Sunday, February 13, 2011

We Need Clear Goals for Our Education System and Citizen Activists for Our Country

For a decade now, we've been trying to improve an education system in America that we know falls short in a variety of ways.  But as we "Race to Nowhere" while "Waiting for Superman," we seem to increase the value of standardized testing as a means of evaluating our students, schools and teachers without really knowing what our real goals are.  How will we know when we have created a truly excellent system for the 21st century?  Are we merely looking to teach students how to do well on standardized tests?  Do the tests assess what we truly value?  Or do they often lower the bar, creating minimum standards and then encouraging teachers to teach to the test and abandon what they know is "best practice"?

Are we really looking to just increase graduation rates?  How can that be a meaningful statistic if we don't know what we want kids to know and be able to do if and when they do graduate?

A hundred years ago, our education system was geared toward teaching kids how to be prepared for jobs working in factories, and how to be citizens in a democracy.  Well, we don't have many factory jobs left in the US, and the standardized tests I've seen - and I've seen plenty - don't assess a student's ability to be an effective citizen.

So what do we want kids to know and be able to do?  There has been a lot written and discussed about teaching kids "21st century skills," and I do agree with much of it.  But there hasn't been enough done to help teachers actually teach those skills or figure out how to assess them.  And, meanwhile, the national obsession with standardized testing largely runs counter to that effort.  In the absence of clear goals, however, getting kids to do better on these tests - and to fare better in tests that compare kids in the US with their overseas peers - will drive spending and reform efforts.

I, for one, am increasingly convinced that my job as a social studies teacher is to teach kids how to be effective citizens in the 21st century.  I want them to understand how and why a democracy needs the active participation of its citizens, how individual citizens and groups of concerned Americans have made an enormous difference in our country's past, solving long-term problems and urgent crises.  I want them to have the skills to research issues and problems effectively, to learn the relevant lessons from history, and to weigh the evidence and possible solutions so they can decide for themselves what should be done.  I want them to know how to take that knowledge and put it into action - how to be a citizen activist.  How do you participate in a democracy in the 21st century?  How do you get your fellow citizens to care about an issue and support your cause?  How do you get your government to address the problems you care about and take actions you believe are necessary for the common good?

The people of Tunisia and Egypt showed us this past month how even under repressive regimes people can make a difference and bring about real change.  In a democracy like ours, it should be even easier.  Indeed, throughout our history, average Americans have made an enormous difference, in spite of the control big money has had on our politics since the 1800s.  But we need to teach our kids how to be agents of change, how to take responsibility for their country and government.

If we feel a need to measure our success toward that end, can we?  Well, I'd love to hear some ideas from fellow educators and other concerned Americans, but for starters, we could measure our success by how many 18-30 year olds vote in each election, how many student protests there are a year, how many 18-30 year olds write or visit their member of Congress, etc.  In our classrooms, we can assess the skills and know-how pretty easily.  Kids can write to their member of Congress, propose legislation and constitutional amendments, blog, post on Twitter, write letters or op-eds for their local newspapers, create action plans on important local, national, or global issues.

Please let me hear from you.  What should our other goals be?

"We can do everything!" The Real Lesson of Egypt

As I was watching This Week on ABC this morning, they had a brief clip of a woman in Tahrir Square after Mubarak stepped down.  She said, jubilantly, "We can do everything!"  For me, that may be the biggest lesson from the 18 days of protest that toppled the former autocratic ruler and US ally.

All too often, we are limited by what we believe to be possible.  But those limiting beliefs are self-fulfilling prophesies.  If we believe something is impossible, then it is.  We fail to attempt it or put in a half-hearted effort, convinced that failure is inevitable.  So it is.  Indeed, it becomes our excuse for not even trying.  We find comfort in believing that we saved ourselves from disappointment and wasted effort.  But it is a coward's alibi for inaction and complicity.

