Education

After several years of promising, the Department of Homeland Security this week finally delivered its first report documenting the number of "visa overstays" -- travelers to the United States who come on a legal visa but then fail to leave when the lawful duration of their stay expires. The good news is that roughly 99 percent of all visitors comply and go home when they are supposed to; the bad news is that, with more than 40 million visitors last year, the one percent who didn't go home still adds up to nearly 500,000 overstayers. That number was seized on by immigration critics who are always eager to confirm their belief that the United States has no control over its borders. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who chairs the Senate Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said the report "boggles the mind." Well no, it actually doesn't. Indeed, the level of compliance is, if anything, astonishingly high. And by finally releasing the report, the Obama administration has offered up real numbers to refocus the debate on the right question -- if 99 percent compliance is not good enough, what will it take to get to 100? First, a little context. It has long been known that some significant percentage of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States did not come illegally across the land borders, but instead arrived on a legal visa -- usually a tourist or business visa -- and then just never went home. The best academic estimates have suggested that number might be more than 40 percent. But that was always an educated guess. The United States has never had the capability to track reliably whether those who arrived on legal visas -- or who came from Europe under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) -- actually left when they were required to. In 1996, Congress told the administration to begin such tracking, but progress was slow. U.S. airports were never configured to permit international passengers to be checked on departure. And at the land borders with Canada and Mexico, where a million people go back and forth each day, recording exits seemed all but impossible. Successive administrations have chipped away at the problem, however. After the 9/11 attacks, in which several of the hijackers had overstayed, the government finally got serious. The United States now requires airlines to report details on all departing international passengers, and information exchange with the governments of Canada, and to a lesser extent Mexico, provides similar data on the land borders. For several years, the administration had promised to pull together all this data and report to Congress on the actual number of visa overstays. Reporting those numbers matters. Congress has been considering legislation, for example, that would allow new countries to enter the VWP if they have a visa overstay rate of no more than three percent. The European Union is increasingly annoyed by what it sees as U.S. discrimination against EU members like Poland, Bulgaria and Romania that are excluded from the VWP, not to mention new legislation passed by Congress in December that bars Europeans with dual citizenship in Iraq, Syria or Iran from using the program. The EU has threatened to retaliate this year by denying visas to some U.S. travelers to Europe. Based on the new data, if Congress moves to an overstay standard for the VWP, then Poland would be a lock for membership; the percentage of Poles who overstayed their visas in 2015 was just 1.49 percent, compared with a mere 0.65 percent for all VWP countries combined. Romania is just over 2 percent. Those numbers will not be the ones highlighted by the administration's critics, however. Instead, they have seized on the 11 percent overstay rate for Afghanistan and the 7 percent rate for Iraq, even though the total number of individuals is tiny. The real question should be how to improve on what is already a fairly solid performance by DHS. Here the critics really miss their mark. Senator Sessions, for example, wants vastly more resources dedicated to tracking down and deporting overstayers wherever they may happen to be in the country. Many in Congress remain eager for a "biometric" exit system that would match the fingerprints taken of arriving travelers with their departure. Both are expensive solutions that would not solve the problem. While too little is still known about those who overstay, it's a good guess that a fair number do it inadvertently and plan to leave at some point. Travel to the United States is confusing at best; many foreigners hold visas with a duration of 10 years, but each visit can be no more than six months. Why not start with the easy remedies, like setting up automatic email notification to visa holders to remind them when their permitted stay in the country is about to expire? Or Congress could stiffen the penalties for overstaying, such as cancelling the visas of overstayers, to deter violations. DHS already goes after any overstayer thought to pose a security threat. These simple compliance measures would shrink the haystack further, improving such targeted enforcement. And some overstayers are undoubtedly intending to stay and live as illegal immigrants, and as recent border crossers are rightly a priority for removal if and when they are found by immigration agents. With the long overdue release of the report, there will certainly be many shrill warnings about the dangers of even a one percent overstay rate, and expressions of shock that not every visitor does exactly what they're required to do. But instead it should be seen as a starting point for continuing to develop sensible measures that improve visa compliance while maintaining the U.S. tradition as an open and welcoming country.

