Dana Goldstein

Joseph Massad's Stunningly Ignorant Al-Jazeera Essay on Zionism and Anti-Semitism

I've been excited about Al Jazeera's expansion in the U.S. market, but this poorly-written, rambling essay by Columbia professor Joseph Massad, calling Zionists anti-Semitic, is as bad as its critics allege. Yes: The Israeli government's repeated claim to speak on behalf of all Jews, worldwide, is deeply problematic, especially given Israel's deplorable ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands. But Massad takes this observation and pads it with ignorant misreadings of history and religious belief, as well as a breezy, ahistoric, and anti-Semitic conflation of Zionism with Nazism. I have neither the time nor the inclination to rebut the piece point by point, but here are a few obvious flaws:

1. Massad claims the Jewish longing for Israel dates back only to the 18th century rise of Protestant nationalism in Europe. Hogwash. Much of the Jewish liturgy, dating back two milennia, is built around mourning for the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the hope that we will congregate in the Holy Land in a figurative "next year," returning there permanently after the coming of the Messiah.

2. Massad points out that both Zionists and Christian anti-Semites believed Jews did not belong in Europe. Does it follow that Zionists are as anti-Semitic as Nazis were, as Massad shockingly claims? Of course not. Many disempowered people have created separatist movements. In the American context, think of black nationalism and separatism. Were Marus Garvey or Amiri Baraka adherents of the same ideology as 19th century "Back to Africa" whites, like Lyman Beecher? No. Zora Neale Hurston opposed Brown v. Board of Education, not because she felt blacks were inferior to whites and thus should attend separate schools, but because she believed integration would damage "the self-respect of my people" by forcing them to closely associate with racists. 

3. Massad writes that almost all those Jews who opposed or were skeptical of Zionism were killed during the Holocaust, leaving a monolithic group of rabidly Zionist (and also anti-Semitic?) Jews. In fact, a number of prominent Jews and Jewish organizations remained critical of Zionism after the war; Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt obviously come to mind. In his book The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart discusses how organized American Jewry was actually rather slow to embrace Zionism as a central cause. Massad also asserts that "Orthodox and Reform Jews, Socialist and Communist Jews, cosmopolitan and Yiddishkeit cultural Jews" were opponents of Zionism. In fact, members of all the aforementioned groups were sometimes strongly Zionist, whether they lived in Europe, Palestine, or the United States. For example, many of the earliest Zionist Jewish settlers in Palestine came from European cities and were socialists. They created kibbutzim to reconnect Jews to the land in a communiatarian way. 

Al-Jazeera can do better.

Youth Unemployment and the Apprenticeship Gap

Kudos to David Leonhardt for calling attention to the staggeringly high American youth unemployment rate -- 26.6 percent -- compared to rates in Europe and Japan. I just want to add that in addition to overall sluggish job creation, one of the problems is that American employers tend to avoid job training and seek workers who already have the exact experience they're looking for. A Boeing executive pretty much sums up this world view: "To expect business to bring graduates up to speed," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education, "that's too much to ask."

Compare this attitude to the one that prevails in nations like Germany and Switzerland, where schools and employers work together, through the apprenticeship system, to prepare young people for the specific jobs the economy needs. Here's my interview with an expert on those aprrenticeships, who explains how they work and why, contrary to American assumptions, they don't prevent young people from pursuing higher education. I've also reported on promising attempts to replicate the European model in the U.S. at both the high school and community college levels. Even Boeing maintains a small apprenticeship program in Washington State. But there is almost zero political will to provide schools or employers with the incentives they need to create and scale these systems. 

"Unquestioning Loyalty"

This is the text of a loyalty oath New York City public school teachers were expected to take in 1917 and 1918. Over the next three decades, teachers across the country were periodically subjected to these sorts of jingoistic fevers. For Quakers and antiwar activists, a particular problem with the pledge was the vow of unquestioning obedience to American military policy, as well as the promise to inculcate such obedience in one's students:

"We, the teachers of the public schools of the City of New York, do solemnly pledge our unqualified loyalty to the President and Congress of the United States in this war with the imperial governments of Germany and Austria. 

