 1996. The Act required agencies to submit their first strategic plans to Congress and the public on September 30, 1997.

Beginning in 1994, twenty-eight departments and agencies began a test run of GPRA through over 70 pilot projects for annual performance plans and reports. Full-scale implementation of GPRA occurred in FY 1999. By August of that year, according to a GAO report, Federal agencies were improving their ability to set goals and measures for their operations. But agencies were still struggling at explaining how they would reach their goals and verify their results. In a report released by three key Capitol Hill Republicans, GAO gave good marks to the Transportation Department, Labor Department, General Services Administration, and Social Security Administration for developing performance plans that explain what the agency plans to accomplish in fiscal year 2000. In March 2000, agencies released their first performance reports, which said whether they met their goals for fiscal 1999.

Since then, GPRA has expanded and thrived, unlike prior budget-related reforms such as Zero-Based Budgeting, which enjoyed a brief moment in the sun during the Carter Administration and was ultimately abandoned. During the Bush Administration OMB expanded upon the GPRA model by implementing a program-level assessment of performance, called the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), that ultimately assessed the performance of over 1,000 federal programs. Amendments to GPRA were passed in 2010 and signed into law by President Obama, putting into statute many of the successful administrative practices developed since 1993 that supplemented the statutory requirements. This seems to be an indication of the staying power of this particular reform.

But the performance revolution did not end with passage of GPRA. The NPR experimented with other strategies geared towards creating a performance culture in the federal government. In 1996 Vice President Gore built on his work implementing GPRA by pledging to create performance-based organizations (PBOs) that would “toss out the restrictive rules that keep them from doing business like a business.” A PBO was a government program, office or other discrete management unit with strong incentives to manage for results. The organization committed to specific measureable goals with targets for improved performance. In exchange, the PBO was allowed more flexibility to manage its personnel, procurement, and other services. Three PBOs were ultimately created: FAA’s Air Traffic Operations, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Student Financial Assistance program. The performance of each of these programs improved over time, but in each case the parent departments limited the administrative flexibilities they had originally been granted.

To build leaders’ commitment and help ensure that managing for results became the standard way of doing business, some agencies used performance agreements to define accountability for specific goals, monitor progress, and evaluate results. Performance agreements ensured that day-to-day activities were targeted, and that the proper mix of program strategies and budget and human capital resources were in place to meet organizational goals. NPR worked with OMB and White House staffs to develop performance agreements between major agency heads and cabinet secretaries, and the President. As of the end of 1995, the heads of 8 of the 24 largest agencies had piloted the signing of performance agreements with the President- something never before done. OMB and NPR coordinated the development of additional agreements in 1996. While the use of presidential-secretarial level performance agreements faded, the legacy of creating a personal, rather than an institutional, commitment to performance was enshrined into the 2010 GPRA amendments with agency and cross-agency goal leaders being named and having a personal commitment to achieve the stipulated goal.

In January 1998, the Vice President asked the leaders of 32 “high impact agencies” to develop a handful of measurable goals that could be achieved over the next three years. High impact agencies were agencies that have the most interaction with the public and businesses, constituting ninety percent of the federal government’s contact with the public. About 1.1 million of the federal government’s 1.8 million civilian employees worked in these agencies. NPR helped these agencies set and meet “stretch” customer service goals built on the Government Performance and Results Act plans. They included IRS, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Social Security Administration. The objectives were included in OMB reviews of the agency budgets in order to help determine which programs were working and which had no impact on results. In addition, in 2000, those Senior Executive Service employees who worked in high impact agencies and who had responsibility for achieving one or more of the goals, were provided the opportunity to win annual bonuses based on their achievement of these goals, and improvements in customer satisfaction and employee involvement.

Source: Gallup, “Trust in Government: Historical Trends.”

It is believed that this improvement contributed to an increase in citizen trust in the operation of the federal government in the late 1990s, with citizen trust doubling in that period. (See Gallup poll above.)

The Customer Revolution

The Federal Government’s first ever customer service recommendations focused only on three agencies: IRS, Social Security, and the Postal Service. But the report also recommended a government-wide initiative.

After the first report was released on September 7, 1993, President Clinton began signing a series of government-wide executive orders to implement various recommendations in the report. The second executive order he signed was on Setting Customer Service Standards (the first was to cut red tape). The new executive order required all federal agencies to identify their customers and survey them to: “determine the kind and quality of services they want and their level of satisfaction with existing services,” within six months. And six months after that, agencies were to develop customer service plans and standards, and plan for future surveys.

Agencies initially hesitated, especially those with law enforcement or regulatory functions, but creating a customer service ethos in the federal government became an enduring theme of the Reinvention efforts of the Clinton-Gore Administration and served as a touchstone for the duration of the Administration.

The reason the president and vice president felt so strongly about this was their concern that Americans’ trust in the federal government had fallen dramatically and they believed that restoring trust was important to a vital democracy. Studies showed that citizens’ trust was closely linked to their perceptions about their personal interactions with government, hence the emphasis on customer service. In fact, when Clinton took office in 1993, citizen trust was at a record low of 21 percent. By the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, that level had doubled to 44 percent.

Agencies developed standards during the course of 1994 with the support of the President’s Management Council, which was comprised primarily of the deputy secretaries from the departments. The first standards report was issued in September 1994 and contained 1,500 standards across 100 agencies. This report was updated annually through 1997, when that report contained over 4,000 standards for 570 different federal organizations.

The message of “putting customers first” was conveyed to the rank-and-file staff across the government using a wide range of methods. It was one of the key criteria for Vice President Gore’s Hammer Award, given to teams of federal employees for reinventing their operations. It was also a key element of many Reinvention Labs, where teams of employees could pilot new innovations. The Vice President frequently held events around customer service initiatives in agencies and agency heads, such as Social Security’s Commissioner Shirley Chater, would be “mystery shoppers,” testing out their agencies’ phone call centers.

The Reinvention staff led a series of other activities and initiatives to support agency customer service initiatives, including:

Sponsorship of cross agency best practices guides on topics such as world-class courtesy, 1-800 phone centers, and customer complaint resolution.
Integration of customer service standards into agency performance measurement initiatives.
Designation of “hassle-free” communities and “one-stop” websites for students, business, recreation, and a governmentwide site, now called USA.gov.
The designation in 1997 of 32 “High Impact Agencies” which have the most direct interaction with the public – such as the IRS and Park Service – and their development of customer service initiatives that would make a noticeable difference to the public.
The 1998 “Conversations with America” presidential directive, where agencies were directed to engage directly with their customers in conversations around the country on ways to improve customer service.

After 1997, the reinvention efforts shifted emphasis from developing and measuring progress against agency-determined standards to a greater use of customer feedback surveys such as the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The ACSI is a survey used by most of the nation’s leading corporations. And for the first time ever it was given to customers from over 100 federal services, such as the Postal Service and IRS. The results showed that some agencies which gave out benefits, not surprisingly, got higher customer satisfaction marks than many private sector companies. But other agencies whose purpose was to regulate their customers fared less well. Still, the insights from the surveys allowed all agencies to change the way they went about doing their job to make it more acceptable to those they served.

Perhaps the best example of this change in strategy was the huge push to get citizens to file their taxes electronically, after the IRS learned from their ACSI results that those who did so had a much higher level of satisfaction than those who filed their returns on paper. Today it is a commonplace experience. Fifteen years ago it was revolutionary. Customer surveys, it was believed, would be less likely to result in lower standards, which agencies might be tempted to set in order to be judged as successful. This was based on observations of the British Citizens Charter movement, which saw agency standards steadily decline over the previous decade.

The George W. Bush Administration did not actively pursue a customer service initiative, but it did not repeal the Clinton directives and it allowed the continuation of the ACSI surveys in agencies. And in 2007, Congressman Henry Cuellar proposed legislation to mandate the creation of customer service standards and link them to employee performance appraisals. It passed the House in two Congresses, but failed in the Senate. At the request of the Senate, the Government Accountability Office examined federal customer service initiatives in 2010 and concluded that including customer service standards as a part of federal employee performance assessments “is an important factor in assessing employee performance,” but that this needs to be done in ways that are appropriate. Congressman Cuellar has reintroduced a bill in the current Congress.

Separately, President Obama sought to reinvigorate customer service efforts via an April 2011 executive order, which directed agencies to develop new customer service plans within six months and to undertake at least one signature initiative using technology to “improve the customer experience.” Agencies have posted their customer service plans and they are being implemented.

The Innovation Revolution

The 1993 Report of the National Performance Review ushered in an era of reinvention, modernization and innovation. The approach to innovation was twofold. It assumed that the employees of the federal government who did the day-to-day work of the government were the ones best able to bring forth ideas for improving performance and cutting costs and that they needed permission and encouragement to change the culture from complacence to innovation. It also sought to bring the information technology revolution that was affecting so many different parts of American society into the operations of government.

In order to create a culture of innovation, the NPR initiated several new programs. Agencies and offices were encouraged to apply to become “reinvention laboratories.” Once designated a “reinvention lab” the agency was encouraged, with the help of the NPR staff, to try new ways of doing business. With the backing of the White House, the reinvention labs were encouraged to think outside the box and not be afraid to fail.

A second project geared towards stimulating innovation was an award program known as the “hammer awards.” The “hammer” in the award referred to the mythical $700 hammer that the Pentagon had bought and that captured, in the public’s mind, everything that was wrong with government. And so the NPR team created the hammer award for those federal employees who did exactly what the public thought they couldn’t do –tear down something that wasn’t working and build something better. In and of themselves these awards were not very fancy. The hammer award consisted of a cheap hammer, tied with a red ribbon and mounted on a blue velvet back background that contained a card from Vice President Al Gore that read “Thanks for creating a government that works better and costs less.” The awards were publicized throughout the federal system and they achieved their goal of encouraging others to innovate as well. They can still be found hanging proudly in federal offices throughout the country and many re-inventors still wear the little lapel hammer pin they got for participating in an award winning project.

The third program designed to facilitate innovation was the formation of The National Partnership Council. This was a high level group geared towards moving the federal government and its unions away from overly legalistic and adversarial bargaining and towards a more cooperative relationship. Only by working with unions and with employees could the culture change in the direction of more innovation.

