Education

The immigration bill introduced in the Senate this week – all 844 pages – is not a perfect piece of legislation. But it is the most serious effort in many years to create an immigration system that would better serve U.S. economic needs, strengthen the rule of law, and enhance security. Immigration, I and others have argued, has long been America’s secret weapon. For generations, it brought to our shores a windfall of the world’s hardest working, brightest, and most ambitious individuals. They went to school, raised families, started companies, and in thousands of ways contributed to the creation of the most vibrant and dynamic economy in the world. But it was also a chaotic system. There was little scrutiny of those applying for visas to come to the United States. Once they arrived here, there was little effort to make sure they abided by the terms of the visa. And for those who lived near America’s borders, it was not difficult to just walk across and stay, and some 11 million people who have done so are still living in this country. Such chaos was always a challenge, but became intolerable over the last two decades. It become intolerable for border states like California and Arizona in the 1990s, and it became intolerable for much of the rest of country following the 9/11 attacks, which exposed the weaknesses of U.S. entry controls. But in response to legitimate fears, the United States has spent much of the last decade walking away from the openness that has been such a great source of American strength. That has kept out or driven away many of the ambitious immigrants that the United States wants to attract and keep. Congress has a chance now to recreate a vibrant immigration system, but one that operates within rather than outside the rule of law. The bill has many pieces, and we are only at the beginning of what will be a great national debate. But some of the more sensible proposals include: • New opportunities for highly-skilled and educated immigrants. U.S. economic progress depends on maintaining its leadership in innovation, yet there are surprisingly few slots available for these immigrants unless they have family ties in the United States. The bill would expand and improve the H-1B visa program for skilled workers. It would eliminate quotas for the most highly educated immigrants, and expand opportunities for others, especially in science and engineering. It would create a new visa for foreign entrepreneurs coming to the United States to start companies. And it would create 120,000 new “merit-based visas” awarded based on education and employment skills. • A more flexible immigration system in which numbers adjust depending on the strength of the economy. It is self-evident that the United States should be admitting more immigrants when the economy is strong and unemployment is low, as it was in the 1990s, than when the economy is weak and unemployment is high, as it has been in recent years. But rigid quotas and long waits for green cards have meant that immigrants tend to come when their bureaucratic number comes up, not when the economy needs them. As economist Gordon Hanson has written, the only part of the U.S. immigration system that has been responsive to market demands is the illegal part. The Senate proposal would start to change this by adjusting immigration quotas to respond more to market signals. A new program for low-skilled immigrants would fluctuate from 20,000 to 200,000 visas annually depending on labor market demand. H-1B visas could range from 110,000 to 180,000 per year. And the new merit visas could rise to as many as 250,000 annually in a strong economy. • Reasonable benchmarks for border security. For the past decade, Congress’s approach to border security has been to throw more of everything at the border (agents, technology, fencing, etc.) with little thought to whether those resources were actually doing anything to discourage illegal migration. This bill, however, sets ambitious but achievable targets for apprehending or discouraging illegal border crossers, and for preventing temporary visa entrants from overstaying their visas and remaining in the United States illegally. There are tough issues to resolve in measurement and evaluation, but the bill moves in the right direction by finally holding the administration and the Department of Homeland Security accountable for performance, not promises. • Workplace verification. The biggest failing the last time Congress did something similar (the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act) was the failure to discourage employers from hiring people not authorized to work in the United States. The new bill would make mandatory the E-Verify system that checks the identity of new employees against Social Security and immigration records. It is not a perfect system, and there will still be a cash market for labor that will elude any such controls. But the bill should make it much harder for anyone who lacks legal status in the United States to find work, greatly reducing the incentive to migrate illegally in the first place. • A sensible legalization scheme. The promise of legal status for unauthorized immigrants – an estimated 11 million currently – will be the most controversial element of the bill. But the legislation is reasonable and pragmatic. It offers a long temporary status – with the right to work, travel, and be freed from the fear of deportation – for those who come forward. It excludes only those with significant criminal records. It is open to anyone living in the United States before December 31, 2011, a more generous scheme than the 1986 bill and one that will only exclude a small number of very recent migrants. It gives new hope to those who those without criminal records who were deported but are hoping to rejoin family in the United States, allowing them to apply for legal return. And after a decade – and half that for young people and for farmworkers – they can apply for green cards and citizenship. Unlike so many pieces of legislation in recent years, the bill is a serious, good faith effort by senior members of both parties to solve real problems and develop constructive compromises, not to score political points. Whether such an effort can survive the broader airing that will be required to pass the Senate and the House remains to be seen. But it is a fine start.