 "We pledge ourselves actively to inculcate in our pupils by word and deed love of flag and unquestioning loyalty to the military policy of the government and to the measures and principles proclaimed by the President and Congress.

"We declare ourselves to be in sympathy with the purposes of the government and its efforts to make the world safe for democracy, and believe that our highest duty at this moment is to uphold the hands of the President and Congress in this crisis. 

"We believe that any teachers whose views prevent them from subscribing to such sentiments should not be permitted to teach the youth of our city.”

 Related: Texas state senators object to a curriculum that supposedly sympathizes with socialists, critiques founding fathers.

Inside My Interview with Bill Gates

Yesterday I got to meet and interview Bill Gates, along with five other writers and reporters. We sat around a conference table at a midtown Manhattan hotel. Gates, wearing a totally unassuming gray suit and sipping Diet Coke out of a glass bottle, was business like and to the point. His passion flared up a few times during the hour-long conversation. He vehemently pushed back against economist and blogger Tyler Cowen's suggestion that macroeconomic and population growth, as well as better roads and other infrastructure, could bring faster humanitarian relief to Africa than more direct health interventions like vaccinations or contraceptives, which the Gates Foundation funds. Discussing the bleak living conditions in the Central African Republic and Yemen, Gates said, "If you don't invest in health there, you're a cold-hearted bastard." In a rare personal comment, he discussed how one of his daugthers was moved by video footage of a child survivor of polio limping down a dirt road. "What did you do to help her?" she asked her dad -- an insightful comment, since Gates said he feels growing concern about the survivors of once-deadly childhood diseases like malaria and polio, who often arrive at school with cognitive delays that make it difficult to learn. 

On education, I think a few of Gates' comments broke news. He hinted that his foundation may soon invest resources in alternate rankings of American colleges, saying the true metric for success in higher education should be whether a school accepts a student "with a combined SAT score of 600, and they got $100,000 jobs, and they're super happy." In response to several questions from yours truly, he also discussed standardized testing and teacher evaluation at length, particulary in non-traditional subjects such as art and music. Gates said he isn't sure if good tests can be created in the arts, and he called Florida's plan to move forward quickly with such non-traditional testing "crazy," as well as something that could create a popular backlash against education reform. 

In response to Jason Kottke, Gates briefly addressed his reputation as one of the world's most celebrated college drop-outs, and I thought his comments were interesting considering the backlash against college coming from Peter Thiel and some other Silicon Valley luminaries, who tend to imagine upper middle class kids and the Ivy League when they hear the words "higher education." First, Gates correctly pointed out that community colleges and four-year public universities make up "the heart and soul of education in America," and that those schools are currently operating under severe budget constraints, which hinder their ability to move the working poor into the middle class. Second, he said the number of successful tech entrepreneurs or programmers without a college degree is "a rounding error, that's why it's so mythic," and added that he had enjoyed college and "I'm just about as fake a drop out as you can get," since he loves lectures and left Harvard only to pursue the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to launch Microsoft.

Lastly, in response to Jacob Weisberg, Gates addressed the potential of MOOCs--massive online open courses--to transform higher education, saying such classes would not live up to their full potential unless they enroll more low-income students and provide some sort of counseling or support to guide students through completing the MOOC and ultimately attaining some sort of credential. Currently, most MOOCs are seeing drop-out rates of up to 80 percent, and are reaching a fairly privileged audience. 

Head on over to The Atlantic to read my full report.

Can Four Young Economists Build the Most Efficient Charity Ever?

It's holiday giving season. Would you donate cash to a poor family, and let them spend it on whatever they wish? That's the radically simple premise of the new philanthropy GiveDirectly, which I report on today at The Atlantic:

GiveDirectly remains an outlier in the development arena, perhaps the only organization that distributes private donations, made online, directly to the poor with no strings attached--no requirement to launch a business or to immunize one's child; no distribution of bed nets, solar lanterns, orgoats.

