Conspiracy Theories Aren't Just For Right Wing Imbeciles

Pew took a look at the kinds of people most likely to believe that the pandemic was planned. Katherine Schaeffer reported that 71% of Americans "have heard of a conspiracy theory circulating widely online that alleges that powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak. And a quarter of U.S. adults see at least some truth in it-- including 5% who say it is definitely true and 20% who say it is probably true, according to a June Pew Research Center survey. The share of Americans who see at least some truth to the theory differs by demographics and partisanship. Educational attainment is an especially important factor when it comes to perceptions of the conspiracy theory. Around half of Americans with a high school diploma or less education (48%) say the theory is probably or definitely true... That compares with 38% of those who have completed some college but have no degree, 24% of those with a bachelor’s degree and 15% of those with a postgraduate degree."

Partisan affiliation also plays a role in perceptions of the theory. About a third (34%) of Republicans and independents who lean to the GOP say the theory that powerful people intentionally planned the COVID-19 outbreak is probably or definitely true, compared with 18% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. It’s worth noting there is no significant difference in how likely partisans are to have heard at least a little about the theory: 72% of Republicans have heard of the claim, compared with 70% of Democrats.

Conservative Republicans are especially likely to see at least some truth in the theory: Roughly four-in-ten (37%) say it is probably or definitely true. This contrasts with 29% of moderate and liberal Republicans, 24% of moderate and conservative Democrats and 10% of liberal Democrats.

That said, make what you will out of the video above, circulating online among left-wingers.

The breakdown in accepted, shared societal "knowledge" is something that can be blamed on... you know who: the Orange Menace, who, like any authoritarian figure, needs to be able to define Truth or-- at the very least-- cast doubts on any shared vision of objective reality. Trump's been working on that kind of manipulative tactics for his entire public life.

Yesterday, CNN reported that "Trump's new political self-preservation effort to show he has a grip on a pandemic that is killing hundreds of Americans every day is being exposed by his refusal to share the stage with scientific experts-- or the facts. On a day that laid bare his refashioned campaign strategy, Trump... tried to show he is managing the fight against Covid-19 after weeks of neglect. [The putrid Orange Mance] has been flailing for days, as a vicious surge in infections races across the sunbelt, caused in part by governors who heeded his calls to open states before the pathogen was suppressed."

The anchor of Trump's new, punchier briefings is a scripted opening in which he cherry picks the most hopeful aspects of a pandemic that has destroyed the rhythm of American daily life and turned the economy upside down. Wednesday was yet another tragic day, with another 1,195 new deaths and 71,695 fresh infections.

In his two briefings so far, his rejigged approach seems more like a cosmetic political exercise than an attempt to provide the country with meaningful public health advice as the pandemic gets worse.

And the new tone detected by some political commentators did not survive a Fox News interview in which the President again doubted the value of diagnostic testing, which scientists say is crucial to isolating newly infected patients and stopping the spread of the disease.

...Trump, however, went on to make misleading statements that would never have been uttered by a public health expert but that he seems to think are politically helpful. He blamed migrants from Mexico crossing the closed border for causing a spike in cases, along with young people attending anti-racism protests.

The President also claimed that kids with strong immune systems don't bring the coronavirus home and that all schools can open in the fall. He did not provide any scientific evidence for the assertion or explain, for instance, why children who often pick up the flu and colds in class would not be at similar risk for transmitting the coronavirus.

And yet again, Trump claimed falsely that the United States is doing "amazing things" in comparison to other countries as it fights the virus. In fact, the US lags fellow highly industrialized nations in suppressing infection curves and leads the world in infections and deaths.

...Trump's approach to managing the virus-- that tends to put his own political interests ahead of science-based reasoning-- extends to reopening schools, which he wants to do so that the country will look like it's back to some semblance of normality ahead of the fall election.

But experts disagree with his calls.

..."He wants to open the schools, regardless of what the science says. And the science is pretty clear. If you open schools in areas or school districts where there's a high level of virus transmissions, say if you were going to do this in Houston today or San Antonio or Phoenix, it will fail," said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University.