To most Americans, the typical college experience involves learning from a professor in a lecture hall and spending a set duration of time in class over several semesters. But that could soon change. Almost ten percent of last year’s graduates of Thomas Edison State College (TESC) earned their degree without setting foot on campus or even taking a course offered by the college, because the school uses a competency-based education model. At TESC, course credit is granted not only for transferring coursework and attending in-person or online courses, but also for demonstrating knowledge of a subject by passing a standardized exam, an approach known as competency-based education.  TESC is New Jersey’s second largest public college—after Rutgers—and was founded in 1972 to give adults greater flexibility in pursuing a degree. Today, the school is providing a way for adults to consolidate scattered educational history and bridge gaps on a path to a bachelor’s degree. Competency-based education helps motivated adults complete degrees and gain new skills and certifications at lower cost, over less time, and with less disruption to their lives. Educational attainment is one of many factors that goes into a person’s earning potential.  A Georgetown study found that the median lifetime earnings for someone with some college but without a degree was $1.5 million; this is higher than the $1.3 million median for a high school graduate, but far less than the $2.2 million median for holders of a bachelor’s degree.  Appropriate data are not available to determine how much of that $700,000 spread is likely to be recovered by graduates of competency-based programs, and would depend upon factors such as employers’ acceptance of degrees from these institutions.  But there is the potential for a substantial benefit for adult students, particularly if costs can be held low. The New York Times described one adult student who completed her degree by earning fifty-four credits in fourteen weeks through multiple equivalency exams at a cost of $5,300 for books and fees. As George A. Pruitt, the college’s president explained in that article: “We don’t care how or where the student learned, whether it was from spending three years in a monastery…as long as that learning is documented by some reliable assessment technique.” That approach is attracting more students. Enrollment at Thomas Edison doubled over the past ten years—a higher growth rate than all other New Jersey state colleges and public universities. Competency-based education is also offered by a few other accredited schools: Connecticut’s Charter Oak State College, Excelsior College in upstate New York, and the online-based Western Governors University, a private nonprofit institution that also has partnerships with three states and has announced plans with two more states. More well-known state universities are creating competency-based degree programs.  Last year, Northern Arizona University announced a partnership with Pearson. The University of Wisconsin (UW) announced it would create a flexible degree program following a competency-based model, with coursework and assessments overseen by faculty and staff of the UW system. Degree programs this fall include an associate of arts and science, and a bachelor’s and master’s degree in nursing. Notably, competency-based degree programs allow students to leverage free online courses—such as those profiled last May in a Policy Initiative Spotlight—offered by elite universities, even though the course providers do not directly grant credit. By completing free online courses, students can gain the knowledge necessary to pass equivalency exams. This could potentially undermine future plans for universities to monetize their online offerings. As CFR’s James Lindsay explained, there still is not a solid business model for online courses. But online education continues to evolve: some public universities plan to offer credit for a free introductory course as a recruitment tool, while California’s legislature sees them as a way to relieve a shortage of seats in core classes. Concerns remain over whether competency-based education provides the same quality of education.  One concern is that strong test-takers could earn passing grades on an equivalency exam without having a truly thorough command of the material.  A reliance on online education troubles some, especially in light of a recent report that raised concern that online education could widen achievement gaps across demographic groups. Still, the authors of that study concluded that “although many students face challenges in adapting to online learning, online coursework represents an indispensable strategy in postsecondary education, as it improves flexibility for both students and institutions and expands educational opportunities among students who are balancing school with work and family demands.”  Competency-based education and online courses both make it easier for adult students to enhance and demonstrate their knowledge—and at a lower cost.