The second major portion of the innovation revolution was to bring the new information technology that was transforming American society into the public sector. When the National Performance Review was formed few Americans knew about the Internet. President Clinton liked to say that when he was inaugurated there were only 50 sites on the World Wide Web, which was a term just becoming popular. No one “Googled” anything, the term wasn’t even in use. But the Vice President, who, as a Senator had taken the Internet out of the military sphere, and written the legislation that allowed it to become a private sector tool, had a vision for how the Internet could change government.

Under the leadership of NPR, the federal government entered the Internet Age. In 1997 the NPR published Access America: Reengineering Through Information Technology. In an age when less than 25% percent of the public was online, this report summarized what was to come. The Internet would be used to bring information to the public “on its terms.” Information technology made it possible to begin implementation of a nationwide electronic benefits transfer program, to integrate information in the criminal justice community and to provide simplified employer tax filing and reporting. It also began the integration of government information through the creation of firstgov.gov – the federal government’s first, comprehensive web portal, launched in 2000.

Today it is called USA.gov, but its purpose is the same – to offer citizens one stop access to government information. As the Internet evolved, the goal was able to move from access to information to actual transactions. Today the majority of Americans pay their federal taxes online and conduct many other transactions at the federal, state and local level online as well. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of many original NPR staffers who continued to work on this project through the Bush administration and then in the Obama White House, the federal government is no longer an institution looking from the outside in at IT innovation, but instead plays a key role in breaking down barriers between government and its citizens everywhere.

Lessons for Future Government Reform Efforts

It has been twenty years since there has been a major reform undertaking by the U.S. federal government. This is no one’s fault. The Bush Administration had to cope with an unprecedented attack on American soil and a subsequent war; the Obama Administration had to cope with an economic emergency unparalleled since the Great Depression. Neither Administration can be blamed for not making government reform a central focus.

Now, however, as we (hopefully) return to a more normal time, these two emergencies have left us with a huge national debt while, at the same time we have an exploding elderly population. The time has come to take a new and comprehensive look at the operations of the Federal Government with an eye towards reducing that debt and improving efficiency. So here are a few reflections from my experience in the White House in the 1990s and my experience at Harvard University where I was on the faculty studying and teaching these issues.

First, there are two ways to cut the government. One takes an across the board approach, as the sequester does. It assumes that all government is created equal. In that approach there is no attempt to differentiate efficient from wasteful; critical from obsolete. This is, obviously, the politically easy approach but not the substantively most valuable approach. Second, is the way we did this in the 1990s. We recruited a staff of experienced civil servants to help us understand where the government was going wrong and where it needed help. As a result we focused on government wide policies like procurement and we also focused on problems within individual departments and agencies.

Second, as the Government Transformation Initiative points out, the same “problems” are identified year after year and never solved. The reason is that each one has to be considered on its own. There are no easy solutions. For instance, this is why “reorganization authority” is not the answer. Often programs that appear to be doing the same thing are actually not. Furthermore everyone has different authorizing statutes that would need harmonization. The bottom line is that some “stupid government” stories are actually not stupid and some are. It takes a careful in-depth approach to separate the two.

Third, show me an inefficient, obsolete or wasteful government practice or program and I can promise you that someone in the private sector is making money off of it. Not surprisingly, people who make money from government ineptness are loath to see it end. The case is never presented that way but a strong counter-force is needed to overcome special interest pleading.

Fourth, calculating efficiency in the government often involves a complex process of finding similar private sector “bench-marks” against which we can measure government efficiency. Again, the story is complex and often obscured by the large numbers of dollars the federal government deals in. For instance, the amount of fraudulent Social Security retirement checks paid to seniors in any given year is likely to be a number that seems enormous to the American people. But at payments of $821 billion per year in old age and retirement insurance, small amounts of fraud result in large amounts of dollars. Thus the calculation of waste, fraud and abuse needs to be made in the context of similar processes in the private sector.

Fifth, it is career bureaucrats who know, better than anyone else, what works and what doesn’t. A successful reform effort cannot take place without their wisdom and without their participation. As with any workplace the federal workplace is composed of a wide variety of character and talent. For every civil servant who ties up citizens in red tape and doesn’t seem to work very hard, there are civil servants who work overtime making sure that our soldiers’ families get what they need or who makes less money than they could in the private sector to make sure we are funding essential medical research. We need to reward the civil servants who produce for their fellow citizens. In addition, the federal government consists of a whole lot of very good people caught in a whole bunch of very crazy systems. Of course at the time each rule was created it made sense, solved a problem and worked in the public interest. But over time the accretion of rules and regulations ends up costing us money and frustrating the public.

Conclusion

It has been twenty years since there has been an across the board analysis of government reform. Much of what we did back then in the Clinton Administration is standard operating procedure now in the government. It is time, however, for a new burst of creativity. We face two challenges: budget deficits are at all time highs and the trust deficit of the American people is at all time lows. A serious bi-partisan reform effort could do wonders for both deficits.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my views on this important subject.

[1] This number does not count temporary workers hired to conduct the 2000 Census.

Downloads

Download the testimony

Authors

Elaine Kamarck

Publication: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

Can Google Fly Its Internet Balloons Wherever It Wants?

John Villasenor — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The Internet is abuzz with news of the first public flight tests in New Zealand of Google’s Project Loon, which aims to provide Internet access to underserved areas using a network of high-altitude balloons. As Google explained in a June 14 blog post:

We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters. The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it.

Whether Project Loon’s vision makes technical sense is a worthy question. But even if it passes technical muster, the prospect of using globe-circling high-altitude balloons as communications platforms raises complex legal issues regarding airspace access and control.

It’s the distance, and not the altitude, that creates the primary concerns. Thousands of high-altitude weather balloons are launched without incident every week. However, (with some notable exceptions) weather balloons usually stay aloft for only a few hours and remain within the airspace of a single country during their flight.

By contrast, flying a balloon around the world is hard—and not just because of the engineering difficulties involved. The biggest challenge can often be finding a route that steers clear of countries unwilling to grant overflight permission. Back in the 1990s, attempts at around-the-world manned balloon flights generated complex diplomatic dances and were even thwarted completely by airspace permission concerns. Obtaining approval from China proved critical in enabling the first successful nonstop balloon circumnavigation in 1999 by Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones. Steve Fossett’s successful 2002 solo balloon circumnavigation took place deep in the southern hemisphere, where much of the route is over water.

Google says that the Project Loon balloons can be “steered by rising or descending to an altitude with winds moving in the desired direction.” To a certain extent, that’s true. But when the only thing you can control is altitude, steering options can be pretty limited. Unless you’re willing to ditch or to limit flights to latitudes well south of the equator, sooner or later some of the balloons will end up in the airspace of countries that don’t welcome their presence. And, while Silicon Valley’s ask-forgiveness-not-permission culture might pay off in many contexts, international aviation won’t be one of them.

So what does that mean for Google’s vision to ring the globe with Internet access points drifting in the stratosphere? A Google spokesperson said the company is “hoping that the launch can start the conversation and begin to spec out how this might work on a larger scale.” Google coordinated with local air traffic control in last week’s New Zealand tests, and is “looking forward to see where this can go.” The next phase of the project will reportedly involve hundreds of balloons flying at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees south, which would take them over a lot of open ocean but also include transits over New Zealand, southern Argentina, and southern Chile.

And then what? In a “Facts and Figures” post about Project Loon, Google notes that “approximately two thirds of the world’s population today doesn’t have Internet access.” However, reaching more than a small fraction of this underserved population using Project Loon would require expanding coverage to more tropical and northern latitudes. That, in turn, would require using the airspace of countries that are certainly not going to permit regular overflights of communications balloons operated by an American company. In other words, regardless of the potential technical merits, a truly global system of Google-operated Internet access balloons isn’t happening anytime soon.

But that doesn’t mean the underlying idea of using high-altitude balloons as communications platforms is flawed. For applications such as disaster relief, it’s a well-recognized and potentially highly effective approach that companies like Space Data Corporation have been honing for many years [PDF]. To the extent that Project Loon can help improve the state of the art in rapid communications system deployment, it’s a worthy effort.

Authors

John Villasenor

Publication: Forbes

Image Source: © Anthony Phelps / Reuters

PRISM and Boundless Informant: Is NSA Surveillance a Threat?

Richard Lempert — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:31:00 -0400

The NSA’s recently revealed PRISM project allows the NSA to monitor the internet traffic of foreigners, but sweeps up American communicators in the process while the once equally secret Boundless Information program analyzes and is fed in part by metadata on calls routed through Verizon, and it is safe to assume, other telecommunications carriers as well. How concerned should we be? The answer depends on what one’s concerns are. If the concern is the privacy of one’s own conversations, there is little reason for all but a handful of Americans to lose sleep over this, and those most likely to lose sleep are also most likely to pose security threats.

The programs are somewhat different, but given what we have been told so far, here’s how they are likely to work. The telecommunications data mining appears to be both vast and indiscriminate but only collects so-called metadata; that is, data on which phone numbers called which other numbers, how long the calls lasted, the locations where calls were made and received and the like. No conversations have been recorded, so what was said is forever beyond the government’s reach. If, however, a number called or called from belongs to a suspected terrorist, here or abroad, or to someone whose calling patterns or call locations arouse suspicions, the NSA, FBI or other agency will most likely be able to secure a warrant, based on probable cause, that will authorize listening to what is said in calls to and/or from the identified number. It is not, however, just those who call or are called by previously identified suspicious numbers who will be vulnerable to having their calls seen as suspicious and their conversations monitored. Data mining can cast suspicion on those who call others who have called suspicious numbers, those who call third party numbers whom suspicious callers call and the like. Still, although the net is potentially wide, it is likely that relatively few Americans are selected for active surveillance, and then only after a court has reviewed the reasonableness of monitoring requests given patterns in the metadata and connections to known security risks.

To give an example, consider the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. The authorities feared the Tsarnaev brothers might have had domestic accomplices, and they also wanted to know if foreign instigation played a role. Through PRISM, they would have been able to retrieve archived phone data, examine calls made to and from the Tsarnaev brothers’ phones and identify not only patterns that might suggest others were involved but also people they might talk to to learn more about how the Tsarnaevs had been radicalized. The data analysis would allow them to take a giant step toward answering the questions that most concerned them in a less intrusive and more objective way than by having human gumshoes patiently track down various leads and leads stemming from leads. This may explain why very soon after the bombings the authorities could tell us they were reasonably confident that the Tsarnaevs had acted alone and had hatched their plot without foreign involvement. (Given Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s travels back to Russia, the latter conclusion is not yet completely safe to draw; modern technology does not obviate all needs for gumshoe detective work). President Obama, members of Congress and James Clapper, the top U.S. intelligence official, have all said that the kinds of monitoring that feed Boundless Informant have contributed to identifying terrorists and thwarting possible attacks. There is no reason to doubt their word.