The economics might be sound. But the politics within the non-profit world are more complicated. Niehaus, now a professor at the University of San Diego, says other development experts who have tested unconditional cash transfers are enthusiastic about the approach. The trouble is convincing NGOs to invest in such programs beyond the pilot stages.

"We had conversations with people [in the non-profit sector] who said there was a lot of internal resistance to unconditional transfers," Niehaus told me. "If this works, what are we all here for? Why do we have jobs? There's an industry that exists that tries to make decisions for poor people and determine what's best for them. In some ways, that's the industry I came from. But the value of that hasn't been proven."

Read the whole piece!

Susan Rice, Obama, the Clintons, and the Tragedy in the Congo

The decade-long conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly over control of mineral deposits, is the deadliest the planet has seen since World War II, with an estimated 3 million people killed and 500,000 women and girls brutally raped. Every expert agrees that the governments of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, which receive hundreds of millions of dollars in American military aid each year, have enabled the militias that perpetrate much of the violence in the Congo. We also know that multinational mining and tech corporations, many of which have deep political influence in the United States, are dependent upon the minerals dug up in rebel-controlled Congolese mines. These materials are used to build cell phones and other small electronic devices.

UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s history of consulting for the autocratic Paul Kagame regime in Rwanda should certainly be on the table as the president, Congress, and public weigh her candidacy for secretary of state. But it is crucial to note that in her repeated attempts to downplay the role of the Rwandan government in the systematic mass killing, rape, and torture of Congolese civilians, as well as in the recruitment of child soldiers, Rice is serving not as a lone actor, but in absolute concert with the Obama administration’s overall Africa policy. Under Hillary Clinton, the State Department committed $17 million to alleviating sexual violence in the region. Most of the money was spent on treating rape survivors, which, while absolutely crucial, did not address the political and economic root causes of the conflict. That’s a problem because no matter how hard health and development organizations work to rehabilitate rape victims and former child soldiers, as long as the conflict continues, these survivors risk being re-victimized once they return to violence-torn communities. That is why so many Congolese women and girls are raped multiple times.

As I reported in 2010:

Obama has long been interested in Africa, both personally and politically. As a freshman senator in 2005, he sponsored legislation, later signed into law by President Bush, empowering the secretary of state to withhold aid from neighboring countries that play a role in destabilizing Congo.

But that prerogative was never exercised, under either Bush or Obama, even as both Sweden and the Netherlands de-funded Rwanda because of its support for armed rebel groups active inside Congo.

In its dealings with Rwanda, the U.S. is “paralyzed,” argued Mvemba Dizolele, a native of Congo and Africa policy expert associated with the Hoover Institution and Johns Hopkins University. “We lost our moral authority in 1994 when the genocide happened, and we allowed [Rwandan President] Paul Kagame”—the leader who ended the genocide—“to become the authority in the region and go into Congo.”

As a veteran of the Clinton administration, Rice is part of the group of policy-makers who deeply regretted America’s inaction in the face of the Rwandan genocide, and who greeted Kagame’s rise to power with relief. In 2009, Bill Clinton presented Kagame with a Global Citizenship Award at his annual Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York. In 2010 I asked President Clinton about UN reports holding Kagame’s administration partially responsible for violence in the Congo. Clinton replied:

“The U.N. said what it did about what happened after the [Rwandan] genocide, in Congo. … Kagame strongly disputes it. Right now I’m not going to pre-judge him because there’s this huge debate about what happened in the Congo and why, and I don’t know.”

In reality, Kagame’s culpability has been broadly documented for years, by the United Nations, by Human Rights Watch, and by Africa scholars and advocates. It’s fine to hold Susan Rice accountable on this, but we have to reach higher, too, into the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Oval Office.

