Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health-care reform, and Republicans will vote against it.
Yes, Democrats have rallied behind a bill that large numbers of Republicans should love. It is built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.
Republicans have said that they do not want to destroy the private insurance market. This bill not only preserves that market but strengthens it by bringing millions of new customers. The plan before Congress does not call for a government “takeover” of health care. It provides subsidies so more people can buy private insurance.
Republicans always say that they are against “socialized medicine.” Not only is this bill nothing like a “single-payer” health system along Canadian or British lines, but it doesn’t even include the “public option” that would have allowed people voluntarily to buy their insurance from the government. The single-payer idea fell by the wayside long ago, and supporters of the public option—sadly, from my point of view—lost out in December.
They’ll be back, of course. The newly pragmatic Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was right to say that this is just the first step in a long process. We will see if this market-based system works. If it doesn’t, single-payer plans and public options will look more attractive.
Republican reform advocates have long called for a better insurance market. Our current system provides individuals with little market power in the purchase of health insurance. As a result, they typically pay exorbitant premiums. The new insurance exchanges will pool individuals together and give them a fighting chance at a fair shake.
Republicans now say that they hate the mandate that requires everyone to buy insurance. But an individual mandate was hailed as a form of “personal responsibility” by no less a conservative Republican than Mitt Romney. He was proud of the mandate and proud of the insurance exchange idea, known in Massachusetts as “The Health Connector” (the idea itself came from the conservative Heritage Foundation).
What does it tell us that Republicans are now opposing a bill rooted in so many of their own principles? Why has it fallen to Democrats to push the thing through?
The obvious lesson is that the balance of opinion in the Republican Party has swung far to the right of where it used to be. Republicans once believed in market-based government solutions. Now they are suspicious of government solutions altogether. That’s true even in an area such as health care, where government, through Medicare and Medicaid, already plays a necessarily large role.
As for the Democrats, they have been both pragmatic and moderate, despite all the claims that this plan is “left wing” or “socialist.” It is neither.
You could argue that Democrats have learned from Republicans. Some might say that Democrats have been less than true to their principles.
But there is a simpler conclusion: Democrats, including President Obama, are so anxious to get everyone health insurance that they are more than willing to try a market-based system and hope it works. It’s a shame the Republicans can no longer take “yes” for an answer.
E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.
(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
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Shortly after Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou took office last fall, he learned that he’d inherited a massive booby prize: a budget deficit that was twice the amount the previous government had disclosed. But, when Papandreou came clean and promised to address the problem, the financial markets reacted violently. Interest rates soared, adding billions in debt-service costs to an already dire budget picture. And so, when Papandreou arrived in Washington in March, the stated reason was to push his brief against speculators--who, he claimed, had driven up Greek borrowing costs to usurious levels. “[We] were bold enough to reveal these problems,” Papandreou said at the time. “But we were also penalized for revealing these problems.”
Unofficially, however, the point of the trip wasn’t so much economics as political economy: to subtly suggest that Greece had allies outside Europe who could help deal with its debt crisis. For weeks now, the Greeks and their eurozone neighbors have been engaged in an awkward dance. The French and Germans, who hold outsize sway in the monetary union, have shunned talk of a bailout, which would go down in their countries about the way the Wall Street bailout went down in this one. (The image of entitled Greeks frolicking on sun-splashed islands occupies roughly the same mental space in Northern Europe that “fat-cat bankers” do in Middle America.) The Europeans imply that there’s little risk of contagion and believe Greece should largely clean up its own mess. For its part, Athens has formally denied interest in a bailout. But it has desperately played up the seriousness of the situation so as to obtain some sort of assistance, suggesting the turmoil could spill into Ireland and Portugal, even large economies like Spain and Italy.
By trekking to Washington, Papandreou hoped to ever-so-slightly tip the balance in this showdown. As Gikas Hardouvelis, a former economic adviser to one of Papandreou’s predecessors, described the thinking to me, “Let the Germans feel that you do have Obama’s ear so that they don’t feel like super dictators.” But the truth is that Washington can’t play a direct role for fear of meddling in European affairs.
Which raises an interesting geopolitical question: How does the world handle a crisis when the United States can’t step in? The answer, so far, is not very well. Without a third-party broker, it’s not clear that the Greeks and Europeans can strike a bold enough deal soon enough. And that could be a problem not just for Europe, but for the entire global economy. “Just as subprime in the U.S. affected Europe,” says Ted Truman, a longtime Fed and Treasury official who advised Secretary Timothy Geithner last year, “there’s no reason a crisis in Greece, Portugal, and Spain couldn’t affect the United States and the rest of the world.”
The day after his meeting with Obama, Papandreou turned up at the Center for American Progress (CAP), an influential liberal think tank three blocks from the White House, to field questions from a small group of journalists. He is in his late fifties, trim and mostly bald, with a modest gray mustache. All in all, he looks less like a world leader than the proprietor of a refrigerator-repair school you might see advertised late at night. Papandreou’s father, Andreas, was himself a Greek prime minister. But, while the father was famous for his fiery, rabble-rousing speeches, the son exudes a pronounced anti-charisma. There were times during the Q&A when it was tough to hear him over the whir of the air-conditioning.
Still, what Papandreou lacks in physical presence he more than makes up for in stature on the international stage. Hardouvelis points out that Papandreou is the current head of the Socialist International, giving him easy access to foreign eminences. Perhaps more important, his five-year tenure as Greek foreign minister beginning in 1999 won rave reviews in Europe and beyond. In 1996, Richard Holbrooke marveled that Greece and Turkey had been on the verge of war “over a little piece of land smaller than the State Department.” Many in Foggy Bottom credit Papandreou with defusing the decades-old hostility behind such flareups.
Against this generally favorable backdrop, the particular card Papandreou wants to play in his dealings with Europe is the threat of turning to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). European federalists cringe at the thought of the Fund’s shock troops landing on their soil--the mere symbolism would deal a blow to the idea of continental self-sufficiency. So Papandreou has sought leverage by publicly musing about inviting the IMF to Athens. “We have done our duty, what we were told to do ... it’s important for Europe to recognize this,” he said at CAP, alluding to proposals to pare back his country’s deficit. “In the case that Europe does not have the necessary tools, and a country like Greece did have real trouble borrowing, then the alternative would be the IMF.”