"It will fail because not only are the kids transmitting the virus but adults, vendors are going in and out of the schools," Hotez said on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer."

"What will happen within two weeks, teachers will start going into the hospitals, going into ICUs. It'll be bus drivers, cafeteria workers and parents will start getting sick. It's untenable. It's not sustainable."

So Trump finally cancels the live GOP convention in Charlotte Jacksonville... while insisting that in-person schools must be opened.

Don't Be Afraid To Say Whose Fault This Disaster Is

Yesterday, we saw how impossible it is to not blame Trump for the botched U.S. response to the pandemic. Last week, in an OpEd for the Washington Post, Here’s how to make up for lost time on covid-19, Bill Gates did his best-- which wasn't good enough-- to not point the finger if blame directly at Señor Trumpanzee. "There’s no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus," he began what he intended to be a completely positive piece. The United States missed the opportunity? That's because the United States in led by a narcissistic sociopath who is enabled by an entire political party. Nonetheless, Gates urged his readers to think about how "the window for making important decisions hasn’t closed. The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of covid-19." Knowing what Trump is, makes that sound like a dire warning if not an actual threat.

Gates offers 3 steps the country needs to take now to pull ourselves out of the hole Trump dug and shoved us into. Problem, of course, is that Trump would be involved in the solution-- something he has steadfastly rejected.

First, we need a consistent nationwide approach to shutting down. Despite urging from public health experts, some states and counties haven’t shut down completely. In some states, beaches are still open; in others, restaurants still serve sit-down meals.

This is a recipe for disaster. Because people can travel freely across state lines, so can the virus. The country’s leaders need to be clear: Shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere. Until the case numbers start to go down across America-- which could take 10 weeks or more-- no one can continue business as usual or relax the shutdown. Any confusion about this point will only extend the economic pain, raise the odds that the virus will return, and cause more deaths.

Second, the federal government needs to step up on testing. Far more tests should be made available. We should also aggregate the results so we can quickly identify potential volunteers for clinical trials and know with confidence when it’s time to return to normal. There are good examples to follow: New York state recently expanded its capacity to up to more than 20,000 tests per day.

...Even so, demand for tests will probably exceed the supply for some time, and right now, there’s little rhyme or reason to who gets the few that are available. As a result, we don’t have a good handle on how many cases there are or where the virus is likely headed next, and it will be hard to know if it rebounds later. And because of the backlog of samples, it can take seven days for results to arrive when we need them within 24 hours.

This is why the country needs clear priorities for who is tested. First on the list should be people in essential roles such as health-care workers and first responders, followed by highly symptomatic people who are most at risk of becoming seriously ill and those who are likely to have been exposed.

The same goes for masks and ventilators. Forcing 50 governors to compete for lifesaving equipment-- and hospitals to pay exorbitant prices for it-- only makes matters worse.

Finally, we need a data-based approach to developing treatments and a vaccine. Scientists are working full speed on both; in the meantime, leaders can help by not stoking rumors or panic buying. Long before the drug hydroxychloroquine was approved as an emergency treatment for covid-19, people started hoarding it, making it hard to find for lupus patients who need it to survive.

We should stick with the process that works: Run rapid trials involving various candidates and inform the public when the results are in. Once we have a safe and effective treatment, we’ll need to ensure that the first doses go to the people who need them most.

To bring the disease to an end, we’ll need a safe and effective vaccine. If we do everything right, we could have one in less than 18 months-- about the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed. But creating a vaccine is only half the battle. To protect Americans and people around the world, we’ll need to manufacture billions of doses. (Without a vaccine, developing countries are at even greater risk than wealthy ones, because it’s even harder for them to do physical distancing and shutdowns.)

We can start now by building the facilities where these vaccines will be made. Because many of the top candidates are made using unique equipment, we’ll have to build facilities for each of them, knowing that some won’t get used. Private companies can’t take that kind of risk, but the federal government can.