In South Africa this week a group of emerging nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa itself, known as the BRICs (the moniker given by Goldman Sachs in 2001), gathered to launch their own development bank. The New York Times called the move “a direct challenge to the dominance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.” Observers immediately asked whether the countries have enough in common to form an economic alliance of any kind and questioned whether they could share goals given their usual roles as competitors. Yet regardless of the fate of the bank, what is certain is the rising clout of the emergings. As the United Nations 2013 Human Development Report notes, “by 2020, according to projections developed for this Report, the combined economic output of three leading developing countries alone—Brazil, China and India—will surpass the aggregate production of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. Much of this expansion is being driven by new trade and technology partnerships within the South itself.” The numbers are particularly staggering given the historic shift they represent. As the UN report notes, “in 1950, Brazil, China and India together represented only 10 percent of the world economy, while the six traditional economic leaders of the North accounted for more than half. According to projections in the Report, by 2050, Brazil, China and India will together account for 40 percent of global output, far surpassing the projected combined production of today’s Group of Seven bloc.” These figures represent a dramatic shift in people’s lives. The middle class is expected to be more than 3 billion strong by the year 2020, up from 1.8 in 2009. This growing group will boost demand for everything from commodities to goods and services and will represent a new hub for entrepreneurship and innovation. Yet alongside all the growing prosperity is the more worrisome issue of global inequality. This inequality at its most potent can stymie development and suffocate the potential of those who were born the wrong sex or race or the wrong social or ethnic or economic group. Most of the regions in the UNHDR show “declining inequality in health and education and rising inequality in income.” The UN identified three factors that have helped to foster growth and combat poverty among those nations in the global South that have achieved greatest progress: “a proactive developmental state, tapping of global markets, and determined social policy and innovation.” Along with these three factors, education has been a leading driver of development and produced “striking benefits for health and mortality.” According to the UN report, its research found that “mother’s education is more important to child survival than household income or wealth is and that policy interventions have a greater impact where education outcomes are initially weaker. This has profound policy implications, potentially shifting emphasis from efforts to boost household income to measures to improve girls’ education.” For a long time researchers have pointed to the positive power of girls’ education in boosting development outcomes. Now with the Human Development Report’s data it is possible that more focus will be placed on innovations such as unconditional cash transfers, such as those issued by the charity GiveDirectly, that get money into the hands of girls, who then can use it for school fees and uniforms. One of the report’s many compelling graphs compares educational attainment in South Korea and India. While in the 1950s a large part of Korea’s school-age children were out of school, “today, young Korean women are among the best educated women in the world: more than half have completed college. As a consequence, elderly Koreans of the future will be much better educated than elderly Koreans of today, and because of the positive correlation between education and health, they are also likely to be healthier.” In India, on the other hand, before 2000 more than half the country’s adults had no formal education. According to the report, those grim numbers have changed little. “Despite the recent expansion in basic schooling and impressive growth in the number of better educated Indians (undoubtedly a key factor in India’s recent economic growth), the proportion of the adult population with no education will decline only slowly. Partly because of this lower level of education, particularly among women, India’s population is projected to grow rapidly, with India surpassing China as the most populous country.” As the rise of the global South moves forward the questions of equity and access will continue to grow louder, even as the region’s overall boom continues.

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Katie Rock, a human rights attorney who is currently launching Activyst, a socially-conscious company that funds girls’ sports programs worldwide. Here, she discusses the benefits of girls’ involvement in sports and how to understand and overcome the obstacles to their participation. The fact that girls in developing countries face unique hardships is well understood. These girls frequently have less access to education than boys, leading to illiteracy and fewer work opportunities. Adolescent pregnancy is commonplace in the developing world, where the vast majority of teen pregnancies occur and maternal mortality is a leading cause of death for teen women. Three-fourths of teen HIV cases globally are among females, and cervical and other cancers are on the rise in developing countries. Abuse is another persistent issue, with one in three females worldwide having been physically or sexually abused. However, there is a high impact but often overlooked opportunity to improve girls’ lives and prospects: sports. As detailed in a compilation of research by the Women’s Sports Foundation, sports have profound effects on girls in virtually all aspects of life. Girls who play sports reach higher levels of education and do better in school. They are less likely to develop breast cancer and other chronic diseases, get pregnant in adolescence, engage in high-risk sexual behavior, or stay in an abusive relationship. Yet, in the developing world where girls most need these benefits, they rarely play sports. And while the idea of sports as a solution may seem simple, increasing girls’ participation is far from it; the barriers are heavily influenced by local political, economic, and social contexts. Consequently, it is imperative to understand these barriers in order to implement sports programs that garner local support. Working with the Pan American Health Organization from 2010 to 2012, I investigated why girls in Nicaragua--where girls’ conditions are among the poorest in the Western Hemisphere--rarely play sports. Interestingly, we found that there are few organized sports for girls or for boys in Nicaragua; yet, boys’ participation rates are much higher than girls’ participation rates. We discovered two primary (and related) barriers to girls’ sports that shed light on this situation. First, girls explained that there are no places for them to play; the public fields in their neighborhoods are generally understood to be “un lugar para los hombres”--a place for the men. The few girls who had tried to play in those places reported being told to leave or harassed. The streets, where most sports are actually played in Nicaragua, were no better. While it is accepted, and even expected, for boys to play unsupervised in the streets, this is viewed as odd or unsafe for girls. Exploring this environmental issue further, we asked girls where they would prefer to play sports. They overwhelmingly responded they would prefer to play in their schools, which were generally safe spaces where girls already felt comfortable. The second primary barrier was the lack of parental permission to play sports. Girls explained that their parents worried about their safety outside the home, thinking they might be assaulted or “get into problems” (meaning, for example, that they would skip practice to spend time with boys and risk getting pregnant). Some parents also needed their daughters in the home, or simply did not believe sports should be a priority. On further exploration, we found that parents in Nicaragua are not necessarily against sports or letting their daughters leave the home. However, they are strongly protective. They will allow their daughters to leave home, so long as there is a transfer of “protection” to someone else they trust. Again, school came to the forefront as an acceptable place for girls. Through these findings, we better understood why, despite the similar lack of organized sports activities, boys still play sports in high numbers and girls do not. Boys do not require a designated activity, setting, and coach; they can simply play in the neighborhood with friends. However, the streets are not an option for girls; when there are no organized sports activities, it is the same as no opportunities at all. To increase girls’ participation in sports in Nicaragua, supporters must address the barriers uniquely experienced by girls. This means increasing organized activities for girls (and dedicating funding to doing so), ensuring these activities take place in a safe space, and establishing trust between coaches and parents. Activyst, the start-up I have been building, generates funding for organizations offering organized sports activities for girls worldwide. Our first nonprofit partner, Soccer Without Borders in Nicaragua, has worked to understand and address these local barriers, forming trust with parents and making safe spaces and schools centerpieces of the program. Their own programs now reach 130 girls, and they reach 1,200 more through outreach in gym classes at local schools. Sports can help girls live healthier, safer, and more productive lives. With further understanding of the barriers in other regions, and the support of organizations creating programming that takes account of local contexts, we can enable more girls worldwide to reap the many benefits of sports.