Of course, no one expects Greece to call in the IMF unless it’s truly on the verge of a meltdown. Among other obstacles is the European Central Bank (ECB), whose authority over monetary policy is supreme. (By contrast, the Fed must answer to Congress on occasion.) The ECB jealously guards its bailiwick and would be horrified to take orders from IMF officials. “The Germans are concerned about the ECB,” says former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, a TNR contributor. “They will control it next--it’s their turn dammit! They don’t want the IMF kibitzing.” If nothing else, the Germans and French enjoy disproportionate influence on the IMF board. They could effectively prevent the Fund from accepting a Greek plea for help. This is all the more likely when you consider that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been warily eyeing his countryman Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF managing director, for months now. Strauss-Kahn has hinted at a presidential run in 2012, and Sarkozy presumably isn’t eager to make him Europe’s savior. [Editor's note: Following the print publication of this piece, the German government changed course and suggested it might support an IMF intervention. The French and the ECB appear to remain opposed to the idea, though the situation is fluid.]
By the same token, observes Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, few doubt the French and the Germans would pony up if Greece were really teetering. Nothing would deal a bigger blow to the European project than a spectacular flameout by one of its members. The point is just that resolving a situation like Greece’s shouldn’t require the threat of imminent collapse, by which time the crisis could have spread around the globe.
That’s the reason why, for all the headaches it poses, the IMF deserves to be more than a bargaining chip. While noble, Papandreou’s deficit-cutting efforts aren’t likely to be sustainable. They simply ask too much of his country too quickly, attempting to reduce a deficit of 12.7 percent of GDP to under 3 percent within three years--all at a time when Greece is already in recession. Even if Greece can painlessly refinance the roughly 20 billion Euros in debt that come due this spring, future refinancings will be brutal if the austerity regime unravels. “I think the amount of adjustment they’re asking for in a short period of time is in the draconian category,” says Truman. “It’s likely to fail. So we’re going to have another chapter.”
Pretty much the only way to avoid a relapse is a financing package worth at least tens of billions of euros. That would buy Greece some time to roll back its deficit at a more humane pace. And, as a practical matter, the IMF is the only institution that can quickly muster enough cash.
But the case for IMF intervention isn’t just economic; it’s political. For all the tensions it would create in Europe, turning to the IMF could actually solve many more. As the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf has pointed out, the Germans are basically pursuing two contradictory goals in their dealings with Greece. On the one hand, they want to inflict pain so as to restore credibility to EU rules governing deficits, which members have flouted for years. On the other hand, they want to preserve European cohesion, which could fray if the Greeks--and other countries at the continent’s periphery--feel they’ve been wronged. Wolf wagers that one or the other goal must give. But turning to the IMF might resolve this contradiction. However embarrassing it would be for Europe as a whole, it’s Greece that would bear the scarlet letter of IMF assistance--a loss of face few neighbors would care to repeat. At the same time, notes Randall Stone of the University of Rochester, the Greeks wouldn’t have the pedantic Germans to blame for their plight. They could focus their ire on those faceless bureaucrats at the IMF’s Washington headquarters.
And then there are the Americans. Though Obama administration officials don’t appear overly concerned about Greek contagiousness, they probably secretly pine for an IMF intervention. Both Geithner and Larry Summers, the top White House economic adviser, have said that most countries are too slow to respond to a financial crisis, and too tentative once they do. The two men have long favored a “Powell doctrine” of overwhelming financial force. Only the IMF can execute that here.
Alas, decorum dictates that Geithner and Summers essentially keep quiet. And so, on his way out of Washington, Papandreou was left to plead his own case. At the CAP session, one reporter mentioned a recent Greek debt offering that went slightly better than expected. “We had the good news of having our borrowing ... at a rate which was lower than previously, but still not low enough,” Papandreou bleated. “That’s not, in the long run, sustainable.” Then again, he added joylessly, he was still “in the process” of negotiating with the Europeans. Somehow, it was not reassuring.
Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic.
You do not need insider information to know that Hillary Clinton threw a hissy fit at Bibi Netanyahu last Friday morning. And you don’t need that kind of information to know that she was sent out to do this little job by her boss. Just as Joe Biden revealed that it was President Obama who’d compelled him to “condemn” the Israeli interior ministry’s press release announcing that the fourth out of seven required approvals had been passed, leaving three others and several years to go before construction could even begin on the 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo, an East Jerusalem neighborhood of some 20,000 unpatriotic but ultra-Orthodox Jews, may God bless their little Shloymeles and Leahs.
This is a pretty draconian response from Washington to a pretty minor (albeit ill-timed) provocation. Especially as Israel, in agreeing not to start new construction in the West Bank for ten months, had said that it was specifically exempting East Jerusalem from this interdict. While recognizing this exemption, on October 31, 2009, Hillary Clinton called Israeli forbearance on new building “unprecedented.” So what has changed? The Palestinians proved to be more recalcitrant rather than less, likely because they had quickly surmised that Obama was in their corner and would not push them much. Their surmise turned out to be correct. In the particular case of Ramat Shlomo, the United States quickly joined its Quartet partners--the European Union (itself in some disarray), the United Nations (a literal joke in the world), and Russia (which has done so much for peace in the Middle East)--to denounce Israel’s disdain for their sentiments.
Before anyone leaps to the conclusion that I favor unlimited Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, allow me to say that I don’t. Moreover, I envision, if the Palestinians come to their senses (which, frankly, I cannot assure they will do), that Arab neighborhoods in that part of the city will be joined to land under the dominion of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to constitute Palestine. Most Israelis would be perfectly prepared to part with these areas under a finalstatus agreement. So, “undivided Jerusalem” will evaporate like the mist in the morning. Special and very delicate arrangements will have to be made for the Holy Basin, including the Temple Mount (or the “Haram Al Sharif,” as the Muslims call it). And let’s be clear about the sacred places on the Mount. When they were captured in June 1967, administrative authority over them remained with the Islamic waqf. Jewish prayer was forbidden there, although some Jews wanted to pray there, and some still do. Instead of the Mount being encroached upon by Israeli authorities, it has been protected by them. The assault on the space has come from Muslims, who conjure up perils to its integrity. When prime minister the first time, Netanyahu opened the Western Wall Tunnel--and Arafat responded by inciting riots that claimed 80 lives. Ariel Sharon walked on the Mount and there followed the second intifada, a feast of terror.
The Israelis will not allow the future of Jerusalem to be decided by a riot-backed fiat of the Muslims, whose claims on the city are inflated. OK, I am a doubter. By way of compensation, then, I will concede that Muhammad did ride his winged steed Al Buraq on his Night Journey to Jerusalem and, from there, ascended on a ladder to see Moses and Jesus in heaven. Otherwise, however, Jerusalem is to Islam what any other city with a big mosque is. And this particular city was ignored over the many centuries and especially when it was under the dominion of King Hussein of Jordan. But it lives centrally and vividly as the City of David to his people and to the faithful of Jesus who walked there along the Stations of the Cross to Golgotha--that is, in the two traditions whose cardinal books are centered in Zion. Jerusalem becomes sacred to Muslims when it is governed by Jews or Christians, Jews in particular.