In his 2015 TED Talk on pandemics (above), Gates said the greatest risk of global catastrophe today looks not like the picture on the left, but the picture on the right:

Gates was on Fox News Sunday yesterday and said that "It is fair to say things won’t go back to truly normal until we have a vaccine that we’ve gotten out to basically the entire world." But what Bill Gates-- and almost anyone else in the ruling class-- will never say, of course, is that the greatest risk of global catastrophe looks like this:

Progressive Democrats have been connecting the dots and have started speaking out loudly-- connecting something else: Trump's gross incompetence with his congressional enablers. For example, Kathy Ellis is running for a Missouri congressional seat held by a Trump stooge, Jason Smith. "So far,"she told us this morning, "Smith's largest contribution to this pandemic has been calling for thoughts and prayers as Missouri's 8th district suffers. With five of the rural hospitals closing in the past six years, and many hospitals struggling to keep their doors open, rural residents are concerned with their ability to access testing and treatment when Coronavirus hits their communities." This week, Kathy joined 21 party leaders, candidates for office, and current elected officials in calling for support for our rural communities in the form of free testing and treatment (and eventual prevention), emergency funding to rural hospitals and community health centers, and the establishment of a health worker fund to protect our frontline workers. "Smith," she concluded, "has only offered his half-hearted concerns via taxpayer-funded political newsletters."

For-Profit Education Profits Everyone... Except Students, Teachers, Taxpayers And America

Bob Herbert’s piece in last week’s Politico Magazine, The Plot Against Public Education— How Millionaires And Billionaires Are Ruining Our Schools, casts Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, as the arch-villain of public education. Between 2000 and 2009 Gates spent $2 billion on his theory that smaller high schools would better educate students. He managed to break up 8% of America’s high schools. “Smaller schools,” wrote Herbert, “were supposed to attack the problems of low student achievement and high dropout rates by placing students in a more personal, easier-to-manage environment. Students, teachers and administrators would be more familiar with one another. Acts of violence and other criminal behavior would diminish as everybody got to know everybody else. Academic achievement would soar.” It didn’t work. “[H]is experiment was a flop. The size of a high school proved to have little or no effect on the achievement of its students. At the same time, fewer students made it more difficult to field athletic teams. Extracurricular activities withered. And the number of electives offered dwindled… There was very little media coverage of this experiment gone terribly wrong. A billionaire had had an idea. Many thousands had danced to his tune. It hadn’t worked out. C’est la vie.” That didn’t stop Gates. He then moved on to his relentless attack against American teachers.

I’ve covered Gates, and his desire to improve the quality of education in America seemed sincere. But his outsized influence on school policy has, to say the least, not always been helpful. Although he and his foundation were committed to the idea of putting a great teacher into every classroom, Gates acknowledged that there was not much of a road map for doing that. “Unfortunately,” he said, “it seems that the field doesn’t have a clear view on the characteristics of great teaching. Is it using one curriculum over another? Is it extra time after school? We don’t really know.”

This hit-or-miss attitude— let’s try this, let’s try that— has been a hallmark of school reform efforts in recent years. The experiments trotted out by the big-money crowd have been all over the map. But if there is one broad approach (in addition to the importance of testing) that the corporate-style reformers and privatization advocates have united around, it’s the efficacy of charter schools. Charter schools were supposed to prove beyond a doubt that poverty didn’t matter, that all you had to do was free up schools from the rigidities of the traditional public system and the kids would flourish, no matter how poor they were or how chaotic their home environments.

Corporate leaders, hedge fund managers and foundations with fabulous sums of money at their disposal lined up in support of charter schools, and politicians were quick to follow. They argued that charters would not only boost test scores and close achievement gaps but also make headway on the vexing problem of racial isolation in schools.

None of it was true. Charters never came close to living up to the hype. After several years of experimentation and the expenditure of billions of dollars, charter schools and their teachers proved, on the whole, to be no more effective than traditional schools. In many cases, the charters produced worse outcomes. And the levels of racial segregation and isolation in charter schools were often scandalous. While originally conceived a way for teachers to seek new ways to reach the kids who were having the most difficult time, the charter school system instead ended up leaving behind the most disadvantaged youngsters.