This guest post is by Curtis Valentine, a Term Member with the Council on Foreign Relations and a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (South Africa 2001-2003) The continuous debates over domestic issues like immigration, education, the economy, and healthcare reveal what most of us already know: America is divided politically and economically. The results of the 2012 presidential and congressional elections suggest that most of us live amongst like-minded individuals. The disparity in income in America is among the highest of any developed country. A program of mandatory national service could help to bridge those divides, build greater unity, while putting millions of young people to work on the growing number of domestic challenges that compromise our economic and military competitiveness around the world. The era that combat veterans like my father grew up in seem distant to many of us today. During the 1960s and 1970s compulsory military service had the potential to blur racial, political, and economic lines. Today, non-military service institutions are extremely class-divided. Over time, non-military service has become synonymous with wealth. For example, Americans who join Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Teach For America (TFA), are overwhelming middle income or wealthier, and many are chosen from American’s most selective schools. The notion of compulsory service is not foreign to present day Americans. In some high schools and colleges across the country, students are required to perform a number of community service hours as a condition for graduation. An expansion of mandatory service would include either a full-time assignment in the spirit of the Peace Corps or part-time assignment like a community service project. In 2008, then President-elect Barack Obama called for a plan to require fifty hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. The plan was later removed from his official website. In 2003, Congressmen Charles Rangel and John Conyers, and Senator Fritz Hollings introduced the Universal National Service Act. In a response to what his office saw as an overrepresentation of poor and minority Americans in the military during the Iraq War, Congressman Rangel introduced the bill to highlight the impact of the war on all Americans. Rangel commented that  the bill was introduced "to make it clear that if there were a war, there would be more equitable representation of people making sacrifices." The legislation would have required all Americans to serve for two years in one of a variety of capacities, including military time, AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, TFA, or local initiatives. Opponents of compulsory service argue that this would be an intrusion by government in what has traditionally been a voluntary act. Others argue that requiring service or compensating for service takes away the spirit of the act. Interestingly enough, Peace Corps, TFA, AmeriCorps, and the military are all considered service institutions yet all of them compensate their volunteers monetarily, with both preferential government hiring post-service and graduate school funding support. In the case of part-time compulsory service, the notion of offering tax breaks for donating time – in the spirit of the tax breaks for donating goods – could reduce the financial burden incurred. Even supporters of compulsory service would contend that penalties, such as a fine for not serving, would only favor wealthy Americans with the means of paying it. The goal of any program is to have impact. A program of compulsory service would do best to use the Peace Corps model of embedding volunteers in the communities they serve. Locating volunteers from other parts of the country would create the cultural exchange needed to fully earn the respect of those the volunteer would be serving. The program would also promote skills transfer and capacity building for sustainability. This movement is a global one; other countries in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean are considering expanding or creating compulsory service projects for their young population ages 15-29 as well. In Ghana, the government is expanding and re-evaluating their current National Service program to ensure volunteers are well placed and well resourced. In Barbados, the government is creating a new National Youth Service program to address the need for Bajan youth to work with each other for the common good. Though many European countries like France and Germany have ended mandatory military service, other countries like Austria, Denmark, Finland, and Greece continue to require male citizens perform military service. Compulsory service is bold, but the absence of a bold solution will only ignore growing social seclusion. Without a program like compulsory service, Americans will continue to struggle with the idea that we are inextricably linked. Barring a bold solution from national leaders, America will continue to move forward without a long term plan to rebuild communities and create the social cohesion and national unity that is critical to U.S. national security.