My own life is full of wonderful examples of people telling me, over and over again, that something is impossible, only to find out that it is, indeed, possible.  Sometimes, I even found that it was relatively easy.  It seems that once we reach and cross over that tipping point where something that seemed impossible now seems possible, we realize it is actually the status quo that is fragile and impossible to maintain.  Change is inevitable, and the momentum shifts toward the change we now believe in.

People told me I couldn't go to college a year early, after my junior year in high school.  But I did.

People told me I couldn't pass the Foreign Service exam, and certainly not on the first try.  But I did.  (By one point!)

People told us we couldn't get the US House of Representatives to pass legislation lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia.  But we did - a mere six months after forming the American Committee to Save Bosnia and less than five months after starting our advocacy campaign.  And a year later, we passed it in both houses of Congress by veto-proof 2/3 majorities!

I am proud of these achievements, but they pale in comparison to those of countless other people who have truly accomplished the previously unthinkable.

People said when I was growing up that the Iron Curtain would never fall.  But it did.  I was fortunate enough to witness the collapse of Communism first hand from my posting in Moscow.  even got to help tear down the Berlin Wall with my own two hands and was an election monitor in the first free and fair elections ever in the history of the Soviet Union.  I saw the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union stand up and demand their freedom.  With the exception of Romania, each revolution was peaceful and relatively swift.

People said we would never elect an African American to be President of the United States - but we did.

And, now, after people said for decades that the Mubarak regime could never be toppled, the people of Egypt took to the streets for less than three weeks and showed, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., before them, that non-violent protest can achieve the impossible.

So when we talk in this country about how it seems impossible to stop a genocide in Darfur or the Congo, or to fix our inadequate education system, or to take back control of our political system from the big corporations and wealthy Americans who currently dominate it, or to reduce our federal budget deficit or fix Medicare and Social Security, or to solve the climate change crisis, let us remember the people of Egypt and Tunisia.  They accomplished something "impossible" by believing they could and then doing it.

We really can do everything!

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Trying to Understand Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

Updated 2/27/11

So what is the "Muslim Brotherhood"?  What is its agenda?

For  much of his time in office, Mubarak warned the US and the West that it needed to support him because the alternative was a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization he portrayed as a radical Islamist group.  If the MB took over Egypt, he warned, it would be like the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Some politicians and pundits in the US, particularly on the right, have similarly warned of a pending catastrophe if the MB took over.  At a minimum, it would be like having Hezbollah or Hamas running Egypt, they warn.  Or, at its worst, it would mean the establishment of a Caliphate that would take over the Arab world and present the more dire threat to the US ever.

Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich's apocalyptic warnings aside, I have been looking for more objective and informed analysis of the MB, its agenda, and its role in the current crisis and Egypt's future.  So I am gathering worthwhile and interesting resources and will compile a list in this post, which I will update as more come across my screen.  I hope others might find this list helpful and informative and that you will send me links to new ones as you find them.  I do not know how accurate or reliable any of these resources are, but I share them in the hope that one or more might prove helpful in getting a clearer, more complete picture of the MB.  Most do seem to paint a portrait of the MB that is more moderate, for now, than I had imagined in the past.

Helpful Links on Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood

New! Harvard University professor Dr. Tarek Masoud, on Fareed Zakaria's GPS
What the Muslim Brothers Want, by Essam El-Errian in the New York Times
Explaining Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Lawrence Wright on NPR's Fresh Air
Don't Fear Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, by Bruce Riedel at Brookings
Should We Fear the Muslim Brotherhood?, by Shadi Hamid in Slate
The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood, by Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke for Foreign Affairs
Understanding Revolutionary Egypt, by various authors (including two of the ones above) for Foreign Policy
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood: Islamist Participation in a Closing Political Environment, by Amr Hamzawy and Nathan J. Brown for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Egypt Opposition Wary After Talks, from the BBC




Egyptian Turning Points? Or Just More Uncertainty...