PRISM appears to be a far narrower intelligence gathering program but far more intrusive. It can capture not just metadata but the content of communications transmitted via the web, including messages sent and retrieved, uploaded videos and the like. It is specifically targeted, and without a warrant neither American citizens nor permanent resident are legal targets. However, the protections citizens and permanent residents enjoy appear loose. News stories suggest that data capture is allowed to proceed whenever a responsible agent thinks it more likely than not that a possible target is foreign. The standard, if true, means that some communications involving only Americans are inevitably captured, and Americans may be caught up in surveillance aimed at foreigners, such as recordings of foreign chat room conversations.

The protection most of us enjoy under PRISM may be more practical than legal. The amount of data that can be collected limits the reach of the program. Not only is capturing too much information from innocent Americans a waste of resources, but also suspicious communications can be lost in a forest of irrelevant data. The NSA thus has powerful reasons to limit impermissible observations, at least where there is no good reason to suspect Americans of terrorist involvements. Still we lack two bits of information important in assessing this program. One is the fate of information pertaining to Americans who should not have been observed in the first place. If this information is purged from all databases except perhaps when the person is dangerous, erroneous capture is less of a concern than it otherwise would be. Second, we don’t know how monitoring targets are determined or the number of targets selected. To the extent that individuals, organizations and sites are targeted based on target-specific concerns about the threats they pose, the net cast is likely to be narrow, and even if the reasons for targeting do not rise to the level of legally cognizable probable cause, they tend in this direction. But if targets are selected based on the impersonal outputs of other data mining efforts like the telephone records that feed Boundless Informant, all bets are off. Depending on the algorithms used and the degree to which they have been empirically validated, the net could be wide or narrow, and the likelihood that a target would be involved in terrorism or that citizens would be swept into the net may be great or small. Congress in overseeing PRISM should demand this information if it is not already provided.

It is easy to be cynical about government and the respect that agencies show for the laws under which they operate. Cynicism is fed by occasional scandals and by the more frequent pseudo-scandals which make it appear that within the Beltway things are out of control. Having spent four years as a Division Director at the National Science Foundation and three years as Chief Scientist in the Human Factors/ Behavioral Science Division of DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, I am not cynical. Time and again I have seen government employees seek to follow the law even when it seems silly and interferes with their mission. When I joined DHS I was most surprised by the fierceness of efforts to comply with the U.S. Privacy Act. At times interpretations of what the Act protected were so broad as to border on the ridiculous, and costs were real: research projects with national security implications were delayed, redesigned or even precluded because privacy officers, sometimes with little basis in the statute, felt there was a risk that personally identifiable information (PII) would be impermissibly collected. The absence of any reason to fear revelation or misuse made no difference. The strict scrutiny applied to research that might involve PII is, to be sure, relaxed in front line operational settings like PRISM and legal restrictions may differ, but my experience in two agencies as well as conversations with people in the intelligence community (IC) lead me to believe that it is a mistake to regard as a sham the legal restrictions on PRISM or other IC data mining and surveillance activities.

Through its PRISM and Boundless Informant efforts, NSA is working to protect the nation, apparently with some success. The 99.9% of us who pose no threat of terrorism and do not inadvertently consort with possible terrorists should not worry that the government will track our phone or internet exchanges or that our privacy will be otherwise infringed.

This does not mean, however, that the NSA programs and the capacities they reveal are of no concern. They should be regarded as canaries in the coal mine; they provide early warning of dangers we may be confronting. These capacities, along with increasingly ubiquitous surveillance cameras, photo recognition software, the ongoing development of rapid recognition DNA analysis, drones that can spy or kill and DNA, fingerprint, photo and other searchable digital databases together create what I have called the infrastructure of tyranny.

"These capacities, along with increasingly ubiquitous surveillance cameras, photo recognition software, the ongoing development of rapid recognition DNA analysis, drones that can spy or kill and DNA, fingerprint, photo and other searchable digital databases together create what I have called the infrastructure of tyranny."

These technologies potentially enable small groups of people to control and restrict the freedom of far larger numbers. We think this could not happen here, and I do not claim it is imminent, but recent trends in politics and social life suggest that if the fear was ever groundless, it no longer is. Not only are our politics deeply and too often viciously divided, but divisions seem to be stoked by extremists who personally profit from their ability to arouse emotions and by small numbers of extremely wealthy individuals who spend freely to advance their views of the good society. Moreover, our political parties and Congress itself sometimes seem more interested in thwarting the opposition or scoring points with their most committed supporters than with cooperating and compromising to promote the national interest. Concerns raised by these developments are exacerbated by an increased tendency within Congress to ignore more or less neutral procedural commitments and understandings that have allowed effective governance despite sometimes deep differences in political goals. In addition, we live in a time of increasing inequality and decreasing social mobility. The experience of other countries from the French Revolution on suggests that when inequality becomes too great and a small group of “haves” is seen as capturing too large a share of the pie, protests begin that even if peaceful at the start are prone to erupt into violence. Even before violence from below erupts, and almost always afterwards, we have seen those on top muster their resources to suppress dissent and to preserve their positions of power, using violence of their own if need be.

Historically the masses tend, sooner or later, to prevail, but in PRISM, Boundless Informant and other new technologies we are developing a set of tools that make it more likely that an elite core will be able to disrupt nascent revolt and maintain its preferred position by increased surveillance and even selective killing. Although it is not likely, it is not unimaginable that a future administration could, with substantial popular support, use a genuine crisis as an excuse to postpone a scheduled election, could put down subsequent protests with violence and could create a situation in which it maintained itself in power using the infrastructure we are creating to protect us from crime and terrorism. Even if the possibility is small it cannot be too much diminished. Doing this is likely to involve combating inequality, strengthening democratic institutions and perhaps abandoning the volunteer army, matters too far afield to be further discussed here.

Even if it seems fanciful to fear that American democracy could one day be imperiled by technologies and activities developed to fight crime and terrorism, it is not farfetched to recognize the degree to which foreign governments can, and to some degree are, using these technologies to enable powerful elites to control people who desire more freedom or might seek to replace them in power. Moreover the lines demarcating those in control may relegate people of certain religions, gender, or gender preferences or ethnic heritage to permanent positions of economic disadvantage and powerlessness. The capacity that foreign nations have to use technology to suppress dissent is likely to grow over time with profound effects on our country’s relations with them. It would be nice to think that by controlling American exports of these technologies, we could forestall this, but we can’t. We no longer can control, if we ever could, the use or development of sophisticated surveillance and suppressive technologies. I don’t even have a solution to suggest for this one.

Beyond these fateful concerns and of more immediate import is a peculiar feature of the way the debate over data mining and other surveillance technologies has developed. People, or at least the chattering elites, seem most upset when the federal government is acting. Attention falls off when privacy infringing technologies are used by state governments or in the private sector. Yet the federal government really is on our side and is using these technologies to protect us. Moreover, through our votes and outrage we can to some extent control how the federal government uses them. The same is not true of the private sector. They can and do use these technologies to track our purchases, to stimulate impulsive buying, to set different prices for different customers, to extend or deny credit using attributes with little obvious relation to credit worthiness, to hire or not based on health indicators or long past or other employment-irrelevant behavior and to decide whether or at what price we are insurable against various harms. None of this is done in our interest as consumers or citizens although not everything runs counter to these interests, and most of what is done is unregulated. States are similarly often more free than the federal government to employ surveillance technologies because federalism allows them to do things the federal government cannot do, and we attend less to what is going on in their nether reaches. Here the danger is not that they don’t have their citizens’ interest at heart but rather that if we decide to deny the federal government a certain capacity, states may develop that capacity and the federal government may be able to do what we thought we were forbidding by working through the states. This may have happened when some early federal data mining efforts were protested and withdrawn.

Of the surveillance concerns I have mentioned the private sector and state-level capacities are the easiest to deal with. As a general principle whenever efforts are made to restrict federal government activities in the interest of privacy, potential privacy infringements by the private sector and state governments should also be considered and often should be regulated. Moreover, because the private sector uses data mining and surveillance technologies to reach ends of no interest to the government, we should develop philosophies and policies suitable to the protection of privacy and other interests in private sector contexts.

Data mining in connection with PRISM and Boundless Informant appropriately raises concerns. But it would not be surprising if upon closer inspection and as more is known, it is discovered that the privacy threats that these programs pose for American citizens are small, their compliance with legal restrictions is genuine, and their contributions to the fight against terrorism has value more than commensurate with any costs they impose. At the same time we are well advised to be wary about what we are creating. Efforts associated with the “war against terrorism should be regarded as military in essence, and the posse comitatus law which prevents the military from acting to enforce domestic criminal law, no matter how great the need, should be clearly extended and strictly applied to the NSA, the CIA and similar organizations, including some aspects of work done by the FBI, even if they could make valuable contributions to crime control more generally. Moreover, what we are learning about these programs should serve as a wakeup call to stimulate social and political changes that will make it less likely and less possible for a government in power to extend its time in office by undemocratic means. In addition, as we think about privacy and data mining, we should be as alert to and concerned about the privacy dangers posed by private and state sector data mining as we are to the dangers posed by federal activity. Regardless of who is doing the infringing, privacy is a human value we should cherish.

Authors

Richard Lempert

Image Source: © Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters

How to Control Health Care Costs: Lessons from Abroad

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:00:00 -0400

Event Information

June 13, 2013
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Register for the Event
At a Brookings event on June 13, 2013, Dr. William A. Haseltine, author of Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Health Care System (Brookings Press, 2013) argued that there are alternative models to the current health care system in the United States.

Haseltine began his remarks by noting that Americans often see worse results in terms of the quality and coverage of their health care, even though they pay more than people in many other high-income countries. Singapore, on the other hand, ranks sixth in the world health care outcomes—well ahead of the United States—while spending less than one fourth of what the United States spends.