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Leonard Wantchekon, founder of the African School of Economics and professor at Princeton. He discusses his efforts to build a world-class university to train African scholars and practitioners in Benin. There is a genuine need for African economists, development specialists, policymakers, and highly skilled managers to assist in designing and implementing growth-promoting policies on the continent. Since 2002, only 7 percent of the 401 publications on Africa in the Journal of Development Economics have been co-authored by Africans. In addition, only 11 percent of the 258 impact evaluation studies completed on the continent since 2004 have included African co-authors. The lack of scholarship on Africa by Africans points to a larger issue−many Africans lack the means to attend a quality institution that offers social science graduate programs. On the management side, there are about ninety institutions in Africa that offer a Masters in Business Administration and less than ten meet international standards, according to a 2012 report from the African Management Initiative. The report also cites an international media company representative who stated, "...we really want to hire locally, but the fact that we still can’t is really a mark of the fact that those people aren’t there.” This lack of highly trained managers together with the limited representation of African scholars in social science research on Africa has led to difficulties in the formulation of coherent public policies and proper market analysis for the private sector. The African School of Economics (ASE) aims to fill this need. The ASE will also address Africa’s ongoing gender inequity. It is broadly documented that African women and girls are largely disenfranchised populations on the continent. As such, they have access to the fewest resources in their daily lives and often lack opportunities to attain levels of education available to male counterparts. The 2012 World Development Report (WDR) notes that “Women now represent 40 percent of the global labor force, 43 percent of the world’s agricultural labor force, and more that half of the world’s university students. Productivity will be raised if their skills and talents are used more fully.” It also reports that, “Women are more likely than men to work as unpaid family laborers or in the informal sector,” and “as a result women tend to earn less than men.” The ASE aims to increase gender equality throughout Africa by offering women the opportunity to receive a graduate education. The knowledge and skills they will gain at ASE will help them influence public policy and foster economic growth in Africa. The ASE will open in the fall of 2014 and will be based on a forty-five acre campus in the university town of Abomey Calavi, Benin, about twenty-five miles from Cotonou, the country’s largest city. It will offer a variety of full-time and part-time programs. In 2014 the ASE will offer a Masters in Business Administration and in Mathematics, Economics, and Statistics. In 2015 it will offer a Masters in International and Public Affairs and in Development Studies. In 2018 a PhD program in Economics and Management will open, and in 2024 students will be able to enroll in a Bachelors program. The programs bear strong similarities with those provided in top North American and European universities, but with two main distinctive features: (1) advanced training in quantitative and qualitative research methods, and (2) significant exposure to the humanities, including economic history of Africa. ASE will host three major research centers: the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy (IERPE), the Institute for African Studies (IAS), and the Institute for Finance and Management (IFM). Each institute will provide students and faculty the opportunity to actively participate in research projects, mostly sponsored by government agencies, international organizations, and private corporations. The ASE will also host an analytical social history center, the Museum for Social Discovery. Princeton University has provided a grant to cover ASE’s initial administrative costs as it prepares for the fall 2014 launch. Furthermore, the two institutions have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will enable an exchange of faculty and students in both directions. In addition, the ASE has formalized partnerships with nine other universities across the globe and is in negotiations with an additional fifteen. Finally, the ASE has been developing ties with about thirty private and public universities across Africa in order to facilitate student recruitment and placement and to establish joint academic programs. Tremendous progress has been made since the official launch of the project. The campus blueprint is almost complete, the academic programs are finalized, and the process of staff, student, and faculty recruitment is underway. There is much more work to be done. I believe that creating the ASE is an important step in the process of African development. This is because ideas that will help Africa develop have to come mostly from Africa and have to involve more Africans. This, of course, cannot happen overnight. So we need to set up great institutions of higher education with the hope that, over time, we develop enough talent to make a difference.