Jake Thomases is a public policy analyst at the Risk Analysis Research Center. Investors in Indonesia let out a small sigh of relief when Heri Sudarmanto, the director of foreign workers, announced on October 19 that foreign workers would not be required to pass Indonesian language tests after all. Just three days earlier, an official with the manpower ministry told reporters that such a test would be implemented. The language requirement, which has been proposed and rescinded more than once, is just the latest attempt to shield sectors of the Indonesian economy from outside competition. Such measures are puzzling and counterproductive given President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s pleas for infrastructure investment dollars during every state visit he makes. Against the backdrop of economic protectionism, such pleas come across as: “Bring us the money and we’ll tell you how to spend it.” Already foreign oil and gas workers face age limits and foreign lawyers are severely restricted in their activities. Companies were briefly required to employ a ten-to-one ratio of Indonesians to expats before the regulation was hastily dropped in late 2015. Some professions are entirely closed to foreigners, while certain industries, like onshore drilling, have been shut off from foreign investment. Control over the large Mahakam gas field is being transferred from France’s Total and Japan’s Inpex to overworked state-owned enterprise Pertamina when its lease expires in 2017. It is not only foreign companies that should be concerned. The fact is that even if fifty thousand foreign investors lined up tomorrow to offer capital injections with no preconditions – if the administration could direct the money into whatever sectors it chose and hire only domestic employees – the necessary roads and power plants still wouldn’t get built. Domestic companies would end up sitting on a pile of unspent money, unable to fulfill their contracts, because they wouldn’t be able to hire enough people to get the work done. Indonesia may be growing into a middle-income economy, but its workforce is stuck in poor country status. The skills gap between what employers need and what employees have is turning into a major bottleneck. The more barriers the government throws up to foreign expertise, the narrower the bottleneck becomes. A 2008 World Bank survey showed that nearly seven in ten Indonesian manufacturing firms found it hard or very hard to fill professional positions. A 2013 report by Boston Consulting Group anticipated that companies will struggle to fill 40 to 60 percent of their middle manager positions and half of all entry-level positions by 2020. As the service sector grows, the number of administrative and managerial jobs is expected to rise from 36 percent to 55 percent by 2020. Indonesian schools simply are not cranking out enough qualified graduates to fill them. Engineers are in particularly short supply. The economy is adding fifty thousand new engineering jobs every year, but universities are producing only thirty thousand engineers. This 40 percent gap between supply and demand is expected to grow to 70 percent by 2025. Processing firms in the large palm oil industry have taken to training their own engineers, which can take a year or more. There is widespread poaching of trained employees by competitors, driving up wages to unsustainable levels. As the largest economy in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has a chance to exercise much influence over the new ASEAN Economic Community, a collaboration of ten regional nations into a single market and production base. Its young and urbanized labor force portends continued growth after other developed economies have begun slowing down. But estimates of 2015 growth were below 5 percent. Until the country makes structural reforms – improving infrastructure, cracking down on corruption, producing a more skilled workforce – it will fail to fulfill expectations. Producing more next-generation workers isn’t simply a matter of changing curricula or offering more university programs. Indonesia’s education system is riddled with problems from primary school on up. Teacher absenteeism is high, especially in more remote schools, and many teachers are not qualified despite a recent glut of teaching school graduates. Memorization is the preferred method of student instruction rather than encouraging the creative thinking needed for high-skill work. Federal education spending, required by a 2002 law to be 20 percent of the budget, did not actually reach that threshold until 2009. Student enrollment, much improved for younger children, lags well behind the regional average for those over fifteen years old. The latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test in 2012, measuring reading ability, science, and math, rated Indonesian fifteen-year-olds next-to-last among sixty five countries. That dismal showing is unlikely to change much once the 2015 PISA results are released. In 2012, the education ministry announced that it was pulling science and English language from the primary school curriculum in favor of additional civics and religious instruction. Universitas 21, a university network, ranked Indonesia’s higher education system forty-eighth out of fifty countries studied. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings placed no Indonesian schools in the global top six hundred.  Very few Indonesians study abroad either, largely because of a lack of English language ability. The cost of higher education, even at public schools, can be prohibitively expensive for low-income students, which is partially to blame for the fact that three-quarters of all university students are from families in the top 40 percent of the income scale. Education inputs are improving at least. Jokowi has guaranteed twelve years of free education to the poorest students by offering stipends to cover school fees. A new law requires every district to have its own community college, and for credits from those colleges to be transferable to four-year programs, which was not previously the case. The government’s actions on education have been mostly positive, but the system started from a position of such disarray that it will take time for the reforms and additional spending to make a difference. For now, it is important that those crafting economic policy be aware of the problems of the education system. They should advise universities on what skills companies are looking for and help design curricula accordingly. Most of all, they should not exclude foreign companies and foreign workers, who may be the only ones capable of running particular industries. Keeping jobs open for Indonesians does little good if there are no Indonesians to fill them.