I have distaste for the ultra-religious Jews who, through both stealth and stupidity, maneuvered the Netanyahu government into this confrontation with its most significant ally. I also know a little about how this happened. A mid-level, faceless bureaucrat issued a press release as she issues other press releases, mostly on the trivial. Did some higher-up grasp that this would make trouble for Bibi and give the information more life? My guess is that the answer is “yes.” The Israeli parliamentary system is a vipers’ nest and has been for decades. The main activity of the coalition partners is to undercut each other. The Shas Party, whose functionaries run the interior ministry according to their dictates from God, uses every occasion it can to push its own idiosyncratic agenda, no matter how little support it has in the public. If it makes trouble for the government itself, so much the better.
David Axelrod has now put an ugly political spin on this turmoil by suggesting that the Israeli move was designed to undercut the “proximity talks” that had been planned. What’s more, Axelrod argued, this was an “affront” and an “insult” to the United States. Not to be outdone in inflammatory talk, ABC’s Jake Tapper, who was questioning the political adviser to the president, goaded him further: “I hate to say this, but yes or no, David, does the intransigence of the Israeli government on the housing issue, yes or no, does it put U.S. troops’ lives at risk?” Axelrod declined to take the bait. The idea was already out there.
Still, Axelrod, a strange guy to go out and comment on Obama’s foreign policy, was not just speaking for himself. Like Hillary Clinton, this kind of talk was a decision of the president himself. No one on the White House staff denies this. You don’t have to ask about it. Almost everyone who’s anyone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or in Foggy Bottom will volunteer the news: Obama is “rip shit” with the Israelis. So how long has he been rip shit? I believe that he has been sitting in waiting for the opportunity to have others send the message: “The president has blown his top.” When talks fail, which they inevitably will, he will present his own plan. Beware.
Obama had gone out on a limb about Israel-Palestine. It was based on very faulty history or, rather, on a canny distortion of history. The fact is that neither George Mitchell nor Hillary Clinton nor the president himself has wrangled a single concession from the Palestinian Authority, not one. In fact, the whole structure of the talks is built on yet another concession from Israel. The press is so unknowing that it simply didn’t realize or didn’t care about the nature of the concession. But, to anyone who knows and cares about history, the arrangement is nothing less than spooky.
The idea of proximity talks goes back very deep into the past. It was actually transcended in the negotiations between Yasir Arafat and the strained Israeli duo of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Since then, in fact, face-to-face consultations had become more or less routine. Sometimes they were desultory; other times they were not. On occasion, they were very productive, as with the agreement to field a U.S. training mission for Palestinian police with deep cooperation from Israel.
So, proximity talks are a big retreat from reality--not a surprise, but a big retreat nonetheless--when the Palestinians want only to talk with the Americans. And then, the Americans will talk to the Israelis, and back and forth through the American mediator, presumably a tired Mitchell who hasn’t had a fresh idea in years. Now he has allowed the Palestinians to push him back to the idea of indirect negotiations, and, apparently, Obama also does not object--or maybe it was his own fix-it device. This is an old nightmare in the Jewish memory bank. Already, at Versailles, there was no contact between the Zionists and the Arabs and no contact at later conferences at which the question of Palestine was discussed.
The St. James Conference, called the London Round Table and convened by Neville Chamberlain(!), attracted all the leading Zionists and the best-known non-Zionist Jews. Saudi King Ibn Saud’s son, Emir Faisal, was in attendance, as were Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Said (who was butchered on the streets of Baghdad 20 years later) and Jamal Al Husayni, a relative of the notorious grand mufti of Jerusalem. We have a description of what happened in London from the eminent historian Walter Laqueur:
The Arabs refused to sit at one table with the Jews and arrangements were made for them to reach the conference hall in St. James’s Palace by a different entrance. There were, in fact, two separate conferences. Only on two occasions did informal meetings take place between Jewish leaders and the representatives of Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The Palestinian Arabs refused any contact with the Jews.
Eight years later, another conference assembled in London, this time summoned by the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who--how can one say this?--simply did not like Jews. The conference, writes Laqueur, “was a repeat performance for those who had been to St. James’s Palace eight years before. There were no new proposals to be discussed, nor, as in 1939, were there any direct meetings before Arabs and Jews.”
The Arabs put their fate in the gods of war, expressing “the view both privately and on occasion in public that historical conflicts are always settled by force of arms and that one might as well have the struggle right away and get it over.” The General Assembly convened in November 1947 and sanctioned the creation of a Jewish state (yes, specifically Jewish state) and an Arab state (not, as it happens, a Palestinian state, since even the concept of a “Palestinian” did not have real life at the time--the “Palestinians” were the Jews). Thus, the Arabs went to war ... and were handily defeated. At the various armistice talks, no Arab would sit at a table with an Israeli.
That the president and his team should now take up this old Arab formula for disguising reality demonstrates the poverty of their grasp of the problem at hand. In fact, Obama seems to think that he is the superego of the conflict and that his function is to hand out dicta on how to end it. But he has no dicta for the Palestinians and plenty for the Israelis. The Jewish state has many conditions under which it would be prepared to give more rather than less. Alas, the president can’t bring himself to publicly acknowledge this. The fact is that he does not particularly like Israel. Which is why it is so frightful to have his messenger running between Jerusalem and Ramallah making demands on the Jews.
Martin Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.
From: Ben Wildavsky
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Kevin Carey
Subject: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education reform.
Diane, I appreciate your spirited rebuttal to my essay. I’m not surprised to hear you repeat what you say in your book--that you have no objection to the market economy per se (although you somewhat undermine your case when you toss around silly phrases like “corporate suits”). It is the entry of market principles into public education that bothers you. Schools, you say, are like firehouses and police stations, not shoe stores. To give teachers extra compensation based on effective job performance undermines the fundamentally cooperative nature of schools. And so on.
You are quite right that markets are no panacea, contrary to what John Chubb and Terry Moe once wrote. I did not claim that markets have such magical powers. It seems to me that we should regard markets as an enabling condition for the changes that public education badly needs. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has made this case eloquently, arguing last week that both choice and accountability “provide invaluable opportunities to rethink schools and systems that are too often hobbled by anachronistic policies, practices, stifling contracts, and cultures.” Accountability and choice, then, are simply means to an end.