The Disability Treaty Debacle and the Republican Education Agenda

Every so often the paranoid rhetoric of the "parental rights" movement surfaces in the Congressional Republican caucus. That's what happened yesterday when 38 senators blocked the United States from adopting the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a treaty largely based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. That celebrated piece of legislation was signed into law by George H.W. Bush in 1990. Both former Bush presidents, Bob Dole, and John McCain all back the treaty, which seeks to prevent discrimination on the basis of disability, and which would do nothing to change any exisiting U.S. law or to prevent homeschooling. Yet anti-internationalist conservative interest groups have organized strong opposition to this treaty and others among homeschooling parents and Tea Party activists, telling them it could prevent parents from educating disabled children at home or using corporal punishment. From the Senate floor, Utah's Mike Lee articulated this position: 

I and many of my constituents, including those who homeschool their children or send their children to private or religious schools, have justifiable doubts that a foreign UN body, a committee operating out of Geneva, Switzerland, should decide what is in the best interests of a child at home with his or her parents in Utah or in any other state in our Great union.

Back during the GOP primary I wrote an essay for The Nation about divisions in the Republican Party over school reform. The GOP education agenda is no longer set by No Child Left Behind moderates, who see school accountability and choice--backed by shared academic standards and enforced through standardized testing--as essentially conservative ideas. Instead, as President Obama and most Democrats have come to embrace that reform agenda, and have implemented it through programs like Race to the Top, the GOP has shifted far to the right, becoming increasingly responsive to activists who see any federal foray into education or children's issues more broadly as an invasion of the sacred parent-child relationship. 

This helps explain what happened in the Senate yesterday, and it explains what the Republican Party will have to resolve, internally, if it really intends to make education a core part of its emerging post-2012 agenda, as Buzzfeed's John Stanton and Zeke Miller are reporting. Sure: Private school vouchers and anti-teachers' union rhetoric can coexist quite comfortably with strong support for unregulated homeschooling. Both sets of ideas are predicated on a certain hostility toward traditional public schools; Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum would agree, for example, that more kids should be able to use their state and federal education funding to enroll in online, for-profit charter schools, which students "attend" from their home computers, and which are much cheaper to operate than brick-and-mortar schools.

But ultimately, authentic school improvement must take into consideration the curriculum and how it is tested or assessed, not just at charter or online schools, but at traditional public schools, as well, in which close to 90 percent of American children are enrolled. The religious right has a long history of opposing state and national efforts to raise academic standards and even to provide high school students with on-the-job vocational training (Michele Bachmann began her career grandstanding on such issues); moderate Republicans like Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels, however, remain comitted to the Common Core and to the basic idea that Washington has a role to play in supporting local schools and holding them accountable for results. 

The intra-Democratic Party debate between traditional teachers' union positions and standards-and-accountability reform was resolved over the course of the past 20 years mostly in favor of reform. The Republican Party may now go through a similar transition. Will the GOP choose centrist standardization and school improvement (which costs money), or conservative hostility toward any investment in public education? 

A "Bar" Exam for Teachers?

With the Common Core, the United States finally has national curriculum standards to define what students should be able to do at each grade level. Should we also have national teaching standards?

The American Federation of Teachers has released a new proposal for national teacher certification, which would require all incoming teachers—including those recruited by Teach for America and other alternative-certification programs—to pass a written test of subject area knowledge, as well as demonstrate real-world pedagogical skill within the classroom, ideally over the course of a full year.

There's a lot to like in the AFT report, which borrows from international best practices for improving the prestige and effectiveness of public school teaching: in short, raise academic standards for prospective teachers, while requiring recruits to spend a significant amount of time observing master teachers at work. That said, despite a statement of support from Arne Duncan, I don't think these ideas are terribly likely to be broadly implemented any time soon. Powerful and influential people believe in tearing down, not building up, the barriers to becoming a teacher. Education budgets are still reeling post-recession, and most of the reform firepower is already committed to implementing the Common Core and overhauling the evaluation of existing teachers. It's still worth the time, however, to dive deeply into this paper, both because its policy ideas are worthwhile and because politically, it indicates how the teachers' union movement is hoping to shift the school reform debate.