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Anne Heyman, chair of the board of directors at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda. Here, she discusses the importance of hiring and training local staff and partners in order to ensure the sustainability of development projects. Everyone implementing projects in developing countries faces the challenge of ensuring their sustainability. Often these efforts focus on financial sustainability, but this is only part of the equation. Equally important is the question of operational sustainability: how can founders ensure that the project will continue at the expected level of program delivery even after they have left the country? This question has been a critical component of strategic planning for the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda since the project’s inception in September 2006. Our focus on hiring and increasing the capacity of Rwandan staff has been more expensive, and this approach is more time-consuming at the outset than using already-trained staff from abroad. But it has been essential to making the project sustainable over the long term. The village, which I helped establish in the Eastern Province of Rwanda, is home to 500 teenagers orphaned principally by violence, but also by AIDS and other causes. It is not an orphanage or a boarding school. Modeled on the youth villages (such as Yemin Orde) built in Israel after the Holocaust to house and reintegrate orphans of that genocide, it is instead an innovative community where young people live in surrogate families and receive guidance, comprehensive health care, and a quality formal and informal education that emphasizes the value of critical thinking and practical skills needed in a developing nation. Beginning with a direct purchase of the land (rather than requesting it from the government), we concentrated on supporting the local economy. We hired a Rwandan architecture firm and a Rwandan construction company, and we put together a Rwandan advisory board consisting of people working in all the areas relevant to the village programs (such as education, youth development, culture, HIV/AIDS, and post-conflict reconciliation). The architects, contractors, and advisory board members all spent time in Israel studying the Youth Village model, giving them a deep understanding of the villages’ philosophy, methodology, and benefits. Moreover, we designed the Rwandan village’s physical and programmatic structure in full consultation with these individuals. Knowing that their voices were heard has made them passionate supporters of the village. Perhaps our biggest investment in operational sustainability involved the hiring and training of local staff. We hired only locals where possible. In other cases (for example, the director’s position, which required previous experience running a youth village), we kept foreign staff in the job only as long as it took to set up systems or train a local person to take over. We identified and addressed skills that needed strengthening in our local employees through ongoing trainings—an effort that continues today. One thing we have learned through experience is that one-off trainings are never worthwhile. Instead, we have found success through long-term training programs where the trainer transitions out gradually, allowing local staff to build their capabilities and responsibilities over time. For example, in our high school, we have conducted some individual trainings for teachers, but we have also employed a full-time pedagogical adviser living in the village and working with staff every day. She has now identified staff members who can fill her role in the future, and this year she will be coming to the village three times for two months each time to oversee that transition. No matter how well planned, not all transitions are smooth, and sometimes a “plan B” is necessary. For example, we had an educator who trained staff in the Youth Village philosophy and methodology living in the village for the first three years of operation. He identified and trained a Rwandan successor on our staff, but after one year in this position that successor was hired away by another institution. To address the problem we identified a new candidate from our staff who would excel at the job and brought over a team from Israel to train (and re-train) all staff in our philosophy and methodology. This team will continue to provide support to the new educator and other staff members until everyone feels it is no longer necessary. This methodology of intensive training with an eye toward operational sustainability inevitably results in two salaries being paid for one job. Travel, training, and consultant costs can be avoided by simply using expatriate staff. We are very clear with our funders, however, that this is our strategy, and our budget includes the necessary costs of these trainers and consultants. Our donors are aware that without this type of investment, it is impossible for a project like Agahozo-Shalom to ever become truly independent.

President Obama’s call in last week’s State of the Union address for high-quality pre-kindergarten education for all American children is long overdue. The rest of the developed world is well ahead of the United States when it comes to universal pre-K. Just 69 percent of American four-year-olds are in any kind of program, compared to nearly all four-year-olds in most of Western Europe, Japan, and Taiwan, where pre-K is usually part of the public school systems. In other words, for some of the United States’ chief economic competitors, school starts a full year earlier. But the United States has been catching up. The biggest growth has been in state-run programs, where pre-K enrollment doubled during the 2000s. Thirty-nine states now offer programs, most of them means-tested, compared to eight states in 1980. Only sparsely populated Western states have no programs at all. Nine states have “universal” preschool programs, in which pre-K is supposed to be available to all who apply. High-quality pre-K programs can have an immensely positive and cost-effective impact on young children,  particularly on the most disadvantaged. One year of intensive cognitive enrichment in model programs, such as the famous Perry Preschool project, can catapult an adult into a different life trajectory—where he or she is more likely to graduate high school, stay out of crime, form stable relationships and families, and ultimately earn more money. For programs like Perry Preschool, the cost-benefit analysis would make any policymaker swoon; every public dollar spent gives back seven dollars worth in future benefits. The problem is that the average pre-K experience in the United States is not high quality. According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, only five states provide programs satisfy all of their quality benchmarks. Most children enrolled in state pre-K programs have teachers who are only required to have a high school degree and earn less than K-12 teachers. Head Start, the federal program for young children in poverty, has a spotty record when it comes to average quality and impact on student achievement. Moreover, more than half the country’s impoverished children, whom Head Start and means-tested state-run programs are designed to serve, are not enrolled in any pre-K program. The challenge then will be to raise overall quality, expand to scale, and at manageable costs—and all while convincing the public the massive new funding to make it happen are worth it in the long term. Luckily we know it is possible, and in the most unlikely of places: red-state, rural, far-from-wealthy, and tea-party-strong