You chide me for allegedly ignoring evidence that charter schools, on average, don’t perform any better than conventional public schools on the NAEP. I never said they did. It’s widely acknowledged that, so far, charter schools have been highly uneven in quality. But that doesn’t mean the charter principle is a failure. For one thing, charters can be closed down for poor performance (although this hasn’t happened often enough). For another, the quality and motivations of charter authorizers matter a lot to charter success. As charter laws were enacted, political pressures--notably union pressures--put many of the entities opposed to charter schools in charge of them. Washington, D.C., is a great example. Two charter authorizers were initially established. One was the regular school board, which had no love of competition and permitted a number of terrible charter school to operate with little or no oversight. The other, an independent board established just to authorize charters, came to be highly regarded and now oversees all of the city’s charters.
Overall, charters seem to have done no harm, and, in a number of high-profile cases, they have done a lot of good. As you know, there are many efforts underway to study and replicate the very best charter chains--just what one might expect in, well, a market. We’re still in a period of experimentation. But the flexibility of the charter philosophy--and the availability of comparable achievement data across schools--permits educators to try new things and to measure whether they’re working.
Even as you disparage the performance of charters, you complain (echoing a longstanding claim of Richard’s) that they cream the most motivated parents and students, leaving the neediest kids in regular public schools. Isn’t this a contradiction? If your assertion is true, wouldn’t we expect charters to outperform regular public schools? The allegation of creaming also raises an important philosophical question--in fact, a moral one--that Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research touched on at the AEI forum where you spoke last week. Isn’t it preferable for some kids to have superior alternatives than for all kids to remain in underperforming schools? If you could wave a magic wand and get rid of charter schools, including the KIPPs and Achievement Firsts, would you really be doing kids in those schools a favor by sending them back to the crummy institutions they escaped? It seems to me that we can simultaneously provide appealing charter options that will cause some students to exit while doing much more to meet the educational needs of the kids who remain in regular public schools.
Moreover your support for Catholic and other private schools seems, at the very least, in tension with your worries about the most motivated students picking charters. Is it fine for some big-city families--whether working class or well-to-do--to forsake regular public schools for Catholic education or expensive private schools, but not OK for their lower-income counterparts to move to charters? Would it perhaps be tidier and less corrosive to communities to ban private or nontraditional public schools entirely, just as we would never tolerate letting the, uh, corporate suits take over the fire department?
I also think you overreach when you suggest that the consensus that exists around the broad strokes of school reform is mostly an elite phenomenon. As you detail in your book, testing, accountability and choice have won broad bipartisan support. No Child Left Behind, let us not forget, was not just a Republican creation; it was cosponsored by Ted Kennedy and George Miller, and it passed Congress by a huge majority. Those members of Congress represent the American people, no? Similarly, secretaries of education Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan were appointed by presidents who campaigned on detailed education policy platforms, so voters were surely not kept in the dark about their plans. In my view, one of the most refreshing characteristics of the education reform movement is that it largely transcends party and ideological affiliations. Broadly speaking, there is considerable continuity between the Spellings and Duncan regimes at the Department of Education, and, to the extent that there are differences, each has played against type--Republican Spellings focused intently on top-down accountability, whereas Democrat Duncan seems to have greater faith in markets. Think tanks, editorial boards, and corporations have certainly taken an active interest in all this--why shouldn’t they?--but education reform has been part and parcel of the democratic process.
Moreover, it is hard to buy your contention that teachers have somehow been left out of the consensus. On the political front, at last report, teachers' unions were huge political players at the federal and state levels, contributing vast sums to Democrats in particular and occupying inordinate numbers of delegate slots at party conventions. The political process is what makes education reform possible, and teachers cannot plausibly claim not to have had a seat at the table. If their complaint is that it is uncomfortable to make the adjustments required by hiring and firing systems that give principals more autonomy, or by accountability regimes that put them under greater pressure to show that they have succeeded in teaching students material required by state standards, I am not sure that automatic sympathy is in order. Change is hard, as any reader of the management bestseller Who Moved My Cheese? can attest.
You say that you want American education to become “more professional.” But, if you care about professionalism broadly writ, shouldn’t teachers face consequences if they are doing a terrible job teaching kids? You acknowledge that it is hard to fire tenured teachers, but you seem sympathetic to unions’ assertion that they simply want “to be part of the decision-making process” when a colleague is at risk of being fired. You say that union members have good reason to care about performance, because it is not in their interest “to have incompetent teachers in their midst.” But it is hard to see much evidence of teachers rallying together to dismiss colleagues who simply shouldn’t be in the classroom. Au contraire, part of the premise of teacher unionism is that teachers are more or less interchangeable. Hence the widespread and dismaying phenomenon of union-negotiated salary schedules that are based only on “step and scale” pay increases, where time on the job and degrees accumulated are all that matter, not actual job performance. This is not professionalism.
Returning briefly to Massachusetts, I understand--and I wrote--that you have high praise for its record. What I don’t understand is why you want to implement your own reform plan rather than urge others to build on the Massachusetts model and its commendable mix of standards, testing, and choice. Your plan, based on “professionalism,” neighborhood schools, and a stronger curriculum, is, as Kevin pointedly observes, rather ill-defined. The Massachusetts plan has a great track record so far. Why shouldn’t that be your new gold standard?
I’ll conclude this round of debate by touching on Richard’s claim that your support for NCLB was an “aberration” given your continued involvement with groups such as the Core Knowledge Foundation, which does great work to spread rich, substantive curricula. But, as I said in my opening piece, there need not be a contradiction here. There is no reason that both strong content and strong core skills can’t be taught, and assessed, from the beginning of children’s school days. You open your chapter on teaching with a lovely remembrance of your tough-love high school teacher, Mrs. Ratliff, and the appreciation of literature that she instilled in her pupils. But I couldn’t help wondering--how will kids stuck in sorely inadequate public schools ever appreciate Shelley’s “Ozymandias” if they can barely read?
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By Richard Rothstein: Want to improve teacher quality? Fine. But that won't help the environmental factors outside of schools that are eroding student learning.
Ben Wildavsky is a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World, forthcoming in May from Princeton University Press.
From: Richard Rothstein
To: Diane Ravitch, Ben Wildavsky, Kevin Carey, and Andrew Rotherham
Subject: Want to improve teacher quality? Fine. But that won't help the environmental factors outside of schools that are eroding student learning.
It is fair to say that I’ve asserted that “school reform efforts are distracting from more important social welfare goals,” but a little misleading when phrased in this way. A better summary of my concern is that “school reform efforts are distracting from more important environmental causes of low student achievement.”
It is conventional in education policy these days to say that the most important influence on student achievement is the quality of a teacher. This is only true if it is qualified as the most important school influence on achievement. Fifty years of social science research has confirmed, over and over again, that the best predictor of student achievement is not teacher quality or any other school influence, but the social and economic circumstances of the children.