Haseltine said in the U.S., health care costs are eating into every facet of human life. He noted that the country should look around the world at other health care systems in order to make sense of the best practices and efficient allocation of finances to adopt for the U.S. system. Singapore was one nation that particularly stood out in Haseltine’s research. He said Singapore is unique in that their health care system “really works.”

Haseltine noted that while the United States should not strive to adopt a health care system identical to Singapore’s, Americans can learn from its model. In Singapore, health care consists of both public and private systems. Multispecialty care is often delivered in public hospitals, while primary care is delivered by private sector physicians. He added that the system is based upon “the suspicion of the economic man,” where people may “cheat and chisel” the Singaporean health care system. Therefore, the Singaporeans have built a system where most people have to pay for their health care. In addition, Singaporeans believe in “social harmony,” or the notion that the system should not get too out of balance. He said their solution is something along the lines of a mandatory 401k, where citizens are obliged to save money for health care amongst other issues such as retirement and housing. In Singapore, health care companies are also mandated to publish their prices. Haseltine said this creates an atmosphere where customers essentially “shop” for the best health care policy to cover their specific needs.

Several years ago, Singapore had a system that created a strong sense of competition among health care providers. This drove prices up, however, as companies purchased increasingly more expensive equipment to provide the best services. Now, while competition still exists, the government has decided to regulate it—a system that Haseltine called “regulated capitalism,” a strange notion to many Americans.

Haseltine said Singaporeans’ response to their health care system is approximately 75% positive, with “rough edges” falling under elder care and chronic disease.

He concluded by discussing several lessons that the United States can take away from the health care model in Singapore. Haseltine recommended that Americans think of their country in terms of cities and regional networks, rather than as one entity. This outlook should help the U.S. adopt lessons from Singapore, a much smaller country. He cited co-payment—a concept not foreign to Americans—transparency, managed competition, and “doctors on salaries” as the primary lessons for a revised system in the United States.

Video

How to Control Health Care Costs: Lessons from Abroad

Audio

How to Control Health Care Costs: Lessons from Abroad

GOP Opposition to Judicial Nominations: What’s the Precedent?

Sarah A. Binder — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The Senate Judiciary Committee is preparing for hearings on the president’s three nominees for vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Brewing GOP opposition to filling the vacancies comes on the heels of partisan disputes over Republican tactics to block Obama’s judicial nominations. Democrats argue that GOP tactics are unprecedented: Republicans have delayed confirmation votes even for nominees with bipartisan support, they have insisted on sixty votes for nearly every appellate court nominee before allowing confirmation votes, and they have heightened scrutiny of trial court nominees. In contrast, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell argues that “the president’s been treated very fairly on judicial [nominees].”

Can both parties’ claims be true? Steve Benen argues that McConnell’s claims “have no basis in fact,” but I don’t think that’s entirely correct. Because there is no single way to slice and dice judicial nominations data, the parties duel with rival statistics: number of confirmed judges, confirmation rates by president or by two-year Congress, bench vacancy rates, time from nomination to Senate action, and so on. Absent a single metric, it’s tough to nail down whether Republicans have overstepped the bounds of acceptable behavior—relative to Democrats’ behavior in the past. (To be clear, the GOP claim that Obama is creating a “culture of intimidation” by sending three nominees to the Hill to fill authorized seats on the most important of the appellate courts is ludicrous, given the president’s constitutional authority to nominate candidates for the federal bench.)

My preferred measure for tapping the state of advice and consent focuses on confirmation rates and duration of the confirmation process over each two-year Congress. (Senators and others often prefer to compare confirmation rates across presidents, but differences in party size and party control within a presidency confound interpretation of presidency-level statistics.) Confirmation rates between 1947 and 2012 (80th-112th Congress) appear here:

Viewing rates by Congress, we see the basis of McConnell’s claim that the GOP has played fair on Obama’s nominees: Appellate court confirmation rates were slightly higher in the 111th (2009-10) and 112th Congresses (2011-2) than they were over the course of George W. Bush Congresses (under both unified and divided party control). And in the last Congress, GOP treatment of Obama’s district court nominees measurably improved (albeit after Senate Democrats felt compelled to file 17 cloture motions on district court nominees balled up by the GOP). That said, GOP treatment of Clinton nominees in 1999-2000 and Democrats’ treatment of Bush nominees in 2001-2 produced the lowest confirmation rates over the postwar period.

We can also use data on how long it takes to confirm nominees (ignoring failed nominations) to compare the parties’ records. As shown below, GOP foot dragging on Obama nominees for both appellate and district court vacancies has far outstripped Democrats’ slowdown of Bush nominees between 2003 and 2008 (under both unified and divided party control). But these records are beat by GOP delay at the close of the Clinton administration and Democratic opposition at the start of Bush’s first term in 2001-2.

Granted, such comparisons assume that all else is equal about the nominees and the process. That’s debatable. Each party typically claims that they only block nominees who are ideologically out of step, but we lack a common metric for comparing nominees ideologically. Nor do these data capture changes in the threshold for confirmation, as the GOP has insisted on sixty votes for confirming almost every appellate and some district court nominees. Remarkably, the GOP pushed Reid to file 17 cloture motions on district court nominees in 2012, even after Senator McCain had admonished his colleagues in 2011 not to filibuster trial court nominees: “Quite often we establish precedents and you find out when you get back in the majority it wasn’t that good of an idea.”

What does this portend for the fate of the D.C. Circuit appellate nominees? Keep in mind that in addition to the unusual policy impact of the D.C. Circuit, this court of appeals is “balanced” with equal numbers of Democratic and GOP appointed active judges. Since the early 1990s, confirmation rates have been at least ten percent lower for nominations to balanced circuits than to circuits with a party skew. But I suspect that many GOP senators have not yet made up their minds on these nominees, and thus there’s currently no party strategy to block them. In the meantime, the GOP will likely look for opportunities to confirm nominees they deem acceptable (witness today’s move to confirm two district court nominees and recent votes to confirm several appellate court nominees previously blocked by the GOP in the run up to the 2012 elections). Such cooperation allows the GOP to insist that they’ve treated the president fairly—all the while dragging out the D.C. Circuit nominees. Given continued uncertainty over whether Democrats would be able to muster 51 votes to go nuclear this summer, I doubt the conflict comes to a resolution anytime soon.

Authors

Sarah A. Binder

Publication: The Monkey Cage

Image Source: © Gary Cameron / Reuters

Accelerating the Mobile Technology Revolution

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

June 12, 2013
10:00 AM - 11:15 AM EDT

Falk Auditorum
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

A conversation with AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson and Senator Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)

In 2013, the number of active smartphones worldwide leapt to more than 1 billion. Given mobile’s immense growth and popularity as a modern-day necessity, how should policymakers respond to the accelerating speed of the mobile revolution, particularly increasing demand for broadband spectrum? How can the public and private sectors stimulate further innovations and investment in mobile technology? What policy steps must be taken to further public and private investment and advances in mobile technology in the United States?

On June 12, the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings hosted a discussion focused on the mobile revolution and the policy issues that must be addressed to ensure that mobile innovation continues to thrive. Moderated by Director Darrell West, Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, and Senator Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) shared their thoughts on the future of mobile technology and how government and private enterprise can best work together.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #TechCTI

Video

Audio

Accelerating the Mobile Technology Revolution

Who is an Effective Teacher? Improving Teacher Evaluation in K-12 Education

Thomas J. Kane — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 23:00:00 -0400

As states and districts implement new teacher evaluation systems, they will struggle to differentiate between excellent and poor instruction, as well as to define a minimum standard of effectiveness. The task is complicated by the legacy of perfunctory evaluations in K-12 education, in which more than 98 percent of teachers were given the same “satisfactory” rating.

To avoid making “effective” the new “satisfactory”, here is an alternative standard to consider: after a probationary period, a teacher is “effective” if and only if, based on the available evidence (such as from classroom observations, students surveys and student achievement gains), their predicted impact on students exceeds that of the average novice teacher. In other words, if, after a few years in the classroom, a teacher’s predicted effectiveness is below that of the average novice teacher in their grade level and subject, then he or she would fail to meet the minimum standard of effectiveness required for tenure.

Such a definition has two advantages: First, it makes explicit the decision a principal implicitly makes every time he or she retains a non-probationary teacher—to forego the opportunity to recruit a novice teacher as a replacement. Would an NFL coach give up a future draft pick for an experienced player he expects to perform worse than the average rookie? Not if he were trying to win. Would a principal promote or retain a teacher with expected performance below that of the average novice? Not if he or she had the students interests at heart.

Second, it is a self-correcting standard. If principals were to label an unreasonably large proportion of teachers as “exemplary”, then the observation score required to achieve “effective” status would increase. Moreover, if the pipeline of teachers were to dry up, and the quality of new recruits were to decline, then the standard for “effectiveness” would adjust downward. Likewise, if the quality of teacher preparation programs were to increase, then the standard for tenured teachers would be raised.

In their rookie year of teaching, most teachers struggle. Most teachers improve from their first to their second to their third year of teaching. However, a substantial share of teachers will underperform the average rookie in their third year of teaching. For instance, in the typical school district, the average classroom of students assigned to a rookie teacher loses .05 to .10 standard deviations in student achievement relative to students with similar starting points by the end of the year. Using data from several school districts, about 15 to 30 percent of third year teachers would have predicted effectiveness below that of the average novice.

When a teacher fails to demonstrate effectiveness, a principal should retain the ability to offer tenure. But tenure should no longer be the default outcome in such cases. A principal should be willing take additional steps, such as submitting a plan for supporting a teacher’s development or informing the parents in the school.

Two additional safeguards would contribute to the fidelity of the evaluation system:

First, observers should not only be trained, they should be asked to demonstrate their ability to apply the standards on a set of sample videos (which have been pre-scored by master observers.) For instance, an observer in any district using Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching should demonstrate their ability to recognize what unsatisfactory, basic, proficient and advanced questioning strategies looks like. However, while necessary, such training is unlikely to be a sufficient to prevent score inflation. In the Measures of Effective Teaching project, we learned that even when principals could apply the standards when observing teachers from outside their schools, they scored their own teachers higher than other observers did—granting a significant “home field advantage”.

Second, states and districts should compare the distribution of ratings in different schools or districts and study the correlation between observation ratings and other measures such as student growth measures or student surveys. We have learned a lot in recent years about what those relationships should look like. Outliers should be investigated. However, if every principal were inflating their scores similarly, it would be impossible to recognize.

