Something completely different: Chinese education!

Nicholas Kristof recently published an op-ed in the New York Times about how great education is in China. Mostly it was same-old, same-old: Chinese families value education and respect teachers, and Chinese students work harder, so they outperform American students. On the face of it, these seem to me reasonable claims, even if they are simplistic and banal. But he also suggests that the Chinese state--the People's Republic of China, that is--is doing a bang-up job of operating an educational system. To which I could not help but reply: Say what?

Somewhere in the middle he writes:

"Teachers are respected and compensated far better, financially and emotionally, in China than in America...The town [of Dongguan] devotes 21 percent of its budget to education, and it now has four universities. An astonishing 58 percent of the residents age 18 to 22 are enrolled in a university."

Now, I am not an expert on this, of course, but what I've seen about the Chinese education system in the Chinese media and scattered foreign reports over the past few years has suggested that public funding for education in China is in a pretty dismal state. Consider this excerpt from a report based on a UNESCO/OECD study:

"The available data indicate that public spending on education and health [in China] was 2.8% and 0.6% respectively of revised GDP in 2004. These ratios are lower than in many developing countries such as Thailand and the Philippines, let alone OECD countries. Spending on education and health appears low not only relative to other countries, but also in comparison with China’s own national objectives."

Based on the same set of data, another report notes that "In relation to GDP, [Chinese] public spending on education and health is well below that of nearly all OECD as well as most comparable developing countries, while private spending in these areas is among the highest in the world."

You can find the relevant tables here.

For comparison, the same report puts public spending on education in the US at 3.8% of (a much larger) GDP. So is Dongguan an anomaly (and if so, why?), or does “the town of Dongguan” really mean “the private citizens of Dongguan,” or has public funding for education in China skyrocketed between the OECD report and now? I doubt the last possibility.

Anecdotally, this failure to fund appears in the form of complaints about elementary and secondary schools starting to charge fees for everything from books to activities—fees that are heavy and amount to a tuition charge for the education that is supposed to be compulsory and provided by the state. The Chinese media have resounded with such complaints for several years. Google the term luan shou fei 乱收费 (“arbitrarily collecting fees”) and you will get 2 million hits, some of which are about hospitals (responding to a similar lack of public funding for health), but most of which are about “public” schools. Does this really sound like a society in which “governments and families alike pour resources into education”?

If the student’s family can scrape up the fees to get her through primary and secondary school, she does have a better chance of going to college than in the past, since the Chinese government initiated a massive expansion of the higher education system in 1999. Last year I read a report (which seems no longer to be available) about this on the website of the Center on Chinese Education at Columbia. It said that in 1978 there were 856,000 students total in Chinese colleges and universities, and in 2000 the number of places available for freshmen alone was 1.8 million. And last year during the national college entrance exam, the Chinese newspapers reported that the number of freshman slots available at four-year colleges was 2.6 million.

But this has not been an unmitigated good for Chinese society. The number of jobs available for university graduates is now much smaller than the number of university graduates, meaning that a lot of students and their families are going into debt for a college degree that ends up meaning nothing in terms of earning potential or social advancement. This is one source of great dissatisfaction and potential unrest among young Chinese.

Finally, when Kristof concedes (in a single sentence) that China’s education system does have a few problems--“bribes and fees to get into good schools, huge classes of 50 or 60 students, second-rate equipment and lousy universities”—he seems to trivialize corruption. My impression is that corruption is a very serious problem indeed, though of course it’s hard to gauge its extent. It’s not just bribes to get into schools, but bribes to certify teachers who fail to pass tests; bribes that add points to wealthy students' scores on the gao kao (national college entrance exam); and much more.

Kristof's culture-based points I find it easier to accept; the Chinese certainly value education, and families (even very poor ones) are willing to devote a great deal of their collective resources to it. It would be nice if more American families shared this attitude. But I think that lauding the People’s Republic of China for “boosting education,” as he does, misrepresents a system that is deeply dysfunctional.

Dems Drop Deadlines: Tell Libs to Drop Dead

Forgive the tabloid headline--I couldn't resist. There are only early reports, to be sure, but it seems that the Democratic leadership has decided that firm deadlines and benchmarks for the bill to fund more of the Iraq war will not be in the next bill. I'm probably more sensitive than many lefties to the political realities Harry Reid et al are dealing with here: they don't have enough votes to override a veto; they don't have much consensus among their own ranks as to what to do next; they are scared of enabling a Republican 'stab in the back' attack. So, the thinking goes, why not use this bill as leverage for whatever non-Iraq measure we can get, and then start planning for September, when we will probably be able to count on support from a few Republicans, and the public will be even more sick of this damn war than they are now. Okay--fine. So you trade a vote for a months-long funding bill for Republican support of some other legislation, like raising the minimum wage. What you're doing is swallowing support of an incredibly unpopular war (and an incredibly unpopular president) in order to force the Republicans to vote for something that's very popular. Does that make any sense?

I don't understand why the Dems think it's their duty to pass some sort of bill that the president will sign, and to do so sooner rather than later. Funding for the war will run out unless more legislation is approved. By remaining steadfast on the inclusion of deadlines in any further funding, the Dems can either force the Bushies to come up with a bill that's acceptable to *the Democrats*, or end the war by running out the clock on current funding. The end-game for the second option is messy, indeed--probably some sort of Constitutional crisis as King Bush tries to keep the war going without any legislation from Congress, and the dead-ender Republicans screaming bloody murder about how the Dems have abandoned our troops in the field.

But please--the Republicans will be screaming bloody murder anyhow, because it's all they've got left. And the vast majority of Americans want this war to end, and end quickly. If it takes a Constitutional crisis, fine--better to force Bush to practice his Constitution-wrecking in public. He's like an alcoholic in his thirst for power. Quietly trying to wait it out, hoping that the problem will go away, is just enabling further abuse. We need an intervention, and the sooner the better.