Consider this: We are all aware that the national unemployment rate is an unacceptably high 10 percent or so. But the unemployment rate for black adults of an age likely to have school-aged children is now 15 percent. This number includes only those actively looking for work. In the current economy, many of the unemployed have concluded that looking for work is futile. Considering the officially unemployed, those who are so discouraged that they have dropped out of the labor force, and those who are working part-time because they can’t find full-time work, the unemployment rate for black parents of school-aged children is now 25 percent.
What are the consequences of this social disaster?
1. Mobility: Families become more mobile because they can no longer afford to keep up with rent or mortgage payments. They are in overcrowded housing, often doubling up with relatives in apartments that were already too small. Children have no quiet place to study or do homework. They switch schools more often, falling behind in the curriculum and losing the connection with teachers who know them well-enough to adapt instruction to the their individual strengths and weaknesses. Inner-city schools themselves are thrown into turmoil because classes must frequently be reconstituted as enrollment rises and falls with family mobility.
2. Hunger and Malnutrition: When more parents lose employment, their income plummets and food insecurity grows. More children come to school hungry and/or inadequately nourished and are less able to focus on schoolwork.
3. Stress: Families where parents are unemployed are under greater psychological stress. Parents, no matter how well-intentioned, become more arbitrary in their discipline, less supportive of their children. Children from families in such stress are more likely to act out in school, less able to progress academically.
4. Poor Health: Families where parents lose employment are also more likely to lose health insurance. Their children are less likely to get routine and preventive health care, and more likely to miss school days because of illness. They are less likely to get symptomatic treatment for illnesses like asthma,the most common cause of chronic school absenteeism. Andchildren with asthma, even when they attend school, are more likely to come irritable, having been up at night wheezing.
All these consequences of unacceptably high unemployment rates for black parents contribute to depressing student achievement for black children. It is obtuse to expect to narrow the black-white achievement gap in such circumstances. It is fanciful for national policymakers to pick this moment to raise their expectations for academic achievement from children of families in such stress.
It would inappropriately undermine the credibility of public education if, in such an economic climate, educators were blamed for their failure to raise black student achievement. Indeed, they should probably get credit for preventing black student achievement from falling further.
So when I say that school reform efforts are distracting from more important environmental causes of low student achievement, I do not suggest that we should ignore school improvement. We should improve teacher quality, reduce class sizes for the most disadvantaged young children, and improve curricula. But, in the current economic environment, these measures are likely to be overwhelmed by the impact of unemployment. Reducing unemployment is not only a "social welfare goal." It is also an educational issue, likely as important, if not more so, than the school reforms now advocated by the education policy community. And educators should be outspoken in calling attention to this critical impediment and resist demands that they meet “utopian” achievement goals when environmental forces are so forcefully arrayed against them. Politically, educators should be a mobilized constituency for new job-creating economic stimulus measures, for increased aid to state and local governments to prevent teacher layoffs (resulting in growing class sizes), and for increased formula funding for compensatory education funds (proposed for real inflation-adjusted reductions in the administration’s “blueprint” for education funding).
As a second issue, let's examine more carefully the "urban myth" that "low-income children would benefit hugely from being assigned to the best teachers." A previous contributor to this symposium attributed this finding to "multiple econometric studies," but there is less here than meets the eye.
What policymakers who've been told about these studies--few have actually read them--have concluded is that, if low-income students were assigned for five years in a row to teachers who were better than roughly 80 percent of other teachers, these low-income students would achieve at the level of typical middle-class students. In other words, they would close the "achievement gap."
The Death and Life of the Great American School System dismisses this claim by asserting that it is not feasible to seek a policy that would move all teachers up to the level of effectiveness of the top quintile of teachers. Even for the average teacher, this would require a full standard deviation in improvement, and, for teachers who are below average, up to a two standard deviation improvement would be required. No social policy can aspire to such a degree of improvement. A more realistic expectation is that average teachers might, with the right guidance, be transformed into, say, sixtieth percentile teachers--something like a 0.3 standard deviation in improvement. Even this task is especially difficult because the "econometric studies" from which this enthusiasm is derived cannot identify a single characteristic of a "good teacher." Their conclusions are only circular: The best teachers are teachers whose students have better achievement, and students will get better achievement if they are assigned to the best teachers.
But there is a bigger problem, arising from a misunderstanding by policy enthusiasts of the econometric findings. What these studies actually find is that, in any year, some teachers get achievement gains from students that are about 0.2 standard deviations better than those of students who have typical teachers. The policy enthusiasm for closing the achievement gap simply by improving teacher quality stems from multiplying this result by five and concluding that a student who had such teachers for five years in a row would gain a full standard deviation (5 X 0.2) advantage. This assumes that the gains students make during the year in which they had a good teacher persist and can be added to in each subsequent year. But there is absolutely no evidence for such a proposition in the econometric studies or elsewhere. No econometrician has actually observed students, or data regarding such students, who have achieved such cumulative gains for five years in a row under the tutelage of superior teachers. The most reasonable speculation is that students who make big gains in a year will find it more and more difficult to make similarly big gains in subsequent years, even with the best teachers. The earlier gains are likely to be much easier. Would the decline in gain be less if the next teacher was also in the top quintile? Nobody knows. It is a topic on which there has been absolutely no research.
And finally, even if we could confirm that the effect of teacher quality on student achievement was as great as these misinterpretations of econometric studies suggest, we should remember that the studies themselves are based only on basic skills test scores of math alone or reading alone. As we have learned from the corruption stimulated by No Child Left Behind (and documented in Death and Life), teachers responsible for greater gains might be accomplishing this with more test preparation, and less quality instruction, than teachers responsible for smaller gains. Are high-quality teachers of math the same teachers as high-quality teachers of reading? Do teachers who do a great job of teaching math also do a great job of inspiring a love of the arts, of teaching history and civic responsibility, of developing students’ ability to solve conflicts peaceably? We have no answers to these questions? If we did, should we seek to replace teachers who only do an average job of teaching math, but a spectacular job of developing character?
Of course, some teachers are better than others, and consistently so. Figuring out what makes these teachers better, and whether these characteristics can be taught to other teachers, would be a useful policy initiative that could result in raising the level of disadvantaged students' achievement. But better teachers are not so much better that improvement in teacher quality is a plausible way to make a serious dent in the achievement gap. It is what Death and Life says it is: a nonexistent silver bullet or miracle cure.
Richard Rothstein (riroth@epi.org) is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute. His most recent book is Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right.
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By Ben Wildavsky: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education reform.
Welcome to the fourth installment of our online debate about the state of American education. In this round, Richard Rothstein, who on Monday praised Diane Ravitch's view--expressed in her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education--that the current trajectory of education reform is endangering student learning, argues that teachers can't be held accountable for the economic and social factors that negatively affect students' classroom performance. And Ben Wildavsky, who criticized Ravitch's argument in the first round (she responded soon after), says that developing good charter schools can coexist with efforts to fix regular public schools, and that teachers' unions eschew professionalism when they refuse to allow for job evaluations based on performance.