The AFT plan calls for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) to lead the process of writing credentialing guidelines to replace current state-by-state credentialing practices. States could then choose to adopt and assess the national standards as they see fit. (Advocates for the Common Core used a similar political strategy to convince 45 states to adopt those shared standards.) On a conference call with reporters, AFT president Randi Weingarten said such a system would be like the one used in the legal profession, in which prospective lawyers must pass state-by-state bar exams that test for knowledge of local law, but that also include questions on federal law and nationally-relevant legal principles.

The new proposal also supports college GPA requirements for teaching hopefuls, building on the AFT's long-held belief that university departments other than education departments should handle future teachers’ subject-area training. A prospective English teacher, for example, should enroll in a rigorous course of study within her college’s English department, not only in education classes on the pedagogy of teaching reading and writing. Such a set of reforms could answer some critics of American public school teaching, who have long complained that teachers who earn poor grades or who major in education are unprepared to introduce students to the academic disciplines.

The requirement for what Weingarten calls “clinical practice” before certification could prove challenging to implement in a rigorous and uniform way. The NBPTS already administers a well-known master teacher certification program in which veteran educators submit two 15-minute videos of their teaching, alongside a self-reflective essay. NBPTS president Ronald Thorpe, who was also on the conference call, suggested a similar, if less advanced, assessment could be used to evaluate prospective teachers. But currently, not all beginner teachers have trained within real-world classrooms, and local standards for student teachers vary widely. Some trainees prepare and teach sample lessons, while others simply observe a more experienced colleague at work.

Politically, there are several interesting stories here:

• As Weingarten mentioned on the conference call, the national school reform conversation has been “fixated on evaluation” of teachers. The AFT proposal represents, in part, an attempt by the union to shift attention away from the poor performance of some tenured teachers and toward raising standards on the profession’s front end, before teachers are ever in charge of a classroom—and before they ever pay union dues and expect union protection.

• The AFT report offers a clear challenge to Teach For America. The proposal says it is ideal for all teaching hopefuls to spend a full academic year training in veteran teachers' classrooms before earning the keys to their own classrooms, and Weingarten says it is essential that both traditionally and alternatively-educated teachers be held to the same “bar”-like procedures. TFA recruits currently receive just about five weeks of training and practice teaching, typically during the summer between their senior year of college and first year as full-fledged teachers. The organization has a history of successfully lobbying against efforts to hold its recruits to the same credentialing standards as other teachers, and TFA, along with its many influential donors and political allies, would likely oppose national teaching standards that rendered TFA's own model obsolete. (As an example of a more rigorous alternative certification route, the AFT report approvingly cites the Urban Teacher Residency model, which requires recent college grads and career-changers to work a full year as an “apprentice” within the classroom of a mentor teacher, before committing to three years teaching in high-need districts.) 

• Would the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards be broadly trusted to lead such an effort? The NBPTS’ master teacher certification program is widely respected within education, but also has some critics. Several researchers have used value-added measurement to question whether Board-certified teachers are actually significantly better than other teachers at raising student achievement.

• “National” anything is controversial, which explains some of the resentment toward the Common Core shared curriculum standards. Although the Core enjoys bipartisan support, and allows states and local schools considerable flexibility, both the activist right and left have painted it as an example of federal overreach into a realm best managed by local educators and parents. Expect similar opposition to any attempt to create national teaching standards. 

Like Romney, Obama Admin Has Supported Larger Class Sizes. Parents and Teachers Don’t Like It

Despite moderator Bob Schieffer’s wrongheaded assertion that education isn’t a foreign policy issue, class size emerged as a flash point at Monday night’s debate. President Obama boasted about his administration’s record on saving teaching positions and spoke about his plan to hire more math and science educators in particular, which he argued would help American students compete with their international peers for high-skill jobs.