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, from December 18 to December 24, was compiled by Anne Connell and Becky Allen. Japan’s top court upholds century-old surname law   Last week, Japan’s Supreme Court upheld an 1896 law requiring married couples to share a surname. The case has been working its way through the Japanese justice system since 2011, when five female plaintiffs filed suit in two lower courts that rejected their claim. The lawsuit was initiated on the premise that the law violates civil rights and discriminates unduly against women, with particularly detrimental effects in professional settings. Although a 1947 revision of Japanese civil code permitted couples to choose whose name is to be shared by both partners, in practice, the husband’s name is adopted in ninety-six percent of marriages today. Many socially conservative voices—both in government and the broader public—staunchly oppose any legal change, viewing it as a threat to Japan’s traditional family structures. Some argue that this decision undermines Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “womenomics” strategy, which aims to remove legal barriers to women’s economic participation and create legislation that brings more women into the country’s stagnated workforce. Protest in India over release of 2012 Delhi rapist                                                           Indian officials reported this week that one of the convicted rapists in the fatal 2012 Delhi gang rape of medical student Jyoti Singh would be released after spending three years in a detention center. In the direct aftermath of the 2012 attack, massive protests broke out across the country, with thousands taking to the streets to express outrage over the brutality of the assault, the failings of the Indian criminal justice system, and the broader crisis of violence against women. While four perpetrators were sentenced to death and one died in prison, the sixth was a juvenile at the time of the attack, just shy of his 18th birthday. His release this week sparked a new wave of protests and civil society activism, resulting in a controversial bill passed on Tuesday that will allow juvenile defendants charged with “heinous” crimes to be tried as adults in the future. Rise in female billionaires in Asia                                                                            Although most of the world’s wealthiest women have amassed fortunes through inheritance from family dynasties, a growing number of women in Asia are self-made billionaires. A report released this week finds that not only is the rise in female billionaires most rapid in Asia, but more than half of these billionaires are first-generation entrepreneurs. This draws a sharp contrast with the US and Europe, where just 19% and 7% respectively of women tycoons are self-made. Men still vastly outnumber women in the ranks of global billionaires, but the number of female billionaires worldwide has increased seven-fold over the past twenty years, outpacing the five-fold increase in male billionaires. The report cites shifting social attitudes about gender roles, advances in women’s education, and booming economies as potential reasons for the rise. Asia has seen significant gains in girls’ education over the past ten years, including sharp declines in illiteracy, advances in primary education for girls, and an increase in the number of women in university relative to men. Many of the new billionaires are educated women who have taken advantage of accelerated industrial and consumer revolutions in Asia and surging real estate prices.  

I had the honor of meeting Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai and her father this past summer, during their visit to the United States. Malala became an internationally-known activist, after surviving being shot in the head when the Taliban attacked her for speaking up in support of girls’ education in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. Last week at CFR, I screened the powerful new film about Malala and her fight for girls’ education, “He Named Me Malala,” and hosted Meighan Stone, the president of the Malala Fund, to discuss the fund’s work. Like the famous civil rights leader Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat and move to back of the bus during an era of racial segregation in the United States, Malala refused to be silenced by Taliban leaders who enforced a harsh code of gender discrimination against women and girls. As Malala stated in a speech she gave at the United Nations Youth Assembly, “There’s a moment when you have to decide whether to be silent or stand up.” Malala decided to stand up and fight. Indeed, in 2013, a year after the attack, Malala and her father began the Malala Fund, an organization that works to empower girls and advance their access to education. As I have written before, educating girls has clear benefits, first and foremost for girls themselves, but also for a variety of development indicators, from decreasing poverty to reducing extremism. For decades, research has demonstrated that girls’ education is correlated with increased female participation and productivity in the labor market and growing economies. Moreover, educated girls are more likely to marry later, have smaller families, and have reduced incidences of HIV/AIDS. Thus, not only are these benefits for the girls themselves, but later for their own children, who are then more likely to be healthy and productive. Educating girls has the power to mitigate those factors—including oversized youth populations, mass poverty, and limited economic opportunity—that create the environments where extremism tends to thrive. Given the clear benefits of girls’ education, the rise in attacks on girls’ schools and female students and teachers—from