Oklahoma. Its state-run program is universal and has among the highest enrollment rates of any in the country, serving roughly three-quarters of the state’s four-year-olds. The program’s architects wisely folded pre-K into the existing public school system. Funding, which comes from the same general education budget as K-12, is therefore safe from line-item slashing that so often occurs during recessionary budget cuts. The same K-12 teacher standards (e.g., requiring a college degree or certification) and salaries are extended to pre-K teachers. Students’ cognitive gains have been huge; compared to their peers who did not attend the state’s pre-K program, they were nine months ahead in reading and five months ahead in math. While it may be too early to draw definitive conclusions about these children’s long-term success since the program has only existed for fifteen years, the magnitude of the short-term cognitive gains bodes well for sustained behavioral effects. Most remarkably, Oklahoma has pulled this off while spending only $7,500 per pupil per year—more than the average for all state-run programs (i.e., means-tested and universal), but much less than other model programs like the Perry Preschool project. What role should the federal government take in expanding high-quality pre-K on a national scale? According to a recently released Center for American Progress proposal considered to be Obama’s blueprint, the federal role will primarily be to help fund state programs. The proposal calls for federal matching grants up to $10,000 per child—a more generous amount above and beyond what Oklahoma spends—with some additional grants for especially needy districts. The taxpayer’s bill would be an estimated $10.5 billion a year. It remains to be seen whether Congress will stomach a new social spending program at a time when austerity and debt negotiations are issue number one on the agenda. States could certainly use the funding help. State per-pupil pre-K spending for all programs has declined by 15 percent in the last ten years. While Oklahoma stands as a shiny example, other states are backtracking on quality largely because of budget cuts. In 2010, Arizona became the first state to cancel its entire pre-K program. California and New York have eliminated regular site visits to monitor quality. Other states are reducing the frequency of site visits. In this era of austerity, a more realistic short-term goal would be to ensure that existing pre-K monies are well-spent on the neediest children. Here the Obama administration has made some positive impact. The lowest-performing Head Start programs are being forced to “recompete” for funding based on a new set of quality benchmarks. By 2014, half of all Head Start teachers must hold bachelor’s degrees. A new federal competitive-grant program rewards states that expand access to poor children and build robust evaluation systems for better quality control. These are small initial steps that move the country in the direction of the ultimate long-term goal of high-quality pre-K for all.

I spent a fascinating day last Thursday at meeting organized by Atlantic magazine under the title: Manufacturing’s Next Chapter. Here was the most startling piece. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in manufacturing fell from 17.1 million jobs in January 2001 to 11.9 million jobs in January 2013, a staggering decline of 5.2 million jobs. And yet the hottest topic at the meeting was the complaint that there is somehow a shortage of qualified workers holding back the expansion of manufacturing in the United States. The issue of whether a “skills gap” exists in the United States is a difficult one to parse. On the one hand, there are certainly plenty of companies advertising for new employees; at last count there were about 3.6 million job vacancies, up about 1 million from the depths of the recession in 2010 but still about 1 million below the pre-recession peak. It is also true that in manufacturing the nature of the job has been changing, with employers increasingly looking for computer-literate workers with the ability to operate expensive automated equipment. Though there has been only a slight uptick in manufacturing hiring over the past two years – a gain of about 500,000 jobs from the recession lows of 2010 – it is at least plausible that those with the right skills are in short supply. On the other hand, it’s also clear that U.S. companies aren’t trying very hard to attract workers. Wages for manufacturing workers have been flat for more than a decade, and have fallen behind overall private sector wages. There are some exceptions, like aerospace, information technology and oil and gas, but in most sectors real wages have actually fallen. If there were indeed a serious skills shortage, normally that would be reflected in rising wages as companies scrambled to lure the employees they need. And yet some companies have acknowledged that one of the reasons they are expanding in the United States is that wages are rising in places like China while they are falling in the United States, particularly for new hires. This conundrum – claims of skills shortages coupled with flat wages – has long puzzled me. Basic laws of supply and demand would suggest that a shortage would drive wages up. Rob Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, suggested a plausible answer to me. Since most U.S.-based manufacturing is operating in a truly global market, the companies have alternatives to paying higher wages. If a company cannot find skilled workers at the advertised wage, then there are other alternatives to offering a higher wage, such as expanding overseas or investing in additional labor-saving technology. What does that mean then, for labor market policies? There is no question the United States needs to do a far better job at ensuring that employees have the skills needed for available jobs. David Arkless, a global expert on labor market trends, said that the United States has become “inward-looking”, and has failed to match the rest of the world in developing systems to better forecast labor market needs and to better train workers for the jobs that will be available. U.S. community colleges remain in general under-funded. Arkless argued that government investment in workforce development is among the best strategies available for attracting investment. Companies too share much of the blame. As Peter Cappelli, director of the Wharton Center for Human Resources, lays out in a fine little book called “Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs,” most U.S. companies have abandoned employee training. The unions that formerly ran many apprenticeship programs have been decimated, and companies don’t want to pay for their own programs, objecting both to the expense and to the risk that a trained employee will  get snatched away by a competitor. But the collective impact of multiple companies behaving the same way is an ill-prepared workforce. Particularly as mature industries like aerospace are facing the imminent retirement of much of their skilled workforce, the failure to train a new generation could be catastrophic. U.S. companies need to start taking a lesson from European competitors like Volkswagen and Siemens who are investing heavily in the United States and partnering with state governments and community colleges to train the workforce they need. I remain unpersuaded, however, that better training and better alignment of skills and the job market will lead to a flowering of the “good jobs at good wages” that manufacturing boosters promise. They may well be good jobs, and there could well be more of them, but the wages are likely to remain modest.