By Richard Rothstein: Want to improve teacher quality? Fine. But that won't help the environmental factors outside of schools that are eroding student learning.
By Ben Wildavsky: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education reform.
From: Andrew J. Rotherham
To: Diane Ravitch
Subject: Death and Life is being debated as a policy prescription. That's a problem, because it doesn't offer an agenda.
My e-mail inbox contains missives from people claiming your book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, is the most important written work about education in decades. They’re right next to other ones from people urging me to use it for kindling. Like too many debates in education, the one stemming from your book is turning into a Manichaean affair, in the eyes of too many a battle of good versus evil. Close observers of education policy debates increasingly wonder if the field knows how to debate any other way.
The stridency is unfortunate because The Death and Life of the Great American School System is not without its merits. But it’s also not without its problems.
The merits are straightforward. Diane, your stature as arguably the most important educational historian of the twentieth century gives your opinions weight. You make some imperative points, in particular about the importance of a high-quality curriculum if we’re truly going to transform American education into a higher-performing system. That’s an issue you championed long before it was fashionable.
More generally, the seriousness of our educational problems amply demonstrate that no one has a monopoly on good judgment or ideas about educational improvement, so we should welcome a lively debate about where the country is, where it needs to go, and why. The school reform experience of the past two decades offers many cautions and lessons so scrutiny is essential to progress.
Unfortunately, while it’s heavy on scrutiny, Death and Life doesn’t add up to a whole in terms of where you want us to go based on your analysis. In other words, outside of a call for better curriculum, this book falls short as a policy agenda. And make no mistake: Despite your protestations that you don’t want to view things through the prism of policy, given the state of play in the education debate today, your work is being taken as a policy prescription.
More specifically, it’s being taken as the antidote to the Duncan-Obama direction on education policy and the ideas taking hold in an increasing number of states and localities. Yet, while it’s a powerful cri de coeur, it is neither granular nor forward-looking enough to serve as a blueprint for policymakers.
For instance, you are selective about the evidence on charter schools, ignoring the contributions from the many high-performing charters across various geographies. Today, there are clear inferences that can be made about why some charters outperform others. It’s not by chance that charter schools in some locales are substantially better than charters elsewhere, and the differences can be traced to public policy. Figuring out how to more broadly incorporate those inferences into public policy is where the action is on the charter issue.
Likewise on testing and accountability. You paint a broad portrait of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as “test and punish” but ignore the complexity of the policy and its implementation. States, for example, have made an astonishing number of poor implementation decisions that have done more to turn the law into a caricature than anything in the statute has. Meanwhile, after two decades, the experience of states and school districts with standards, testing, and accountability is highly varied As with charter schools, these policies are not monolithic, and there are clear inferences policymakers can draw, particularly about the experience of poor and minority youngsters.
And the same is true, of course, of philanthropy or school leadership. In both cases, the experiences, outcomes, ongoing learning, and changes are highly varied and complex.
I could go on, but the point is obvious: The book offers plenty of legitimate critiques in all these reform areas, and others. Yet painting with a broad brush does much to arouse the passions of advocates, and little to shed light on the issues. It merely fans the flames of today’s mostly unproductive debates.
You write that:
It is time to get serious. We need better teachers, a solid curriculum that includes the full range of arts and sciences, and assessments that reflect the skills and knowledge that society values. Schools must impose standards of behavior, so that learning may proceed unhindered. We need to pay attention to the health and well-being of students, so that they arrive in school ready to learn.
There are few who would disagree. But the challenges of achieving these goals are enormously complex--especially so in a radically decentralized system like U.S. K-12 education. And the solutions are multifaceted. For example, high-performing charter schools struggle to find enough teachers to achieve substantially greater scale but have little trouble filling existing positions. It’s reasonable to assume that this is at least in part because they are desirable workplaces, especially relative to the dysfunctional schools that often surround them. So what role does creating more environments where teachers want to be play into efforts to attract and retain “better teachers?”
Similarly, given what we know about the tortured politics of our education system absent a robust accountability regime, how do you expect to see change enacted? Regulatory capture--meaning that the ostensibly regulated actually control the regulators--is more rampant in American elementary and secondary education than in any other policy domain.
You couldn’t be more right that there are no panaceas. Unfortunately, though, Death and Life offers too many panaceas of its own. So, while your change of heart on some key issues and your criticism of many of today’s reforms and reformers is a soothing balm for those resisting radical changes to our low-functioning system of education, it is not a way forward from where we are today.
Andrew J. Rotherham is co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education and writes the blog Eduwonk.com.
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By Diane Ravitch: We don't yet have all the answers for fixing American education, but we know current reforms aren't working. So why keep supporting them?
WASHINGTON -- One of the tragedies of the viciously politicized battle over health care reform is the defection of the nation's Roman Catholic bishops from a cause they have championed for decades.
Indifferent to political fashions, the bishops were the strongest voices in support of universal health coverage, a position rooted in Catholic social thought that calls for a special solicitude toward the poor.
Yet on the make-or-break roll call that will determine the fate of health care reform, bishops are urging that the bill be voted down. They are doing so on the basis of a highly tendentious reading of the abortion provisions in the Senate measure. If health reform is defeated, the bishops will have played a major role in its demise.
The provisions they dislike were written by two Democratic senators strongly opposed to abortion, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania. Pro-choice groups condemned the Nelson-Casey language from the start.
Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, called their amendment "anti-choice," "outrageous" and "inexplicable." Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women were equally critical.
But the Nelson-Casey language still didn't go far enough for the bishops. Earlier this week, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, claimed the flaws and loopholes in the bill's abortion section are "so fundamental that they vitiate the good that the bill intends to promote." As a result, he said, "the Catholic bishops regretfully hold that it must be opposed."
Fortunately, major Catholic leaders -- most of them women in religious orders -- have picked up the flag of social justice discarded by a bishops conference under increasing right-wing influence.
On Wednesday, a group representing 59,000 Catholic nuns plus more than 50 heads of religious congregations issued a strong statement urging "a life-affirming 'yes' vote" in support of the Senate bill. "While it is an imperfect measure, it is a crucial next step in realizing health care for all," the statement said, adding that the bill's support for pregnant women represented "the real pro-life stance."
"We as sisters focus on the needs of people," said Sister Simone Campbell, a spokeswoman for the group. "When people are suffering, we respond."
No one was more troubled by the bishops' decision than Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association. She loyally refuses to criticize the bishops but argues that their interpretation of the abortion language is simply wrong. She, too, released a forceful statement in support of the Senate bill.