The logic behind the “better than the average novice” threshold reflects the decision that principals implicitly make when they retain a teacher and forego hiring a new teacher. Moreover, the standard is responsive to factors such as score inflation and the supply of teachers. A teacher should not be labeled “effective” unless he or she is outperforming the average novice teacher.

Authors

Thomas J. Kane

Image Source: © Jim Young / Reuters

Would Ben Franklin Trade Liberty for Wiretapping?

Benjamin Wittes — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 08:57:00 -0400

Two years ago, I wrote a brief blog post about Ben Franklin’s iconic quote on the relationship between liberty and security:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

The post detailed research I was doing for a Brookings paper, published later in 2011, on the liberty-security relations seen through the lens of, among other things, data mining. The post, which details the rather surprising history and intended meaning of Franklin’s famous words, has had something of a renaissance in the context of the recent NSA wiretapping controversies. It has gone viral. A lot of people seem to be Googling Franklin’s quote this week. And Edward Snowden, the leaker himself, invoked the words in one of his interviews:

Snowden challenged this, saying the problem was that the Obama administration had denied society the chance to have that discussion. He disputed that there had to be a trade-off between security and privacy, describing the very idea of a trade-off as a fundamental assault on the US constitution.

In what were to be the last words of the interview, he quoted Benjamin Franklin: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."

The history of the quotation is, indeed, interesting; it actually does not mean what people (including Snowden) use it to mean. The larger paper, however, is worth reintroducing too in the context of the current conversation about the NSA’s data-mining programs. It is a broad examination of the relationship between security and liberty—and an attack on the idea that the two exist in some sort of “balance” in which a gain in one will tend to come at the expense of the other. It proposes a different way to think about this relationship—one based on an old text of evolutionary biology: the idea of a “hostile symbiosis.” And it proposed categories of surveillance that might even enhance, rather than erode, liberty.

And not only does it, like the blog post, detail the history of that famous Franklin quotation, it also gives the surprising history of Justice Robert Jackson’s famous warning about turning the Bill of Rights into a “suicide pact.”

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Benjamin Wittes

Image Source: © Chip East / Reuters

Are Public Pensions Keeping Up with the Times?

Richard W. Johnson, Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:56:00 -0400

Retirement plans for public employees in the United States face serious challenges: By their own calculations, states and localities are $900 billion short of the funds they need to set aside to pay for benefits they have already promised their employees, write the Urban Institute’s Richard W. Johnson and the Brookings Institution’s Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. Whitehurst. But the problem is far more serious than currently imagined. What states accountants won’t admit, Chingos, Whitehurst and Johnson argue, is that the funding problem is much worse than states’ calculations show.

The underfunding problem has two key components: First, by their own calculations, most states are not contributing enough to keep up with the pension promises they are making to their employees. Second, states’ calculations seriously understate the extent of the funding problem. Most states assume that they will earn an average rate of return of 8 percent a year on their pension funds, a highly unlikely outcome in the current economic environment. This unrealistic assumption still produces a staggering unfunded liability: $0.9 trillion in 2011. Using a more reasonable assumption of a 5 percent return increases the unfunded liability to $2.7 trillion, these scholars estimate, which implies that the average state has only funded half of its pension promises. A funding gap of $2.7 trillion is more than four times the $607 billion in general outstanding debt on states’ books in 2012, Chingos, Whitehurst and Johnson report.

And many public employee pension systems also have design features that, even if the pensions are properly funded, compromise state and local governments’ ability to attract and retain the best employees, these writers assert. Young workers have little incentive to join the state’s workforce unless they plan to remain on the payroll for at least 25 years. Those who leave their jobs earlier forgo a significant portion of the retirement benefits from their employer. This is because most pension systems provide very steep rewards late in employees’ careers, penalizing those who work for the state for “only” 10 or 20 years. But there is also a problem at the other end of the career ladder, with pension systems punishing employees for staying too long past normal retirement age. This design feature makes it difficult for the state to retain experienced older workers, many of whom have specialized skills and deep institutional knowledge that are difficult to replace.

As debate swirls around how to properly fund public employee benefits, this report assesses the real challenges facing state and local government retirement plans and details the problems facing public employee pension systems across the country. Chingos, Whitehurst and Johnson’s comprehensive examination of the existing research on this topic highlights the many problems facing these pension plans, including the underfunding that threatens states’ economic futures and outdated design features that cripple states’ ability to recruit and retain the best public servants.

In the video below, Chingos and Johnson discuss the issues raised in the paper:

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Are Public Pension Plans Keeping Up With the Times?

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Are Public Pension Plans Keeping Up With the Times?

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How Much of a Mark Can Obama Put on the Courts of Appeal?

Russell Wheeler — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Last month’s confirmation of Srikanth Srinivasan as a District of Columbia circuit judge means, nationally today, an even split among active status circuit judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents. With President Obama’s simultaneous nomination of three others to the D.C. court, some observers have suggested that “the president is poised to make his mark on the federal district and appeals courts in much the same way Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush did.”

How much of a mark he can make depends on who leaves active status and how many current and potential vacancies thus created Obama can fill. As to the courts of appeal, reversing 2009’s 60-40 ratio of Republican to Democratic active-status appointees may be a stretch, but coming close is arithmetically doable. (The party of appointing president balance among active status judges is hardly a precise predictor of the output of the courts of appeals—or the quality of the judges—but it is a consistent metric and worth examining.)

Fluctuating balances Obama and his two immediate predecessors inherited these party-of-appointing-president balances—numbers and percentages of active judges.

	Active Status Circuit Judges Appointed by:		Vacancies in the 179 Authorized Judgeships
	Republicans	Democrats
Jan. 20, 1993	119 (75%)	39 (25%)	21
Jan, 20, 2001	76 (50%)	77 (50%)	26
Jan. 20, 2009	99 (60%)	65 (40%)	15

Various factors affect how a president can put a mark on the judiciary. For example, compare today’s 50-50 breakdown to that in early June 2005, when the 95 Republican appointees created a 58-42 breakdown among active status judges. The Senate had confirmed essentially the same number of circuit judges—39 at that point for Bush and 36 up to now for Obama. Nine of those Bush appointees replaced Democratic appointees, but half of Obama’s appointees have replaced Republican appointees. President Bush was so far ahead of Obama at this administration mid-point in changing the face of the appellate judiciary because he started with a 50-50 balance, versus the 60-40 ratio that faced Obama on Inauguration Day.

Looking to 2017 Given that 60-40 ratio, Obama’s success has depended and will depend, as noted above, on who creates vacancies that he can try to fill. Almost all judges leave active status—thus creating vacancies—by taking senior status. A circuit judge can do so when she reaches 65 and her years as a circuit (and district) judge plus her age totals 80. Whether or not to leave active status can turn on many factors, such as wanting more leisure time but also wanting to create—or to avoid creating—a vacancy for a particular president to fill.

Here are the numbers for Bush’s first and second terms and Obama’s first (ignoring those who left active service in 2004, 2008 and 201l—no vacancies occurring in those years got nominees those same years):

Eligible to leave active service†
	R app'tees eligible	R app'tees leaving	D app'tees eligible	D app'tees leaving
2001-03	29	12 (41%)*	15	6 (40%)*
2005-07	36	15 (42%)*	21	3 (14%)
2009-11	38	13 (34%)**	31	11 (35%)**

†-Derived from the Federal Judicial Center’s Biographical Directory of Federal Judges. Slight imprecisions are possible, because the directory, for security reasons, does not give living judges’ birth dates/months.
*--includes one death of an active status judge not eligible for senior status
**-includes one death of an active status judge eligible for senior status

Republican and Democratic appointees were equally likely to create vacancies in Bush’s and Obama’s first terms, although the percentage of Republican appointees leaving active status declined slightly in Obama’s first term from the rates under Bush. Democratic appointees left active status at a much lower pace in Bush’s second term than they did in his first, perhaps anticipating a Democratic presidential inauguration in 2009.

What might be the balance on Inauguration Day 2017? Start with these facts: five nominations are pending for the 11 current or announced vacant judgeships held by Republican appointees and for three of the eight current or announced vacancies that Democratic-appointees created. And 38 Republican and 37 Democratic appointees will be eligible to take senior status by 2015. Apply to those facts some reasonable but hardly lead-cinch assumptions:

30 % of Republican appointees and 35% of Democratic appointees will leave active status by the end of 2015;
Obama will nominate candidates for nine of every ten vacancies that occur, reflecting what appears to be a more vigorous nomination pace seen so far this second term;
the Senate will confirm 60% of his nominees (down from the first term’s 72% rate).

This is the resulting comparison.

January of	J'ships	Rep. app's	Dem. app's	Vacancies	Active j's	% Rep	% Dem
2009	179	99 (55%)	65 (36%)	15 (8%)	164	60%	40%
2017	179	69 (38%)	92 (52%)	18 (10%)	162	43%	57%

We can fiddle with the assumed rates. For one scenario, if only 20% of the eligible Republican appointees took senior status by 2015, and Obama’s nomination rate was 80% for those vacancies, and the confirmation rate for them was 55%, the active-status judge balance in January 2017 would change by a percentage point.

Of course, the wheels could come entirely off the judicial confirmation machinery or, in some fantasy, it could start ticking like a Swiss watch. But, barring some major development, it appears Obama has a good chance of getting the party-of-appointing-president balance close to a mirror image of 2009’s, but no more.

Authors

Russell Wheeler

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Why the NSA Leaks Will Lead to More Economic Espionage Against American Companies

John Villasenor — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

What happens when an American economy built in significant part on intellectual property collides with overt second-class treatment of foreigners who entrust their data to American networks and systems? We’re about to find out.

On June 5, the world learned from the Guardian of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requiring Verizon to provide NSA with “metadata” for all Verizon phone calls involving at least one party within the United States. Metadata can include the calling and receiving phone numbers, location of the parties, and call time and duration, but not the actual audio content. A day later, the Washington Post described an NSA program called PRISM, which reportedly enables NSA to access data carried by “nine leading U.S. Internet companies” to extract “audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.”

In a pair of statements on June 6 and June 8, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper explained that the “collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” includes “extensive procedures . . . to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted,” and that “Section 702 cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person, or to intentionally target any person known to be in the United States.”