Dems should stick to their guns on including deadlines in any further funding bills. If Bush says he will veto any bill with deadlines, fine--make him veto them again and again. Hell, if you want to make a game of it, see how lengthy the deadlines can get before Bush says he'll sign the bill. Five years? Twenty? At the very least the Dems ought to be able to use the funding bill to find the limits of Republican support for Bush's war. If no deadline, however lengthy, is acceptable, then how about some benchmarks? Force Bush to certify at regular intervals that the Iraqi government is making progress towards stability and self-security. Certainly there ought to be some metrics enough Republicans would agree on to enable passage with a veto-proof majority. And if there isn't, no bill will pass, and war funding runs out anyway.

Come on, Dems--this is a big opportunity. Your professed principles and political utility coincide on this. Don't cave in to Republican bluster, and your own learned cowardice now.

Tax Time: What Do Our Taxes Buy?

Like many Americans, I'll be filling out my tax forms this weekend. Just in time, Peter Rothberg over at The Nation has provided a great link to the National Priorities Project, where you can see the breakdown of where all your federal income taxes go. The main punchline is, of course, that a huge proportion is going to past and present military expenditures, including the vast amounts that we are pouring down the drain in Iraq. You can also get a graph scaling the proportion the median family income in your city or area.

But the most interesting feature, in my opinion, is the section on "trade-offs"...which allows you to see what the foolish and immoral expenditures of the Republicans and Bush Administration could have bought instead. You choose either a state or a congressional district. (Since I live in a small town on the border between two districts, I decided to go for the whole State of Pennsylvania.) Then you select one of several "bad" expenditures along with something really worthy we could have used the money for instead. Here are three examples:

"Taxpayers in Pennsylvania will pay $5.2 billion for the cost of the Iraq War in FY 2007. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided: 6,310,120 Homes with Renewable Electricity."

"Taxpayers in Pennsylvania will pay $422.1 million for ballistic missile defense in FY2007. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:
6,491 Port Container Inspectors."

"$56.5 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% this year could be spent on the people of Pennsylvania instead. If that money were used to support state and local programs, the residents of Pennsylvania could have $2.5 billion, which could provide:
41,309 Elementary School Teachers."

"Taxpayers in Pennsylvania will pay $17.4 billion for the cost of the Iraq War through 2007. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:
4,040,849 People with Health Care."

Wow--I knew the military budget was obscenely high (and the Iraq War in particular!)...but that figure even surprised me. So, just for the amount of money spent by Pennsylvania taxpayers alone on the Iraq War, we could have provided OVER FOUR MILLION PEOPLE with health care.

If you can read that figure and not be stopped in your tracks for a minute to consider once again the idiocy of our country's misplaced priorities, then think about those 4 million people--4 million people, living on the knife's edge of insecurity and bankruptcy, should a major health crisis come up. The working poor of this country--and increasingly, even those in the "middle class"--should be at the top of our national agenda, not at the bottom below tax cuts for the rich, imperial invasions, and insanely expensive weapons systems.

I realize that if you are reading this, I am probably preaching to the choir. But perhaps we can use this hard data to help convince our fellow Americans of the urgent necessity of drastically cutting our military spending? It's a conversation we simply must have at some point very soon. As the figures above show, the current fiscal year expenditures on Iraq from PA taxpayers along could provide over 6 MILLION HOMES WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY. If we are ever going to plan our way out of our fossil fuel dependency, we have to invest in renewable energy NOW while we still can. We simply must do it. And, as this evidence makes clear, the elephant in the middle of the room is our military spending, which we must cut (along with tax breaks for the rich) in order to accomplish our most valued goals.

"I'm not sure of the physics, but..."

Is it just me, or does every harebrained scheme e-mailed to Danger Room contain some version of the phrase above? As an employee of a famous learned society, I have been favored with one such e-mail myself, proposing a method of time travel, and it also contained a similar admission. I'm not terribly informed of physics myself, but that doesn't seem to be as stimulating to my imagination as it is to some others.

Gonzales predictions

What did he know, and when did he know it? Or, if you're feeling more pessimistic about the future of our current AG, Alberto "Fredo," "Geneva Conventions are quaint" Gonzales: When will he go, and how will he do it?

With Republican senators offering at best lukewarm support, Fredo's days may, indeed, be numbered. But the senators seem to have fixated on the need for Gonzales to clear up the record about his involvement in the firings. As others have pointed out, this is only part of the cover up. The question at the heart of the matter is why were the USAs fired in the first place? Even admitting that it was for 'political reasons,' as Trent Lott seems very willing to concede, does not really answer the question.

The real answer, I suspect, is a combination of the mundane and the Machiavellian. Look for the White House and DOJ, once they regain their senses in the face of actual or threatened subpoenas from the House, to emphasize the mundane half of the explanation: that the firings were just part of an effort to build the Republican bench of people eligible for higher political and/or judicial appointments. They fumbled this very badly, of course, in the way the firings were handled, and the lying to cover up their fumbling may still cost Gonzales his job even if the 'bench-building' explanation is accepted by the media and public.

The more sinister side of the firings involve efforts to derail investigations into Republican corruption, and to punish those who would not play along with the GOP's phony voter fraud charges. Most likely, Rove saw the chance to kill two or three birds with one stone (or eight stones, as the case may be), and the USA's were dismissed for a combination of mundane and sinister reasons. Alas for the White House, they seem to have grown to used to a rubber-stamp Congress and press, and figured they could slip this by without attracting attention. (I'm not saying we've yet regained a fully-functioning opposition party and fourth estate yet, but there have been improvements.) If they had just gone with the bench-building explanation in the first place, they might have succeeded, too.