"We looked at the bill. We spent a lot of time with Senators Casey and Nelson," she said in an interview. "We agreed to support it because we believe it meets the test of no federal funding for abortion. Perhaps the language is not the way I would write it, but it meets the test. ... I was not going to take a little bit of abortion (in the bill) to get federal funding."
She added: "I can't walk away from extending coverage to more than 30 million people."
Rather astonishingly, the bishops' statement misrepresented the view of the CHA, whose members include 600 Catholic hospitals and 1,400 nursing homes.
Cardinal George acknowledged that the bishops' "analysis of the flaws in the legislation is not completely shared by the leaders of the Catholic Health Association." Then he said: "They believe, moreover, that the defects that they do recognize can be corrected after the passage of the final bill."
But Sister Carol, as she is known, said the latter assertion was flatly not true. "We're not saying that," she said. Her organization believes the bill as currently written guarantees that there will be no federal funding for abortion and does not need to be "corrected." Why the bishops would distort the position of the church's major health association is, to be charitable, a mystery.
House members voting on health care will be representing primarily their positions as Americans and as agents of their constituents, though many will also be influenced by their faith. Those with a special affection for the Roman Catholic Church have an extra reason for voting in favor of the health bill.
By passing it, they would save the bishops from the moral opprobrium that would rightly fall upon them if they succeeded in killing the best chance we have to extend health coverage to 30 million Americans. My hunch is that many bishops would be quietly grateful. In their hearts, they know the nuns are right.
E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.
(c) 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
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From: Diane Ravitch
To: Kevin Carey
Subject: We don't yet have all the answers for fixing American education, but we know current reforms aren't working. So why keep supporting them?
I am gratified by the astonishing response to my book, including your appreciation of certain chapters. Yet I didn’t write The Death and Life of the Great American School System to win plaudits from you or anyone else. I wrote it because I had to.
I did not intend to “repudiate my ideological fellow travelers,” as you say, but to explain as clearly as I could why I had changed my mind about certain strategies. These strategies--accountability and choice--became known as the “reform consensus” just about the time I realized they were not working. That meant that I would find myself virtually alone in the world of the chattering classes. That was okay with me because I have reached an age where I don’t care anymore whose side I am on. I am just trying to tell the truth as I know it. I may be wrong, and the consensus may be right. Time will tell.
It was not easy to go public and admit that I was wrong, but I had to do it. Maybe someday that will happen to you too. You never know. The New York Times said that I had made a “U-turn” and made it sound as though I had changed my mind overnight. This was not true. As I explained in the book, I began to have doubts about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in November 2006, when I was asked to summarize the papers at a conference at the American Enterprise Institute. One scholar after another got up and said that NCLB’s remedies were not working. By the end of the day, I was convinced they were right. The next fall, when the NAEP scores came out and showed meager improvement, I wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times titled “Get Congress Out of the Classroom.” From that point on, I definitely was outside the consensus.
Your hostility to neighborhood schools is puzzling. In many neighborhoods, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, the school is the safest place for children, the one place where they can count on finding stability, shelter, and support. In neighborhoods where there is a functioning community, schools are often community anchors. To close such schools is to tear the hearts out of communities. You must wonder why so many parents turn out to defend the schools that distant reformers disdain. Most parents want their children to attend schools close to home, if possible. Ask them.
My fundamental philosophy of education is this: I would like to see all children get a great education, one that engages them in the study of history, literature, the arts, science, mathematics, geography, foreign languages, and civics. When I worked in the U.S. Department of Education in the early 1990s, I oversaw the award of grants to create voluntary national standards in those subjects. For reasons I explain in the book, the idea of content standards became toxic to political leaders, so they turned to test-based accountability. I explain in the book that test-based accountability is not a continuation of the standards movement, but a repudiation of it.
I hoped that accountability and choice might bring us closer to the goals I believe in, but I was wrong. They are means, not ends. Getting higher test scores is not the same as getting a high-quality education. As I explain in my chapter on accountability, there is so much cheating, so much gaming of scores, so much manipulation of data by states and districts that the state scores are unreliable. Because of its high stakes and its onerous sanctions, NCLB has incentivized everyone to raise scores by any means necessary. Often this is just institutionalized fraud. Or ,as Arne Duncan likes to say about the dumbing down of state tests, “We are lying to our children.”
As for charters, I readily grant that there are some excellent charters. But most people who have studied charters recognize that the range in quality among them is very great and that there are far more mediocre charters than excellent ones, as well as some that are abysmal. Many of the “high-performing” charters do not take a fair share of English language learners or special education students and shed low-scoring students, which contributes to their “high performance.” The fact that charter students have never outperformed regular public school students on the NAEP indicates that they are not going to produce the quantum improvement that is needed in American education. So, my intent is not to discourage hard-working charter leaders, but to remind them that charters were originally envisioned to help the public schools, not to replace them.
At present, charters enroll about 3 percent of the public school enrollment, yet they seem to consume about 50 percent or more of the attention of energetic reformers such as yourself. Don’t you think that we should figure out how to improve the system that enrolls 97 percent of the kids? If we don’t, our nation is unlikely to see any real progress. Even if the charter sector doubles to 6 percent, we’re still left with 94 percent of our students in a system that needs major improvement.
I regret that I don’t have all the answers, or at least not the answer that you are looking for. But, even if I can’t give you a satisfactory answer about what will work, it is nonetheless very important to say that what we are doing is not working. Surely you do not suggest that we should continue pursuing and funding ineffective policies until someone comes up with a better idea.
I think we should stop looking for “the answer” and agree that education is a complex activity that involves many different actors and many influences. We can’t control all of them, but those that can be controlled can surely be improved. I would like to see better-educated teachers; better entrance exams for teachers; better assessments that gauge understanding, not test-taking skills; better evaluations of teachers and schools; a rich curriculum that goes way beyond basic skills in every school, whether it is created nationally, by state, by district or by school. I would like to see well-educated and experienced educators at every level of our school system (that’s what the highest performing nations do). I would like to see more attention to the health and well-being of young children.
This may sound like pie in the sky to you, but, to me, it reflects common sense about what must happen to improve achievement across the board in our schools. Maybe someday you will see it my way. Maybe not. If you do change your mind, you might find it worthwhile to re-read The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is a historian of education.
RELATED
By Andrew Rotherham: Death and Life is being debated as a policy prescription. That's a problem, because it doesn't offer an agenda.