“Now, Governor Romney, when you were asked by teachers whether or not this would help the economy grow, you said, this isn’t going to help the economy grow,” Obama said. “When you were asked about reduced class sizes, you said class sizes don’t make a difference. But I tell you, if you talk to teachers, they will tell you it does make a difference.”

Romney certainly has a record of claiming smaller class sizes don’t help students learn. But what Obama didn’t say is that while it’s true his stimulus funding saved hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs, his own secretary of education, Arne Duncan, has also spoken favorably about larger class sizes. On March 3, 2011 I asked Duncan about proposed teacher layoffs in New York City. He demurred on the specifics of the negotiations between Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the teachers’ union, but then echoed rhetoric in favor of larger classes often deployed by Bloomberg and other national school reformers, like Bill Gates.

“Class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on,” Duncan told me. He proposed paying proven teachers $20,000 to $25,000 more annually if they agree to teach five additional students. In an acknowledgement that surveys show large class sizes are unpopular with the public, Duncan added that parents should have the choice of whether to place their children in such classes, but said he’d rather his own children were taught by an effective teacher in a larger class than an ineffective teacher in a smaller one. “It's provocative,” he admitted, “but we're talking about selectively raising class sizes amongst your greatest talent."

Duncan has made similar comments in public speeches, most notably in a talk about education budgets called, “The New Normal: Doing More With Less,” which he delivered at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in November 2010.

While it’s clear both Democrats and Republicans have floated the idea of larger class sizes in recent years, it’s less clear what the impact of class size is on student achievement. Common sense suggests crisis class sizes of 50 or 60 students, which were seen at the depth of the recession in Detroit and some California cities, are much too large, leading even the most skilled teachers to become overwhelmed and unable to focus on individual students’ needs. Those situations are most likely to occur in school districts with high-poverty student populations, though some research suggests poor and minority children benefit most from smaller classes.

Where the class size debate gets really complex is when you look at more typical class sizes; for example, the difference between a 25 and 30-student class. In 1985, the Tennessee STAR project randomly assigned a few thousand elementary school students to very small classes of between 13 and 17 children. A number of studies showed students in those classes had higher academic achievement than peers in larger classes, and were more likely to graduate high school. Partly in response, states like California, Florida, and North Carolina launched efforts to reduce average class sizes, but because of budget limitations, few districts have been able to lower class sizes to the extent the research literature suggests is ideal—by at least six to eight students.

Internationally, the United States has larger than average class sizes, but a few of the nations with even bigger classes than ours, such as Korea, Japan, and Australia, clearly out-perform us academically—as do several countries, like Finland and Canada, that have made small classes a priority.

For policy wonks, the mixed evidence on class size can induce whiplash. But parents aren’t confused—they love the idea of their kids getting more personal attention in smaller classes, which is one reason why, nationwide, private schools have an average of 19.4 students per class, compared to 23.6 students in public schools. Whenever I write about this topic, I also get impassioned feedback from teachers. One Washington, D.C. public school educator told me her ideal class size would be 16 students.

“Class size is tied with improving teacher education as the number one issue in education today,” she said. “Really good teaching is differentiated teaching—meeting each and every kid where they are and raising their level of work bit by bit, day by day. Only by knowing each kid, conferencing with each kid and providing instruction to each kid how he or she best learns can we honestly close the achievement gap. We cannot do this with 26 second graders and only one teacher. It is impossible.”

Talking Health Care and Julian Assange on MSNBC

I've really enjoyed my past few appearances on MSNBC. Folks like Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry, Ezra Klein, and today Ari Melber, who guest hosted "Now with Alex Wagner," are doing substantive television. We talked health care, and I was glad we got to make the point that Paul Ryan's proposed cuts would affect not only seniors, but also children, single mothers, and the disabled. As usual, *love* E.J. Dionne.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I also learned a lot from my co-panelists in this segment about Julian Assange. For more on the sexual assault charges he faces, read Amanda Marcotte.