I got the chance last week to visit the Centro Comunitário Lídia dos Santos (or CEACA), an NGO based in the Rio de Janeiro favela of Morro dos Macacos—once the grounds of a zoo, and now home to some 25,000 cariocas (Rio’s residents). Headed by Dona Anna Marcondes Faria, it is the culmination of nearly fifty years of her work to make the community safer. From initial efforts to bring running water and kindergarten classes to the neighborhood, the two story building now offers a host of after school programs, art classes, professional training sessions, and environmental awareness projects. The goal is not just to teach skills but also confidence. CEACA, along with NGOs in some 450 other communities, have gained the attention and support of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Walmart, and dozens of other corporations. A recurring theme in the conversations we had with our hosts and guides was change. Visiting the community’s recycling building, the manager Dona Regina da Silva spoke to us about the challenge of gaining residents’ support for the business. In the beginning she worked alone, snubbed by many of her neighbors as the “garbage lady.” Today, some 700 families bring bottles, paper, plastics, and other goods each week to exchange for food tokens, and in the building next door women and youths use the sorted neighborhood trash materials to create beautiful items such as pillows, bags, and placemats (you can see their work here). In the computer lab/classroom, we spoke with a group of teenagers. Asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, the students offered up careers including engineers, architects, and biologists. Our guides said that this was a significant shift from just a few years ago—when the dreams were smaller and the enthusiasm less pervasive. One of the teachers that spoke with us was a past student, back to help the younger generation as she finished up her university degree. Though she said that few of her former classmates had followed her into higher education, they all dreamed of it, another big change from the past. Organizations such as CEARA make a difference by connecting individuals within the neighborhood and preparing them for the broader world. Also important in transforming the futures of Macacos’ residents has been Rio’s broader security efforts. On the streets the blue and black uniforms of Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) troops were noticeable, part of a city-wide effort (now in over twenty neighborhoods) to introduce a permanent police presence into historically gang-run areas. Many Morro dos Macacos residents recounted the isolation they felt before the UPP officers arrived. Not only did they face discrimination from those on the outside when they revealed where they lived, they also found it dangerous to simply come and go, as rivalries between the gangs controlling each favela extended to all residents—whether members or not . Now with the UPP in place, residents can travel more freely. With persistent high inequality and poverty rates, and over a million living in Rio’s favelas alone, these individual steps may be small. But from my few hours there, the Morro dos Macacos neighborhood at least felt to be moving in the right direction.

South Africa is usually regarded as Africa’s economic powerhouse, but international commentators increasingly talk about Nigeria displacing it. Simukai Tinhu tries to get beyond the hype and has written a thoughtful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both countries in his article “Will Nigeria Overtake South Africa as Africa’s Powerhouse.” He argues that while Nigeria’s growth rate is high, and its population huge, there are serious weaknesses and instabilities in its political economy. He cites the economy’s dependency on high oil prices, a small entrepreneurial community, the Nigerian brain drain to London, New York, and Johannesburg, corruption, poor infrastructure, the rough neighborhood that is West Africa, and the ethnic and religious conflicts that pose an “existential threat” to state stability. As for South Africa, he sees the threat to its leadership coming not from Nigeria but from its internal “tense social atmosphere,” as manifested in the Marikana massacre. He claims South Africa has failed to analyze the causes of this tense social atmosphere, or to adequately address them. Simukai Tinhu’s comments reflect the importance (I would say primacy) of good governance to sustainable economic growth. Here, South Africa with its functioning democracy, strong government institutions, independent judiciary based on the rule of law, and vibrant civil society clearly has an advantage over Nigeria. Both are plagued with corruption, but in South Africa there is the strong political will to address it, and corrupt public servants and politicians are charged, tried, and jailed. That is much rarer in Nigeria, if not unknown. One factor Tinhu does not address, however, is the educational gap between Nigeria and South Africa. For all of its faults, South Africa has the strongest education system in Africa, and it is the only African country with universities that are regarded as world class.  That promotes the development of a diverse and innovative modern economy. The same is true of medical services. In Nigeria they remain undeveloped; in South Africa there are parallel first world and third world systems, and the HIV/AIDS burden has been much greater. Nevertheless, according to the CIA World Factbook, the average life span for South Africans is forty-nine years in comparison with fifty-two years for Nigerians.