We're in some uncharted waters here.  As much as many people in the US, myself included, would like to draw comparisons to past grassroots uprisings - Tehran in '79, Tienanmen Square in '89, Berlin and Eastern Europe also in '89 - what is happening in Cairo is not exactly the same.  Different country, different regime, different history, different culture, different people, different time.  So it is difficult to know which lessons to draw upon from history, which policies to repeat and which to avoid, and where are the key turning points.

Watching some of the Sunday morning talk shows here in the US, it's clear that more and more journalists, pundits and policy makers are similarly uncertain.  I'm certainly no expert on Egypt, though I have been following the events of the last two weeks closely.  Here are some observations and thoughts at what may prove to be a turning point in the revolution in Egypt.  My main theme, I think, is how uncertain everyone involved is.

  • The protesters in Tahrir Square have been remarkably successful at organizing themselves as protesters, but there seems to be a lack of cohesion and organization as an emerging political movement.  As a result, there seems to be no clear agenda beyond toppling Mubarak, and, yet, it seems that the protesters really want something more:  some kind of liberal democracy, at a minimum.  But it appears that they have no shared road map for how to get there, so they don't know what to demand beyond Mubarak stepping down.  But the real issue is that Egypt has been a military dictatorship for almost half a century.  
  • As a result of the limits on political freedoms in Egypt over the decades, there is a lack of political parties and perspectives in the Egyptian political sphere.  So we see the Muslim Brotherhood emerge as a major player, even though it represents at best 20-25% of the Egyptian people.  And we see what may be the beginning of a splintering in the opposition, as certain parties enter into talks with the government while the majority of the protesters appear to be unrepresented and even uncertain as to when, if ever, they would negotiate with the government.
  • Without a clear leadership for the protest movement, US journalists keep interviewing each other, some Egyptian and foreign journalists, a few Egyptian officials, and Mohamed El Baradei, who appears to be a spokesperson for some of the protesters but lacks legitimacy as a true leader for the opposition and also lacks a clear agenda beyond toppling Mubarak.  I have yet to see or hear one interview with a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood or with anyone purporting to be a leader of any other faction of the opposition. 
  • Fareed Zakaria, as usual, has some of the more interesting and compelling analytical points to make, and asks many of the best questions when interviewing people on GPS. Today, he pointed out that, while many in the US and the West are fearful that the current uprising in Egypt will lead to a repeat of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, with a Muslim extremist government taking over, the most likely scenario for that result is that the US is seen as helping the army and the current regime maintain power when Mubarak eventually steps down, angering the protesters and the many Egyptians who want change and feel like they deserve it after all that the protests have accomplished so far.  Resentment toward the regime and the US grows, the population and the opposition, in particular, becomes more radicalized and more religious, and eventually there is another uprising that does bring about a regime more like Tehran's.
  • The Obama Administration, the protesters, and those around the world who support the general aims of many of the protesters - an end to the Mubarak regime and the rise of democracy in Egypt - have a bit of a quandary right now.  How do you get Mubarak to step down and transition to democracy in a country where political freedoms have been limited for so long?  It takes time for a truly free press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly to create new political parties and a healthy debate over various visions for Egypt's future and the role of its government in shaping that future.  If elections are held too quickly, the current regime might well find a way to use them to extend its grip on power, with new faces at the top but the army still in control.  Or, one or more factions in the opposition might be able to grab power in a political vacuum left by Mubarak's demise and the absence of real political parties.

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

The Lesson of Egypt: A New Paradigm for US Foreign Policy

Some commentators in recent days have highlighted the dilemma for US policy makers in addressing the protests in Egypt:  How can we support calls for democracy and freedom in the Middle East while not rashly abandoning a vital US ally in the region?  Calling for Mubarak's ouster in the early days of the crisis could have sent the "wrong" message to other US allies in the region and around the world.  If you are an autocratic regime and face a popular uprising, the US will drop you like a hot potato.  The last thing the US needs in the Middle East and elsewhere is to have its allies and partners in the war on terror lose faith in our commitments to them.  If we would abandon Mubarak - for three decades, the most important and reliable US ally in the Arab world, in whom we've invested our trust and billions of US tax dollars - who wouldn't we abandon?