This week, we've gathered some of top names in education policy to discuss the direction of school reform under No Child Left Behind and, now, the Obama administration. At the heart of the conversation is education historian Diane Ravitch's new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, which contends that testing and school choice--the hallmarks of recent reforms--are devastating schools. In this third round, Ravitch answers criticisms from Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., and Andrew Rotherham of Bellweather Education weighs in about the tone of the debate and whether Death and Life should be considered an agenda-setting text.
By Diane Ravitch: We don't yet have all the answers for fixing American education, but we know current reforms aren't working. So why keep supporting them?
By Andrew Rotherham: Death and Life is being debated as a policy prescription. That's a problem, because it doesn't offer an agenda.
(Flickr photo credit: foreversouls)
Recently I was rummaging through the living mess of papers in my office--my nachlass, however hard-driven, will not be a hard drive--when I discovered a fading sheet I had not seen in decades. It was a copy of a letter that was given to me by a little man in the municipal hall in Hebron in 1980. I had traveled to Hebron to look into an incident that occurred a few days earlier on Purim, a triumphalist holiday on which Jews are enjoined to revel in inversions and to drink themselves out of their capacity to distinguish between good and evil. In the course of their bacchanal, some of the settlers at Beit Hadassah, the formerly Jewish house in the center of town that they were claiming for themselves, had opened their windows and urinated on Palestinians in the street below. The mayor of Hebron convened a public meeting for the victims of the abuse to tell their stories. It was there that the little man rose to express his grievance. To demonstrate the ugliness of what was done to him, he read from an old letter written in Hebrew on the stationery of a metalworking company in Jerusalem. It stated (this is my translation): “To Whom It May Concern: I the undersigned, Moses Joseph ben Jacob Ezra, born in Hebron, hereby declare that the family of Rajib Hassan Al Badr, with whom we lived in the same quarter in Hebron, protected my family in [the riots of] 1929 and again in [the riots of] 1936, and until 1947, while we were still in Hebron, we enjoyed good neighborly relations and constant protection by the Al Badr family generally. I would be deeply grateful for any human assistance that might be extended to them.” So it was the scion of that good and brave family whom the yarmulked hooligans had soiled. I remembered this wrenching document a few weeks ago when Yedioth Ahronoth posted a video on its website of a Purim party in Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, at which religious militants boorishly sang a song of praise to the memory of Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered twenty-nine Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron: “Dr. Goldstein. Dr. Goldstein, there is no one like you in the whole world.” The stone house in which the punks dishonored their tradition with an anthem to murder had recently belonged to the El Ghawis, a Palestinian family that was expelled from it last August.
Sheikh Jarrah is a place with a run-down but real magic, rather like Naples. You can still see the glory beneath the grime, the fine imperial picturesque--the porticos and the gardens of old Palestine, the material elegance of the Muslim gentry in the calm between the storms. There is a mosque at the tomb of a medieval Muslim saint named Hussein ibn Isa Al Jarrah, and nearby it is the tomb of Simon the Just, the high priest in Jerusalem around 200 B.C.E. and according to legend the founder of the Jewish liturgy, whose sacerdotal splendor was described swooningly by Ben Sira; and there is the Shepherd Hotel, a grand villa built by the mufti of Jerusalem, once inhabited by George Antonius, and in the 1980s acquired by a rich Jewish bingo-king in Florida for the purpose of expelling Palestinians from the area and installing Jews; and there is the American Colony Hotel, whose bougainvillea has often given me asylum from the respective fervors of my brothers and sisters in the western part of the city. In 1948, Arab forces in Sheikh Jarrah ambushed a convoy of Jewish doctors and nurses on their way to the hospital on Mount Scopus and committed a massacre. Sheikh Jarrah came under Israeli control in 1967, and a few years later Jewish groups went to court with old Jewish deeds to various properties, even though no Jews had lived there since 1948. The court upheld their ownership, but ruled that the Palestinians who resided there could remain as long as they paid rent. The Palestinian families disputed the authenticity of the Jewish documents, and refused to pay. They were finally evicted this past year, and the drunken disciples of Dr. Goldstein moved in.
The dream of reversing history has been a cause of both greatness and depravity. It is right for people not to acquiesce in their own wretchedness, to reject all the quietisms and the fatalisms that teach them to do nothing for themselves. Zionism owed its moral and historical force in large measure to its refusal to accept the irreversibility of Jewish exile, and its attendant misery; and the national self-reliance now exemplified for the Palestinians by Salam Fayyad--in a culture of jusqu’au-boutisme, the technocrat is the revolutionary--represents a similar refusal of historical passivity. But not everything can, or should, be reversed. Sometimes there is wisdom also in acceptance, and in the power that it confers to move on. In the name of justice, one may destroy peace, and forget that peace, too, is an element of justice. The idea of beginning again is often a savage idea. Since the Palestinian right of return, and its premise that restoration is preferable to reconciliation, would undo the Jewish state, Israel is right to deny it. But if, in the name of moral realism, and so that they do not delude themselves with catastrophic fantasies of starting over, Palestinians are not to be granted a right to return to what was theirs before 1948, then neither should such a right be granted to Jews. When Jews fled Sheikh Jarrah, they fled to a Jewish state, which should have been worth the loss of their property; and the same would have been true of the Palestinians, if their Arab brethren had allowed the state of Palestine to come into being. But the lunatic Jews who insist that a Jew must live anywhere a Jew ever lived do not see that they, too, are re-opening 1948 and the legitimacy of what it established. Why does the Israeli government allow the argument for a unified Jerusalem to be mistaken for the heartless revanchism of these settlers? Whatever arrangements about Jerusalem are eventually made in a peace agreement, and I no longer expect to see one in my lifetime, Jerusalem will remain both the capital of Israel and a demographically mottled city. It makes no sense to show contempt for the people with whom you are destined to live. It is not only cruel, it is stupid. So the dispossession of the El Ghawis is a disgrace. And a Jewish disgrace, because it was Simon the Just, the legendary leader buried in an ancient cave not far from the El Ghawis’ house, who famously taught that one of the things which supports the world in existence is the practice of kindness.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.
On a September road I met my son
walking the other way. I had the hill
to climb; he was returning from a run.
No surprises. He
knew I was nearby,
as I knew he was. But precisely where
our paths might meet was a benign surprise.
The road was rutted, plastered with gold leaf.
Did our eyes, as we neared each other, meet?
More of a full-body recognition:
this tall young stranger
striding silently
around a bend, who paused on seeing me
(however I appeared) and then passed on.
Autumnal radiance thickened
by complications. memory, history--
nothing startling, in my mother’s phrase.
The gold road curves.
The living pass the dead.
Old and young acknowledge one another;
then each takes their separate path ahead.
Oh Muse, peel off your dove-grey cardigan.
September, fallen leaves, and cool noon sun:
I rounded a gold curve and saw my son.