Foreign leaders, unsurprisingly, don’t find all of this particularly reassuring. As a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel quoted in the Washington Post observed, “you can safely assume that this is an issue that the chancellor will bring up” when she meets President Obama in Berlin next week. European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding said, “This case shows that a clear legal framework for the protection of personal data is not a luxury or constraint, but a fundamental right.”

In addition to spurring discussion on the tension between civil liberties and antiterrorism policies, the NSA leaks will have another, less widely recognized consequence: They will significantly increase the level of state-sponsored economic espionage directed against American companies. Why? Because many people overseas will view the NSA’s data collection itself as the defining attribute of the story, with less consideration of the larger American security context that frames it. Some of them will conclude that leveling the playing field requires ramping up their own countries’ efforts to eavesdrop on data from American companies.

NSA is almost certainly using the data it gathers under PRISM and from Verizon (and perhaps other carriers) solely for identifying potential terrorism or espionage threats to the United States. It is exceedingly unlikely that NSA would use PRISM, for example, to help an American company gain a competitive advantage in a bidding war against a foreign rival.

But perception can sometimes matter as much as reality, and some overseas observers appear to believe that the NSA surveillance has an economic component. As Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, reportedly said, “The German business community is on high alert . . . The suspicion in large parts of the business sector is that Americans would also be interested in our patent applications.”

Surveillance in the name of national security is still surveillance, and last week’s developments remind us all in irrefutable terms that nations have often felt much freer to spy on foreigners than on their own citizens. What varies among nations is the set of priorities that motivate the eavesdropping. In the United States, national security provides the motivation. For some other nations, the goal of maximizing economic success in the global marketplace is viewed as justifying espionage against foreign companies.

Of course, state-sponsored economic espionage is as old as the concept of states itself. But the NSA leaks will put wind in the sails of non-U.S. intelligence services aiming to ramp up espionage targeting American businesses. Budgets for spying on American businesses will grow, and people to do the work will be easier to hire.

According to the most recent EMC-sponsored IDC Digital Universe Study, an estimated total of 2.8 billion terabytes of data were created and replicated globally in 2012. Some fraction that tsunami of data passes through networks accessible to foreign intelligence services. And a small fraction of that, in turn, contains highly confidential information about the products, services, and future plans of American companies. When you start with a few billion terabytes, a fraction of a fraction is still a lot of information. And more than ever before, that information is at risk of being compromised and used to America’s economic disadvantage.

Authors

John Villasenor

Publication: Forbes

A Grand Bargain on Fracking? Lessons from Springfield, Illinois

Barry Rabe — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:54:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: A new Illinois statewide policy on shale development and the possible use of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) procedures was just passed with overwhelming majorities in both legislative chambers. Barry Rabe explains the significance of this legislation and how this aspect of the Illinois experience is worthy of national attention.

Paul Simon would likely be very proud. Throughout his long and distinguished service to Illinois in both state government and in Congress, he understood the complexities of combining energy development with environmental protection. This reflected his home base in downstate Illinois, with its significant fossil fuel deposits and extensive environmental treasures.

Simon died a decade ago and so never lived to address the issue of shale development and the possible use of hydraulic fracturing procedures in the very sections of Southern Illinois that he dearly loved. But he clearly would have applauded the type of multi-year effort that brought very diverse stakeholders together to develop a comprehensive new statewide policy on this issue. Indeed, that legislation was just passed with overwhelming majorities in both legislative chambers and was signed into law by Governor Patrick Quinn.

This law neither bans fracking nor tips the scales in favor of development with only modest restrictions. Instead, it reflects some extended and careful elements not found in most other states that have moved more rapidly into shale development. In particular, the new Illinois legislative package includes far more extensive chemical disclosure provisions than are common elsewhere, a severance tax mechanism designed to return some revenues to affected local communities, and expansive citizen participation mechanisms.

Perhaps most significantly, Illinois now will also require water testing before and after any drilling occurs, allowing for careful comparison that is simply not possible in most other states and drilling cases. This testing is coupled with a presumption of liability in the event that water contamination is detected after drilling. The widespread lack of such testing has led to huge uncertainty and controversy around the nation.

This approach secured buy-in from a remarkably diverse, albeit not unanimous, set of stakeholders across Illinois. It reflected significant legislative leadership and endured a number of challenges, including proposed amendments that might have crushed any compromise. And it is designed to provide an overarching governance mechanism for future shale drilling that can simultaneously allow development while going far beyond most states in providing important environmental protections.

Formal restrictions on the application of existing federal statutes for drinking water and waste management to shale drilling have essentially punted this issue to individual states and localities. Yet more than half of the American states have shale deposits, ranging from established state energy development powerhouses like Texas and Pennsylvania to other states that have virtually no prior experience in this area. Many have struggled to develop a credible policy regime and we are indeed beginning to see a patchwork quilt of state-by-state differences. Public opinion surveys find that the citizenry tends to support development but has misgivings about risks, and so supports a series of key environmental protection provisions.

And so Illinois thus takes a lead role in beginning to define what might be possible, particularly through assembling a coalition that takes a careful look at all facets of the issue and attempts to work across partisan lines to create a governance system that might be solid for the long haul.

Ironies abound in this case. It has been rare in recent decades to point to Illinois governance as a model for the nation. The state retains the lowest credit rating in the nation and has just failed yet again to fix a badly-broken system for state pensions. And it continues to hold one of the highest incarceration rates for former elected state officials, including a series of relatively recent governors. So it would hardly seem a likely case to produce a possible model for state best-practice in this emerging area.

But there has always been another side to Illinois, reflected in the life and public service career of Paul Simon. No other state has yet produced such an extensive review and balanced approach to shale development, making this aspect of the Illinois experience worthy of national attention.

Authors

Barry Rabe

Maryland v. King: An Unfortunate Supreme Court Decision on the Collection of DNA Samples

Richard Lempert — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 11:38:00 -0400

Maryland v. King, the recently decided DNA identification case, has elicited both cheers and jeers. Cheerers see the case as an important weapon in the fight against crime, while jeerers see the case as a serious infringement on privacy and 4^th Amendment freedoms. In this dispute the cheerers probably have the better case, but this is because a debate based mainly on interpretations of the 4th amendment does not get at the core of the issue we should be confronting. Perhaps the most common concern of those appalled at the decision is that collecting DNA samples involves an infringement on privacy that is by orders of magnitude greater than that which accompanies other identification evidence, such as fingerprints and photographs. DNA, they point out, can reveal far more about a person than a photograph or a fingerprint, including perhaps violence proneness and the likelihood of contracting different diseases. This concern is, however, largely groundless. DNA collected to match criminals to crimes includes information about 13 gene segments (alleles) that are part of the non-coding portion of the genome. They reveal no intimate information about their sources, nor are they likely to, and the information stored in a data base describes only these 13 alleles. The concern is not entirely groundless, however, for the Maryland statute at issue in King seems to contemplate that whether or not a DNA sample relates to the crime for which a person was arrested, it will be retained if the person is convicted of that crime. It is hard to see a legitimate reason for this or why a criminal upon conviction should lose this aspect of personal privacy, but the question of whether DNA samples following conviction could be retained and further analyzed was not at issue in this case.

The second concern of those appalled is simply that a search of a still innocent person has occurred without probable cause. The concern is fed by Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in King which is entirely unconvincing in its attempt to justify DNA collection as an ordinary part of the booking process, much like fingerprinting. The opinion suggests that the primary justification for taking an arrestee’s DNA is to allow the authorities to identify with certainty the person before them and to better assess the care with which he should be guarded or the danger that if released on bail he might flee or pose a threat to society. Justice Scalia in dissent demolishes this rationale, pointing out that fingerprints are a far faster means of identification and, he might have added, far cheaper. Moreover, in King the delay between the time King’s DNA was taken and when results were returned was about 4 months. Such delays are not unusual and mean that the DNA taken from arrestees cannot satisfy the concerns that for the King majority are the main rationales for allowing the search.

Yet it is hard for one who is not a 4^th Amendment purist to get upset about this search. DNA samples are taken by lightly brushing a swab on the inside of a person’s cheek. The time needed is negligible and intrusion could hardly be less. Compared to the disruption of the arrest and searches for weapons or contraband upon arrest, the “search” for DNA is nothing. Indeed it is nothing compared to the inconvenience and intrusion that is no doubt felt by the teenager who is stopped for “informal” questioning, not amounting to a search, on the streets of New York.

The cheerers, on the other hand, are right to see the DNA sampling of arrestees as a tool for crime control, although whether it will prove as valuable as its advocates claim remains to be seen. (Even if a cold case is solved the offender is already under arrest and most likely would have been convicted and sentenced for his most recent crime.) People are identified as criminals when their DNA is typed and matched to DNA taken at a crime scene or from a crime victim, as with semen found on a rape victim. The unsolved crimes in the DNA data base are serious ones and often, as with rape and burglary (where the UK has taken the lead) many offenders repeat their crimes if not caught. Moreover, the number of cold cases being resolved is not negligible. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation reports, for example, that it had 284 cold hits in 2011 using the national registry, including suspects in 13 homicides and 54 rapes, but a large proportion of these hits most likely would have come anyway from samples taken after arrestees were convicted. Still there are definitely crime control returns to taking DNA from arrestees, some future crimes are in all likelihood prevented and as knowledge of data base searches permeates society perhaps there will be deterrent effects as well.

But these virtues of DNA testing are beside the point, or at least they should be. The issue the Court barely touched on and never dealt with adequately is whether states are justified in singling out still innocent defendants for DNA testing and sparing the rest of us. If everyone’s DNA were tested, say at birth, and kept on file, even more DNA identifications would be made; more criminals would be locked away before they could offend again, and deterrence would be greater. Except by fiat it is hard even to argue for the generally accepted position that those convicted of crimes have forfeited their right to keep the information in their DNA to themselves. It is far harder to argue that those who have been selected by the police to be arrested have, before they are convicted, forfeited this right. Not only are arrestees presumed innocent, but many are in fact innocent of the offense that led to their arrest. In investigating a crime the police may arrest and release several suspects before they identify the true perpetrator, and many of those arrested are never tried or if tried are not convicted.