the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan to Boko Haram in Chibok, Nigeria—is particularly worrisome. That’s why, in her UN speech, Malala said, “Let us pick up our books and our pens. They are our most powerful weapons.” The Malala Fund works to support various education programs in a number of countries and advocates for policies that advance girls’ access to education. The work of the fund reflects the refrain from Malala’s UN speech: “One child, one teacher, one pen, and one book can change the world.” In 2013, the organization provided former girl domestic laborers with free education in Pakistan. The Malala Fund has also supported training in information technology in Kenya; funded a program in Sierra Leone to support the educational needs of girls affected by the Ebola crisis; and provided funding for educational programs for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. In Nigeria, the Malala Fund has provided kidnapped girls, who escaped from Boko Haram, with counseling services and full scholarships to secondary school as well as funds to the Nigerian Centre for Girls’ Education. On a trip to Nigeria in 2014, Malala met with parents of the abducted girls and with the President of Nigeria at the time, Goodluck Jonathan, to press his government to do more to secure their release. The fund also has a social action and advocacy campaign, resources for students, and discussion guides and curriculum based on the film. Malala says she was an ordinary girl born to extraordinary parents in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. While her father named her “Malala,” she made herself Malala. At age 11, she began to blog anonymously about her experience living under the Taliban for the BBC and eventually, demonstrating remarkable courage, she came out publicly to object to their ban on girls’ education. In response, the Taliban shot her, which she miraculously survived. After a long recovery process, rather than express resentment, Malala speaks of “the importance of light when we see darkness.” Her story, her struggle, and her success have helped bring girls’ education to the forefront of development and foreign policy more broadly. Last year, the Obama Administration launched Let Girls Learn, which focuses on community-based programs to eliminate the barriers to education that adolescent girls face. But there is more the United States, other governments, and international institutions can do. International education has been discussed as part of the foreign policy agenda in recent years. In fact, one of President Obama’s 2008 campaign promises was to create a global education fund. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also spoke out in favor of investing in education abroad, writing in Foreign Affairs, “Education has immeasurable power to promote growth and stability around the world. Educating girls and integrating them into the labor force is especially critical to breaking the cycle of poverty.” Yet the promised increases in funding for education abroad have not yet materialized. In both 2011 and 2013, the House of Representatives introduced the Education for All Act, a bill that would increase U.S. aid for education to $3 billion per year. But the bill has never passed, and congressional appropriations for education abroad has been unsteady. The United States should support education—specifically girls’ education—abroad (and, of course, at home) not only to empower and benefit girls around the world, but also to reduce poverty and improve stability in strategic regions and to enhance U.S. national security interests.  

Anti-immigration activists who helped to derail comprehensive immigration reform last year are seething over several provisions of the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress last week. Tucked away in the mammoth legislation were some of the most significant changes in years to U.S. immigration laws. One of the biggest would greatly expand the H-2B program for temporary seasonal non-agriculture workers such as landscapers, restaurant staff, and seafood processors. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who led the fight in the Senate against comprehensive reform, lamented that the new provisions would “line the pockets of special interests and big business.” Welcome to piecemeal immigration reform. After the Alabama Republican and others succeeded in killing comprehensive reform, the only Plan B for those seeking changes to immigration laws was to tackle it piece-by-piece. And the results so far are not encouraging. In the absence of sensible, comprehensive legislation, industry lobbyists, trade unions and others are now pushing to get their favored pieces into some must-pass legislation, like this year’s omnibus spending bill. Alongside the new H-2B provisions, the spending bill has also reshaped the H-1B program for skilled workers by doubling the fees for many companies to as much as $10,000 per employee. But the different pieces will do nothing to address the larger problems in U.S. immigration law, and indeed will make it harder to achieve sensible reform in the future. The problem with piecemeal reform – apart from its susceptibility to the worst of pork barrel, interest group politicking – is that the challenges in the immigration system cannot be properly addressed one-by-one. Consider the new provisions for temporary, low-skilled workers. The issue of low-skilled work was one of the hardest ones in the Senate immigration reform bill, which passed with 68 votes in 2013. The AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce spent more than a year trying to find a sensible middle ground between the Chamber’s desire to ensure that companies could find the workers to meet seasonal surges in demand and the unions’ desire to protect the jobs and wages of American workers. The compromise that was reached was a carefully balanced one that would have allowed the numbers to fluctuate with the state of the U.S. economy and the demand for workers. And both sides were willing to take half a loaf because there were other measures in the comprehensive bill that they liked. The new provision blows that compromise out of the water. It could lead to a doubling or tripling of the 66,000 seasonal workers who come under the existing program, will weaken the requirements that employers seek out American workers first, lower the wages paid to many foreign workers, and reduce federal oversight of employers. Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute says the new provision will "create a huge incentive to hire temporary foreign workers instead of the local U.S. workers who reside in communities where the jobs are located." As is so often the case with special interest-driven legislation, this one was championed by a Maryland senator, Democrat Barbara Mikulski, to serve the needs of the Chesapeake Bay seafood industry, which hires just 200 foreign workers each year. As a result of her efforts, the companies that use H-2B workers are happy now, but they will have no incentive to compromise in the future. The unions will be happier, in contrast, with the stiff new fees under the H-1B program and the companion L-1 program that allows companies to move foreign workers to the United States for temporary stints.  The H-1B and L-1 programs have long been heavily used by a small number of mostly Indian-owned companies that perform back office services for U.S. multinationals, and the new fees are targeted at those companies. And as the New York Times documented earlier this year, there have been some real abuses, including U.S. employees at Disney being forced to train their own replacement foreign workers. The comprehensive immigration reform bill tried to do two things at once – expand the annual H-1B quota to ensure that U.S. companies could hire the best of the world’s talents, while cracking down on abuses in the program. Instead, the omnibus bill takes a sledge hammer to the problem by making the costs of hiring H-1B or L-1 workers prohibitive for many companies. The companies that are most affected – Indian firms like Tata and Infosys – simply didn’t have the friends they needed on Capitol Hill to block the legislation. And the issue is likely to spill over into U.S.-India relations, where the move is seen simply as a protectionist backlash by the United States even as it has been calling on India to open its market to U.S. goods and services. As with the H-2B language, opponents of the H-1B program now have much of what they wanted, and will have no incentive to compromise in the future. Whatever the flaws of the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill, it was a serious effort at finding a middle ground between the legitimate needs of some employers to hire foreign workers and the equally legitimate desire of unions to protect jobs, wages, and working conditions for Americans. With the new measures in the omnibus bill, however, the incentives for sensible accommodation by both sides have just been wiped away.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering December 4 to December 11, was compiled by Anne Connell and Dara Jackson-Garrett. Secretary of Defense lifts combat ban for women Last week, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter announced that the U.S. military would lift its ban on women serving in combat roles. While women have been permitted to serve in nearly all aviation capacities since 1993, the full elimination of the ban opens up thousands of ground combat and frontline positions to women. The Marine Corps was the only branch request an exception to the new policy; Secretary Carter reviewed their plan earlier this fall, but noted in his December announcement that there would be no exceptions for any branch. Each service branch has until April 2016 to integrate women into all roles. Despite the official ban, scores of women have already served—or are currently serving—on the frontlines in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women have played roles in intelligence gathering, as combat pilots, field artillery officers, and even in the ultra-secretive Delta Force. Women have served as vital go-betweens with remote communities in cultural support roles for elite Army Ranger units. One hundred and sixty women have lost their lives in service to their country in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women’s access to the Yemen peace talks The latest round of peace talks between the Yemeni government and Houthi rebels is slated to begin in Geneva next week. The two parties will negotiate a cease-fire agreement to end the recent nine-month conflict that has devastated the Gulf state—one of the world’s most impoverished and worst scoring countries in terms of gender equality, even before the Houthi insurgency broke out last March. Each delegation will consist of 12 members. A week from the start of negotiations, however, delegations have yet to be finalized, in part because the UN has insisted that women be added to the presently all-male delegations. Houthi officials barred Dr. Shafiqa al-Wahsh, a prominent Yemeni women’s rights leader, from traveling to preparatory meetings. Al-Wahsh is just one of many women’s advocates trying to make inroads to the peace talks: in October, 45 women representing different political parties and ethno-religious factions met with the UN Special Envoy to Yemen for a workshop on the effect the war is having on women and to discuss avenues for women’s participation in formal peacebuilding processes. Understanding women terrorists With new evidence from the FBI that last week’s attack in San Bernardino, California was an act of terrorism, there is growing debate about the radicalization and motives of female terrorists like Tashfeen Malik, one of the two shooters. Notably, women have participated in terrorism carried out by radical groups throughout history—from the Baader-Meinhof Group in 1970s Germany, to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka in 1991, to al Qaeda affiliates in Iraq in the 2000s. This trend continues today: according to the Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram has recently overtaken ISIS as the deadliest terrorist group, and, unlike ISIS, Boko Haram actively deploys women as suicide bombers. Just this week, three female suicide bombers killed over 27 people and injured nearly 100 at a market in Chad. There is vast diversity in the paths to radicalization and the motivations that draw women to terrorist groups, though more research and attention is needed to better understand the relationship between women and terrorism.