There's also the caution that "the devil you know may be better than the devil you don't know."  It's a compelling argument, since it wisely kept us from toppling Saddam Hussein during the 1990s.  Stability is better than a power vacuum, and a friendly dictator is better than a hostile one.  Mubarak played upon this fear, hyping the dangers presented by a possible Islamist takeover in Egypt (beware the Muslim Brotherhood - any group with the word "Muslim" in its name must be bad, right?  And some of al Qaeda's founders used to belong to the MB 30 years ago!).


So, do we have clear policy goals in the region, arguably the most important strategically in the world these days?


Well, some of my students tried to identify US policy goals in the Middle East and elsewhere last semester.  They were looking for clear, achievable and observable goals.  They couldn't find any.  Not for the Middle East.  Not for Afghanistan.  Not for the crisis in Mexico.  Not for combating human trafficking.  None.  I would suggest that part of the reason is that once you have clear goals, you will be judged by whether or not you actually achieved them.  Better to keep things fuzzy, so you can define (and redefine) success whenever you see fit.


But a longer-term view of US foreign policy in the region, and around the world, suggests that, perhaps, another reason is that we view our strategic interests too narrowly (Israel, al Qaeda and oil), overestimate our power and influence (yes, we can prop up autocratic regimes with money and weapons for a time, but not forever - see Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, and, now, Egypt), and emphasize short-term needs over long-term objectives.  As a result, our policy is more ad hoc, more reactive than proactive, and viewed by many as more hypocritical over time.  We support the one true democracy in the Middle East - Israel - consistently, but we are best of friends with some of the worst regimes in the region.  

As a result, much of the Arab world has lost trust in us, views us as part of the problem, or views us as the problem.  We seem forever sucked into the tension and turmoil of the region, in large part because we depend on its oil.  And we seem to need these brutal dictators as much as, if not more than, they need us.  So we cling to them, sending them billions of dollars in military and economic aid, training their armies, and sending them billions more for their oil.  And we send a clear message to their people, especially the poor and middle classes yearning for a better life and more freedom:  we choose stability (for the short- and maybe medium-term) over democracy and freedom.  We choose your oppressors over you, the victims.  We defend democracy and freedom for us and for some of our closest allies, but not for you.  Consider this:  do you think it is more likely that Egypt's citizens become more anti-US and more radicalized by us hedging our bets and standing by Mubarak or by supporting their struggle for democracy?

If we should choose to truly think strategically, perhaps ridding ourselves of our dependence on foreign oil and trying harder to "do no harm" would be a start.  Peter Maass had a short but excellent article in August on the hidden costs of our foreign oil dependence.  The true cost of protecting access to Middle Eastern oil - for us, Europe, Asia, and the world - is staggering.

So let's start with one clear, achievable and observable goal that deals with that challenge.  In 2009, the US imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil, or about 52% of its oil needs.  Let's cut it to half the 2009 level ten years:  2.1 billion barrels in 2021.  If we could go to the moon in eight years (JFK gave us a whole decade and we didn't need it!), why not cut our foreign oil imports by half in ten?  Audacious?  Sure.  But isn't this urgent and important enough to be a little audacious?  Two-thirds of our oil consumption is for transportation, and 2/3 of that is for gasoline.  Let's make the switch to hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles a national priority.  Let's get state, local, and federal vehicles switched over to electric or natural gas.  A combination of tax incentives and higher gas mileage standards could do the trick.  Switch the subsidies for big oil companies over to tax breaks for people and companies buying electric, hybrid, and natural gas vehicles.

Oh, and let's support the people who want to be free.  That's something we can do now.  Try this goal:  Mubarak gone, and replaced by a transitional government of national unity charged with drafting a new Egyptian constitution, by tomorrow.