The difficulty of justifying King is still greater when one considers that the police do not arrest innocent people at random. Minorities appear particularly vulnerable. A just released study is instructive. It suggests that even though similar proportions of whites and blacks use marijuana, a black person is about 4 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as a white person, and in some places the disparity is several times as great. This means that blacks who have not committed the crime leading to their arrest are at greater risk than similarly innocent whites of being linked to another crime through DNA profiling. It is, in addition, not just those arrested who are especially vulnerable. If an arrestee’s DNA is the same on most but not all alleles to the DNA in a data base, there is a good chance, amounting often to almost a certainty, that a relative of the arrestee left the crime scene DNA. Moreover, we are not just talking about brothers and sons; the net can be cast very wide. In one UK case, the police compiled a list of 700 people who might have been the source of crime scene DNA that almost but not quite matched the DNA of the initial suspect. Based on considerations like age, gender and residence, they winnowed the list of relatives down to develop a manageable group for further investigation, and they eventually identified the perpetrator. Thus people who have never done anything to justify having their DNA typed are effectively in the DNA data base, and racial disparities in the likelihood of arrest will be reflected in the degree to which never-arrested members of different ethnic groups are vulnerable to DNA identification. The Maryland law at issue in King recognizes these problems. It allows DNA to be collected only from those arrested for serious crimes, and it does not allow familial searching. Other states are not so restrictive, however, and many in the criminal justice system are pushing for more use of near match identifications. The Court’s decision in King can be expected to spur movement in this direction.

What , one might ask, is so bad about using DNA samples taken from arrestees to identify people guilty of unsolved crimes? If an arrestee is found guilty of the crime that led to his arrest, it matters little whether his DNA is typed and compared to unsolved crime DNA before or after conviction. If he is not charged with or convicted of the crime leading to arrest, then but for the DNA typing he would continue to thwart justice for a crime he did commit, surely not a desirable outcome. Even the relative who is discovered by a near match is hardly an object of sympathy. He too is most likely to have not only committed a serious crime but also to have evaded capture for it. From a just deserts perspective nothing seems wrong. Those who have escaped justice now find they must pay the price for their crimes. From a distributive justice perspective the situation is, to be sure, more troubling, for it exacerbates the degree to which some minorities are more likely than similarly criminal whites to be arrested for their crimes. Still the cure should be to arrest more white criminals and not to let other who have committed crimes go free. Moreover, since much crime is intraracial those saved from future rapes or killings will often have the same heritage as those captured.

If there is an argument against more widespread DNA typing, it relates to the surveillance society we are building and when the 4^th Amendment will protect against this. Do we want to allow DNA to be taken when no crime is suspected if by doing this we will catch more rapists and murderers? The answer is unclear. We are, after all, a society that tolerates thousands of preventable gun deaths, many of which are criminal, in the name of individual freedom. Some like Justice Scalia will argue that regardless of results, suspicionless searches, even ones as minimally intrusive as a DNA cheek swab, offend our human dignity and violate the Constitution. Others will feel that the infringement on privacy and autonomy is minimal and that catching more rapists and murderers and deterring others makes the trade-off between dignitary interests and crime control more than worth it. It is the dispute between these two positions that we should as a society be deciding.

The problem with the King case is that it distorts our judgment of the values at stake. Psychologically when we think about the issues King raises, we are deciding for “the other.” Alonzo King was, after, all arrested for and found guilty of a serious violent crime. He is not like us. Thinking of King, it is easy to strike the balance in favor of crime control over 4^th Amendment rights and human dignity, for he certainly does not exemplify the latter. Yet Alonzo King, at the time his DNA taken, was in all legally relevant respects like us in his innocence. We should judge the result in King not with Alonzo King in mind but with ourselves, our friends and neighbors standing in his place. Some through near match searching are, unknowingly, already there. Others could be, for King is precedent for establishing a national DNA database since it is hard to imagine any principled distinction between King while he stands unconvicted and ourselves. (The only salient difference, that an arrest requires probable cause, is too thin a reed for any but the most cynical to rest upon.) It is in the context of establishing a national data base, to include our own, that we should consider the desirability of King. Reasonable people can differ. Some would be willing if not eager to have their DNA in a data base if that would deter crime and mean that more who were not deterred were caught. Others would side with Justice Scalia who wrote, “Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.” What is most wrong with the Court’s decision in King is not that it reached a bad result, but that it forestalls the debate we should be having.

Authors

Richard Lempert

Reaction to NSA Surveillance of U.S. Citizens’ Phone Records

Wells C. Bennett and Benjamin Wittes — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:49:00 -0400

We are at a bit of a loss to understand the FISA Court order that Steve discussed earlier and that Glenn Greenwald disclosed at the Guardian. As Steve noted, the order required Verizon Business Network Services, under Section 215 of the Patriot Act,

to produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or “telephony metadata” created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.

The order---assuming it hasn’t been since modified or contravened---lasts for three months, beginning on April 25 and ending in mid-July.

We have only the order itself, not the application that underlies it, but we have a hard time imagining the application that could have produced it. Section 215, codified in law as 50 U.S.C. § 1861, allows the government to apply to the FISA court for an order for production “of any tangible things . . . for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. . . .” To acquire such an order, the government does not have to do much---just as it doesn’t have to do much in a criminal investigation: It merely has to offer, in pertinent part, “a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation . . . to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

So we are trying to imagine what conceivable set of facts would render all telephony metadata generated in the United States “relevant” to a particular investigation----whatever it might touch on, or how broadly it might sweep. Presumably, the theory would have to be that the “tangible things” here are the giant ongoing flood of data from the telecommunications companies and that they are “relevant to an authorized investigation,” perhaps of Al Qaeda, “to protect against international terrorism.” That reading seems oddly consistent with the statutory text, which may be why the intelligence committee leadership seems so comfortable with the program. But assume this is right. And assume further that the government does not yet know the identities of all of the targets, or the persons with whom those targets might communicate. How is it possible that all calls between, say, a Washington D.C. restaurant and its fish supplier are “relevant” even to such a broad investigation?

The only possible answer to this question is that a dataset of this size could be “relevant” because there are ways of analyzing big datasets algorithmically to yield all kinds of interesting things---but only if the dataset is known to include all of the possibly-relevant material. The data itself may not be relevant, but the dataset is relevant because it is complete---and therefore is sure to include any communications by whomever the bad guys turn out to be.

The trouble is that if that constitutes relevance for purposes of Section 215, then isn’t all data relevant to all investigations? Grand jury subpoenas, after all, issue on the basis of relevance too—albeit relevance to a criminal investigation. Why couldn’t the FBI obtain all domestic metadata on the theory that some sort of data-mining would be useful in a mob investigation—and that a complete dataset is therefore “relevant” to it?

According to press reports today, the government has sought, and won, judicial approval for comparable Section 215 orders for years in the past. Its broad-sweeping collection, moreover, has been briefed to members of congressional intelligence committees. In particular, the Chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said that these collection activities are years old and regularly renewed by the FISC. The Ranking Member added that the collection described in the Guardian report is “nothing new.”

From a legal standpoint, it is undoubtedly significant that judges and legislators repeatedly have blessed these activities. Still, the government ought to explain why Section 215’s “tangible things” and “relevance” language do not permit any metadata to be deemed relevant and thus subject to production under the law. In other words, what's the limiting principle here? This is an even more important question if the harvesting of these records from Verizon is so unremarkable, and so long-lasting, as Senators today seemed to imply. The government needs to explain its position to the public, and not just to the FISC and to appropriate members of Congress.

Authors

Publication: Lawfare

How Ronald Reagan Taught Me My Most Unforgettable Political Lesson

William A. Galston — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:52:00 -0400

Twenty-nine years ago—June 6, 1984, the 40^th anniversary of D-Day—Ronald Reagan gave me an unforgettable tutorial in American politics.

I had just finished my second year as the issues director for Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign. While the tectonics of the race had been moving steadily in Reagan’s direction since the beginning of the year, we still had some prospects . . . or so I thought until his speech that day.

Reagan was the star, Peggy Noonan wrote the script, and Michael Deaver was the director. It was his finest hour. If there were an Oscar for best director of a political drama, Deaver would have won it that year. In fact, he might have retired it for good.

The setting Deaver chose and against which President Reagan stood was spectacular—atop the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, overlooking the deep blue of the Atlantic, framed by the lighter blue of the sky. Seated in front of the president were 62 survivors of one of World War Two’s most heroic episodes, when 225 Army Rangers climbed straight up the sheer cliffs in the face of machine guns and grenades raining down on them.

As I recall, a group of us had gathered in the Mondale campaign’s press room to watch the speech. There was dead silence as Reagan described the Rangers’ climb in vivid cinematic strokes. And then he reached the emotional climax:

“Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are of boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. And these are the heroes who helped end a war.”

As Reagan uttered these words, the camera slowly pulled back to reveal the grey-haired survivors of this ordeal. I started crying. When I looked around the room, I realized that I wasn’t the only one. I said to myself, “This isn’t a fair fight. The man I’m working for honorably represents a great American political tradition. The man we’re working against represents the memory of America at its best.”

As Reagan viscerally understood, it was a past to which many Americans of the early 1980s, scarred by Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis, yearned to return. Time magazine’s Lance Morrow got to the heart of it—America’s mourning for “the moral clarity that has been lost, a sense of common purpose that has all but evaporated.”

As issues director, I was immersed in the rational, evidence-based, linear process of policy development. Reagan taught me that policy issues rest on something deeper—not only moral principle, but moral sentiment and shared memory, and that the ability to evoke those deeper things is the most powerful of all political forces. But this deep well is not—cannot be—the artifact of a speechwriter, however skilled. It must already exist, at least inchoately, to be summoned by politicians who understand it, at least intuitively, assisted by writers who can give it clarity.

Reagan taught me something else that day, although it took me years to understand what it was. A pure politics of nostalgia is inert. To be effective, memory must be mobilized in the service of the future.

Of course the president was trying to win reelection. But long after, when I read the text of his speech, I saw that he was after something more: using the memory of a glorious past to shore up the unity of the West against the Soviet Union and to maintain public support for the sacrifices needed to end the Cold War on terms favorable to the cause of liberty.

Reagan represented a generation for whom World War Two was living history, and therefore a usable past. The questions are inescapable: What is living history for us today? And what are the wellsprings of memory and sentiment from which aspiring leaders can draw to build support for a better, more united future?