Congress is on a roll. First a budget deal, then a multi-year highway bill, and now a K-12 education bill, whose most previous authorization had dated from 2002—the infamous No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The new version preserves the best parts of NCLB, sheds the most flawed parts, and also hands back more education power from the federal government to the states. It is unclear, however, whether this bill will actually do much to improve student outcomes. For all its flaws, the NCLB did focus the country’s attention squarely on the problem of education inequality and severely under-performing schools. As we have written in our progress report on federal education policy, inequality in outcomes is the single greatest problem facing the U.S. education system. No country in the rich world has such a strong link between parental income and student test scores. And the outcome gap between rich and poor has grown over time. NCLB for the first time required real accountability for results from educational institutions, linking federal funding to student test score improvements. On paper, this makes sense. All jobs and industries have some form of review and accountability. To keep schools accountable, there needed to be a way to measure outcomes, and the easiest and most rigorous way is through testing. But NCLB took accountability too far. Its accountability was punitive. It set completely unrealistic expectations about student improvement, requiring that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Schools that were way off track for 100 percent proficiency would have to be reorganized or closed. States that were not on track could lose their federal education funding. The hope was that threatening to take away funding and shutting down schools would propel teachers and principals into action and result in better teaching. No states were on track. To the chagrin of Congressional Republicans, the Obama Administration granted states waivers from punitive measures only if they implemented administration priorities. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was calling the shots instead of Congress, enticing states into accepting Common Core standards, expanding charter schools, and evaluating teachers using their students' test scores. The results at times were dismal. In some cases where student test scores dramatically improved, there were revelations of faked scores. In the most egregious case in Atlanta, administrators were sent to prison. Too much student time was spent on diagnostic tests. Too many extracurricular subjects like foreign language studies and the arts were cut to make budget space for priority subjects that were tested. Teachers’ unions were up in arms about using student test scores to grade their performance. Some parents wanted their kids to have a break from all the high-stakes tests. Worst of all, across-the-board student performance did not improve beyond the historical trend. In 2015 for the first time in twenty-five years, elementary school math scores actually fell. With the new education bill, called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), accountability remains, but each state will be free to determine what that accountability looks like—for example, how to assess teacher performance, where student test scores should be, and what the punitive measures should be. The federal government will have to okay state accountability plans, but the general assumption is that these plans will take a big step back from NCLB-level accountability. States must still carry out annual test-taking, but the tests are supposed to be a more well-rounded assessment and include qualitative surveys on students’ emotional well-being. And states must still have some sort of action plan for the worst-performing 5 percent of schools. But dismantling NCLB and weakening the federal role may not improve student performance. States may not be any more effective at lifting student achievement than the federal government. They weren’t before the NCLB, which is one reason why the feds took on a much more muscular role. Closing achievement gaps requires things that aren’t in the new education bill: making teachers better and directing more money toward low-income students. A giant dilemma facing reform movements is that experts still don’t really know what works to improve student performance. We know teachers matter a lot. But we don’t have a good grasp on what makes teachers good or how to train them to become better. Fortunately tons of private philanthropy dollars are being poured into research to try to figure it out. The bill does not increase or change anything about baseline federal education funding (called Title I) for schools that targets low-income students. There may be plenty of news stories about money going to waste in struggling school districts. Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to Newark schools comes to mind. But academics are now finding good evidence that, on average nationally, big influxes of new dollars to under-performing schools can make a difference in low-income student outcomes. Let’s hope that giving states more flexibility on accountability will not take the pressure off finding ways to close the rich-poor achievement gap.