Authors

William A. Galston

The Postsecondary Education Conundrum

Cecilia Elena Rouse — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:00:00 -0400

Postsecondary education in the United States faces a conundrum: Can we preserve access, help students learn more and finish their degrees sooner and more often, and keep college affordable for families, all at the same time? And can the higher education reforms currently most in vogue—expanding the use of technology and making colleges more accountable—help us do these things?

Since the 1960s, colleges and universities have worked hard to increase access to higher education. Fifty years ago, with the industrial economy booming—as Sandy Baum, Charles Kurose, and Michael McPherson write in the latest issue of the Future of Children—only 45 percent of young people went to college when they graduated from high school. Today, they note, at least 70 percent enroll in some form of postsecondary education. Women, who once accounted for little more than a third of the college population, now outnumber men on campus, and minorities and the poor have also seen many barriers to a college education fall. Certainly, we still have work to do—for example, advantaged children are still much more likely than children living in poverty to go to college, and to attend elite institutions when they do. Yet the gains in access have been remarkable.

Over the past decade, critics have increasingly questioned the quality of college education in the U.S. In particular, they have pointed to low completion rates—only about half of the people who enroll at a postsecondary institution complete a degree or certificate within six years. Yes, there are many reasons that students attend such institutions, but even among those who report that they aspire to earn at least a bachelor’s degree, only about 36 percent do so.

Most recently, the loudest debates in higher education have been about cost. When people talk about the cost of postsecondary education, they usually mean tuition. The most alarming recent increases have been in the “sticker price,” or the published cost of attending an institution. Sticker prices for full-time in-state students at public four-year colleges and universities increased 27.2 percent between 2007 and 2012, according to the College Board. But only about one-third of full-time students pay the sticker price; the other two-thirds of full-time students pay the “net price,” which is the sticker price minus grants and other forms of aid. On average, the net price is 70 percent less than the sticker price. Even so, the net price of college has also increased steeply, by 18 percent over the same five years.

Many people take the sharp rise in tuition costs as evidence that institutions of higher education are inefficient and growing more so—in other words, that colleges and universities are spending more and more money to deliver the same education. They argue that if we aggressively adopt technology and strengthen accountability, we can make colleges and universities more efficient, whether that means providing the same education for less money, or a better education for the same cost.

But, in truth, tuition—whether we’re talking about sticker price or net price—doesn’t really tell us how much a college education costs. As McPherson, who is president of the Spencer Foundation, pointed out recently at a conference at Princeton, an institution’s total expenditure per student is a much better measure of the cost of a college education. Based on 2012 data from the College Board, expenditures per student, especially at public institutions, have been relatively flat over the past decade, increasing by about 6.4 percent at four-year public institutions and actually decreasing at two-year public institutions. Tuition itself accounts for only a part of the total expenditure per student. At public institutions in particular, the rest is made up largely by state subsidies. What has changed in recent years is that state subsidies have fallen precipitously, meaning that parents and students are shouldering more of the cost through rising tuition payments. From 2000 to 2010, the portion of total expenditures covered by tuition at public institutions went from just over one-third to just over one-half, with subsidies falling accordingly. If we look at the cost of college this way, it’s unlikely that growing inefficiency is the main problem facing institutions of higher education; in fact, they are educating more students than ever and doing so at roughly the same cost per student. Nonetheless, few people expect state subsidies to rebound to their former levels. If college is to remain affordable, state institutions must seek ways to lower their cost per student so that they can keep tuition in check.

What are the prospects, then, that technology and accountability can help us rein in the rate of growth in tuition? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t clear.

Technology

Policymakers like to focus on advances in technology as a solution for the tuition crisis because a major component underlying the cost of a postsecondary education is the cost of paying the faculty. As long as the wages that faculty members could earn in other parts of the economy continue to increase, there will be upward pressure on the cost of educating students. But if we could use advanced technology to let each faculty member teach more students, we could lower the cost of a college education. However, no one wants such an increase in productivity to reduce the quality of the education that students receive. Therefore, if technology is to help us solve higher education’s quandary, it must provide education at a lower cost without lowering its quality.

We have scant evidence of whether e-learning is comparable in quality to traditional classroom instruction. However, the best research so far suggests that in large lecture classes, at least, especially those that cover introductory material in some subjects, students learn just as well online as they do in “chalk and talk” classes. We know even less about the long-term cost of teaching in this way. On the one hand, once we pay the start-up and transition costs associated with adopting new technology and training faculty how to use it, the cost per student is likely to fall because faculty will be able to teach more students in larger classes. On the other hand, the best evidence about technology comes from its use in large lecture classes; we know much less about its effectiveness in smaller, typically more advanced courses, which are more expensive to teach by definition. We also have virtually no evidence about technology’s effectiveness in some disciplines, particularly the humanities. If technology can’t deliver the same education that students get in the classroom, what may look like a decrease in cost may actually be a decrease in quality. Thus before we know whether widespread adoption of technological tools is truly a promising approach to reducing the cost of a college education, we need more and better evidence about how these tools affect student learning, in which settings and for whom they work best, and how much they cost to implement and maintain.

Accountability

Policymakers are also talking about accountability as a way out of the postsecondary conundrum. Most public institutions receive state subsidies based on the number of students they enroll. Enrollment-based funding gives these colleges and universities a huge incentive to increase access, but far less incentive to boost completion rates and other measures of student success. On the heels of the movement to increase accountability in K-12 education, a lot of people, including President Obama, have been calling to make colleges and universities more accountable, most notably by tying some portion of state or federal funding to student completion or other measures of success—for example, how many graduates find jobs. Many states have already tried this, but the results have been disappointing (though it must be said, as Davis Jenkins and Olga Rodriguez write in the Future of Children, that much of the research on performance funding thus far has been qualitative rather than quantitative). One reason that performance funding hasn’t worked well may be that the percentage of aid that states have tied to performance has been quite low, meaning that institutions have had little to lose if they fail to meet performance targets. As a result, some reformers are calling for an even stronger connection between funding and accountability. Fair enough, and probably worth a try, but the bottom line is that we have yet to find solid evidence that tying appropriations to student success will produce the results we desire. And caution is in order: Unless such an approach is implemented and monitored carefully, it will create a perverse incentive for institutions to restrict admission to the students who are most likely to do well, thus potentially reversing the gains in access that we’ve worked so hard to achieve.

Conclusion

Despite the caveats I’ve presented here, I believe that both technology and accountability have their place in any effort to solve the postsecondary conundrum.

In the case of new technological tools to expand teaching productivity, we need to carefully study their effect on student learning, institutional stability, educational quality, and cost. It’s going to take some tinkering to build new models of technology-supported teaching that work as well as or better than a traditional classroom education, and we should not hesitate either to try promising approaches or to abandon those that fail to make the grade.

When it comes to imposing stronger accountability, we need comprehensive data systems and other ways to gather information that will give us a clearer, more scientifically sound picture of institutional performance than do the rough measures we use now, such as completion rates. Furthermore, measures of quality should never be the only criteria through which we reward or punish postsecondary institutions, not only because expanding access must remain a priority, but also because it is extremely unlikely that we will ever be able to capture all of postsecondary education’s beneficial outcomes through large-scale data.

In the end, however, technology and accountability alone will not solve the postsecondary conundrum. As tuition costs rise, parents and prospective students are starting to question the value of the postsecondary institutions they’re considering, seeking better information about quality and completion rates, and making decisions based on hard financial realities. This kind of pressure from prospective students and their families is likely to be the most effective incentive of all.

Authors

Cecilia Elena Rouse

A Century Later: The Adoption of the 17th Amendment on Direct Election of Senators

Darrell M. West and Beth Stone — Fri, 31 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Today (May 31, 2013) marks the 100thanniversary of the adoption of the 17th Amendment. With such an important milestone, it is worth pausing to ask the question of what our country has gained from a century of directly electing its senators. In a recent posting by Governance Studies at Brookings in our Issues in Governance Studies, we published a paper by Wendy Schiller (Brown University) and Charles Stewart III (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) entitled “The 100^th Anniversary of the 17^th Amendment: A Promise Unfulfilled?”

Using an original data set of roll call votes for U.S. senator taken in all state legislatures from 1871-1913, Schiller and Stewart investigate the dynamics of Senate elections in the indirect system. They argue that the 17th Amendment has failed to deliver and has produced a Senate even less responsive to voters than under the indirect election system. Characteristics of Senate elections in the indirect age parallel today’s Senate in terms of the types of candidates that run, the role of money in elections, the influence of partisanship, and the nature of Senate ideological and legislative behavior.

Some of the main takeaways are the following:

Corruption and inefficiency in indirect elections (by state legislature) were the driving forces behind the emendation, one part of the Progressive movement for more open, accessible, and responsive government.
Under indirect elections, the pool of candidates was deep with experienced politicians who wanted to remain in office, similar to today.
Despite the blatant use of money to win indirect Senate elections, 100 years after the 17th Amendment was enacted, the modern Senate elections process is swamped with campaign money in ways that far outpace elections under the indirect elections system.
In the Senate, polarization was high under indirect elections and then decreased after the adoption of the 17th Amendment. Yet it began to increase in the late 1970’s and is now as large as significant as it was under the indirect elections system.
Today’s senators are no more responsive to constituent needs than their counterparts elected indirectly by their state’s legislature.

The dysfunction associated with the modern Senate extends well beyond the election of its members. Inherent flaws in the Senate’s construction should be recognized and voters should be wary of false promises. It’s worth reflecting, now, on the effects of this constitutional change on democracy in America.

Read the full paper on the 100th anniversary of the 17th Amendment here »

Authors

Darrell M. West
Beth Stone

Rethinking Responsibility in Innovation

Thu, 30 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

May 30, 2013
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

While emerging technologies—like nanotechnology, synthetic biology and advanced manufacturing—bear the promise of great benefits to society, they also pose significant risks. New sciences and technologies substantially affect society and yet it is nearly impossible to anticipate every major consequence of their advancement, development and commercialization. Who is responsible for those consequences? How is responsibility distributed among the various actors who influence and regulate innovation such as private enterprises, the government, inventors and the general public?

On May 30, the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings hosted a public forum to discuss the role of social responsibility in each stage of the innovation process. A panel of experts discussed the kinds of institutions and incentives that govern innovation and how they shape the behavior of researchers, high-tech firms, capital investment firms, and regulatory agencies.

Audio

Rethinking Responsibility in Innovation