Twenty years ago, more than 30,000 activists and officials from across the globe convened in Beijing for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women.  This gathering was a watershed moment in the global movement to advance women’s rights.  Civil society representatives overcame obstacles reportedly erected by the Chinese government in order to join together to advocate on behalf of women.  Then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who led the U.S. delegation to the Beijing Conference, famously declared that “women’s rights are human rights,” giving voice to a rallying cry that is still echoed in world capitals and local communities today.  And officials from 189 nations adopted an ambitious Declaration and Platform for Action to address issues related to the full participation of women and girls—from health and education, to political and economic participation, to the enduring scourge of gender-based violence—which continues to guide regional and international efforts to advance gender equality. Earlier this fall, at the United Nations, heads of state from 74 nations gathered for a Global Leaders’ Meeting on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment to mark the twentieth anniversary of this landmark agreement and recommit to the vision outlined two decades ago.  At this meeting, world leaders heralded significant progress in the status of women and girls.  Indeed, much has been accomplished since the adoption of the Beijing Platform 1995: the gender gap in primary education has virtually closed on a global level.  The rate of maternal mortality has been halved.  More nations have constitutions and laws on the books to prohibit discrimination and violence against women.  And recognition of relationship between women’s empowerment and economic growth and stability has grown. Yet while the status of women and girls has certainly improved—thanks in no small part to the tireless work of civil society leaders and officials who gathered in Beijing—significant gaps still remain. Though more girls are attending primary school than ever before, access to secondary education remains a persistent challenge, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where less than a third of girls are enrolled, and in South Asia, where less than half attend.  According to the World Bank, women’s labor force participation has actually dropped on a global level, from 57 to 55 percent. Women remain underrepresented in leadership positions, holding just 22 percent of seats in national parliaments. And women’s security remains imperiled: an estimated one in three women globally has been subjected to physical violence, and women remain excluded from peace and security processes. Two decades after the Beijing conference, it is clear that progress is possible—and equally clear that there is more work to do.  What remains lacking twenty years post-Beijing is the financial support and political will required to implement the Beijing platform and the legal improvements it has inspired in nations and communities around the world.  It is only when governments, multilateral organizations, philanthropic institutions, and the private sector muster the resources and will to elevate issues related to gender equality and ensure implementation of new legal and regulatory frameworks that we will finally realize the promise of the Beijing conference. What has unquestionably changed since 1995, however, is the unprecedented growth in the evidence base demonstrating a strong relationship between gender equality and progress in a range of other areas, including economic growth, health, education, and peace and stability.  This awareness creates an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate the pace of change and highlights what is at stake: not only progress for women, but progress for us all.

Nearly one million students from every corner of the world are currently pursuing higher education in the United States, the biggest leap in the past three decades.

Voices from the Field features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to the advancement of women and U.S. foreign policy interests. This article is from Daniela Ligiero, Vice President of Girls and Women Strategy at the United Nations Foundation. Two months ago in New York, world leaders came together to adopt a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide development for the next fifteen years. In a historic moment that included input and participation from more governments, communities, and individuals than ever before, 193 countries agreed on a shared set of seventeen priorities that reflect the interconnectedness of today’s challenges—addressing social, economic, and environmental development. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to mobilize the world around a shared development agenda, yet questions remain over the implementation of these new global goals. How will countries prioritize their efforts? How will they be financed? How will progress be measured and evaluated? What roles will governments, multilateral institutions, the private sector, or civil society play, and how will actors be held accountable for progress? We are now faced with important decisions about how and where to start SDG implementation, and we must consider lessons from implementing the eight Millennium Development Goals—the need to move beyond operating in silos, or focusing exclusively on a single goal, while ignoring the relationships across goals. Implementing seventeen different agendas at once will be much more challenging and inefficient than doing so for eight. Moving forward, a new approach is needed. One way to think about effective and integrated SDG implementation is to select a crosscutting issue, or lens, that can be a lever for change across the seventeen goals. Gender equality should be one of these. Empowering girls and women is one of the smartest ways to achieve all the new global goals. When girls and women are empowered, families, communities, and societies prosper, economies grow, and development becomes more sustainable. In order to approach SDG implementation through a gender equality lens, it is helpful to begin with the goal on gender equality itself, Goal Five, and then expand the aperture to analyze the various goals and targets that could be achieved if we focused on empowering girls and women. To examine a concrete example, one important component of achieving gender equality included in SDG 5 is a focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Going beyond this goal, there’s evidence that voluntary family planning, which is central to SRHR, can affect a number of different SDG goals. When women and couples are empowered to plan whether and when to have children, they are better able to complete their education, women’s autonomy within the household is increased, and their earning power is improved, helping to reduce poverty (SDG1). The highest benefits from reducing the 74 million unintended pregnancies that occur every year would accrue to the poorest countries —with GDP increases ranging from one to eight percent by 2035. Globally, female labor force participation decreases with each additional child by about 10 to 15 percentage points among women aged 25 to 39. Family planning also has a direct impact on health and wellbeing (SDG3). Family planning allows spacing of pregnancies and can delay pregnancies in young women who are at increased risk of complications from early childbearing. Adolescent girls who become pregnant are two to five times as likely to die during childbirth. By reducing rates of unintended pregnancies, family planning also reduces the need for unsafe abortion. Infants of mothers who die as a result of giving birth also have a greater risk of death and poor health, and infants of adolescent mothers have higher rates of neonatal mortality. Finally, family planning reduces the risk of unintended pregnancies among women living with HIV, resulting in fewer infected babies and orphans. Family planning represents an opportunity for adolescent girls and women to pursue additional education and participate in public life. Adolescent girls who become pregnant are more likely to drop out of school (SDG 4). Additionally, smaller families allow parents to invest more in each child. Children with fewer siblings tend to stay in school longer than those with many siblings. Investing in voluntary family planning services can also lead to a demographic dividend—the accelerated growth of a country’s economy (SDG 8). This occurs when fertility rates decline, changing the population’s age structure. When declining fertility rates are coupled with investments in education and other social policies, the next generation of highly educated youth contributes more to the workforce. The adoption of the SDGs marks a new day in global development. This moment is filled with opportunity, but requires fresh and innovative thinking about how to tackle our greatest challenges. To support this, the UN Foundation will support a new roundtable series at the Council on Foreign Relations, focused on gender equality as a crosscutting lens to guide SDG implementation across all of the goals. By creating a vision for the world we want, the new global goals have united the planet in a common purpose. We have the blueprint in hand. Now it’s time to approach the work of building it in an innovative and strategic way.  

A little over a year ago, Malala Yousafzai was awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize along with another children’s rights activist. Yousafzai was awarded the prize, at age seventeen, making her the youngest awardee ever, for her work promoting and advancing girl’s education—first in the Swat Valley of Pakistan and later internationally. Right next door to Pakistan, Afghan girls are also fighting against the odds to secure educational opportunities. Aziza Rahimzada is a fourteen year old Afghan activist who has been nominated for this year’s International Children’s Peace Prize. Rahimzada lives in a refugee camp located in a poor area of Kabul made up of internally displaced persons from surrounding provinces. She started classes for other refugee children in her camp and empowered them to voice their opinions. Moreover, she worked with Afghani officials to obtain a water pump for the families living in her camp, leading some to call her the “Afghan Malala.” Aziza follows in the footsteps of other courageous Afghan women and girls who have fought for access to education, including by creating a network of underground schools for girls during the dark days of the Taliban regime, which prohibited girls’ education. Despite the advancements of education in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, children, particularly girls, still face many challenges in obtaining an education. In Afghanistan, an estimated 3.3 million children, the majority of which are girls, are not in school. Only 21 percent of girls finish primary school, and there are 71 girls to every 100 boys in primary school. Afghanistan has struggled nationally with education, around 50 percent of schools lack basic tools like buildings, textbooks, and teaching materials. Furthermore, a number of schools are overcrowded with many operating on a shift schedule (some students come in the morning and others come in the evening). The female literacy rate remains low at an estimated 24.2 percent. Girls’ education has clear benefits, first and foremost for girls themselves, but also for a variety of development indicators including improving the economy, decreasing poverty, and reducing extremism. Aziza’s efforts to improve the lives of both the children and families in her community highlight the rippling effect that investing in girls can have. Investing in women and girls is critical to prosperity and peace in Afghanistan and, as I have discussed elsewhere, is central to sustaining the goals, which the United States has fought for there since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. With President Obama’s announcement that the United States will maintain 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan—rather than reduce it to the smaller 1,000 embassy-based force—the administration should redouble its efforts to support the work of women and girls like Aziza who themselves are leaders, building sustainable, local solutions. Last spring, I hosted a CFR Roundtable for Tina Tchen, the executive director of the White House Council on Women and Girls (and First Lady Michelle Obama’s chief of staff), who announced the launch of Let Girls Learn, which supports community-based programs to eliminate the barriers to education for girls, and serves as an example of an effective strategy for the United States to pursue. In addition to supporting girls’ education directly in Afghanistan, the United States can support the Afghan government in improving the security environment, including by training Afghan women for jobs in the Afghan National Police, which could help prevent the kinds of attacks on female students, schools, and teachers the Taliban has carried out. With the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign upon us, candidates should be asked to address their plans for supporting girls’ education globally—particularly in places where girls have been denied equal access to schools such as in Afghanistan—given its importance, not just for gender equality, but also for security and stability.