In her book Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch explains the problem: “Many studies show that charters enroll a disproportionately small share of students who are English-language learners or who have disabilities, as compared with their home district. A survey of expulsion rates in the District of Columbia found that the charters— which enroll nearly half the student population of the district— expel large numbers of children; the charters’ expulsion rate is seventy-two times the expulsion rate in the public schools. … As the charters shun these students, the local district gets a disproportionately large number of the students who are most expensive and most challenging to educate; when public students leave for charters, the budget of the public schools shrinks, leaving them less able to provide a quality education to the vast majority of students.”

…Few people would accuse Gates of acting out of greed. For other school reformers, however, a huge financial return has been the primary motivation. While schools and individual districts were being starved of resources, the system itself was viewed as a cash cow by so-called education entrepreneurs determined to make a killing. Even in the most trying economic times, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, earmarked for the education of children from kindergarten through the twelfth grade, are appropriated each year. For corporate types, especially for private equity and venture capital firms, that kind of money can prove irresistible. And the steadily increasing influence of free-market ideology in recent years made public education fair game.

Stephanie Simon, writing for Reuters in the summer of 2012, captured the excitement of investors eager to pounce: “The investors gathered in a tony private club in Manhattan were eager to hear about the next big thing, and education consultant Rob Lytle was happy to oblige. Think about the upcoming rollout of new national academic standards for public schools, he urged the crowd. If they’re as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They’ll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it.”

With billions to be reaped from the schools by proponents of online classes and entirely online charter schools— virtual schools— teachers would find that they, too, were expendable.

The foothold established by for-profit virtual schools was extremely disturbing. Their most fervent advocates spoke in the most glowing terms about getting rid of buildings, classroom teachers, playgrounds— everything most people associate with going to school. “Kids have been shackled to their brick-and-mortar school down the block for too long,” said Ronald Packard, a former Goldman Sachs banker who was the CEO of K12 Incorporated, the nation’s largest operator of online public schools, likes to say.

Packard was an operator, not an educator. When he founded K12 in 2000, one of his two primary financial backers was Michael Milken, the disgraced junk-bond king of the 1970s and 1980s. The other was Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle and the fourth-richest person in America. The first chairman and chief proselytizer of K12 was William Bennett, who had served as education secretary under Ronald Reagan and drug czar under George H. W. Bush. There was something odd about Bennett’s trumpeting the wonders of cyberschools. In his book The Educated Child, published just a year earlier, he had sounded less than enthralled about the potential of online schooling. “When you hear the next pitch about cyber-enriching your child’s education,” he wrote, “keep one thing in mind: so far, there is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve learning.”

He was, nevertheless, the energetic public face of K12 until 2005, when he had to resign because of a controversy that erupted over a comment he’d made on his radio program. (In response to a caller, Bennett had offered what he described as a thought experiment, saying, “If you wanted to reduce crime … you could abort every black baby in the country, and your crime rate would go down.” He added, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”)

Virtual schools remained under the radar for several years before eventually becoming too big to ignore. There were close to a quarter of a million full-time students attending online charter schools in the United States in 2014, and that number was growing. The schools were heavily advertised, and the companies running them spent tens of millions of dollars on political lobbying. Very few taxpayers were aware that some of the money they thought was paying for schools of the brick-and-mortar variety was actually being used for advertising and politics and to fatten the portfolios of virtual school proselytizers and promoters.

Performance results have been uniformly abysmal for students— although the investors, the lobbyists and the crooked politicians who take their legalistic bribes have done spectacularly well. And the crooked politicians aren’t just Republicans. Corporate Democrats like Cory Booker might as well be Republicans when it comes to destroying the public school system for profit. Eli Broad and the Walton family have been particularly predatory when it come sot stealing taxpayer dollars and funneling them into initiatives that wreck public schools while making wealthy investors wealthier. Political hucksters like Fox’s Rupert Murdoch, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, sleazy lobbyists Lanny Davis and Ed Rendell and would-be president Jeb Bush have looked at education as a big fat honey pot to further enrich themselves.

“Those who are genuinely interested in improving the quality of education for all American youngsters,” concluded Herbert, “are faced with two fundamental questions: First, how long can school systems continue to pursue market-based reforms that have failed year after demoralizing year to improve the education of the nation’s most disadvantaged children? And second, why should a small group of America’s richest individuals, families, and foundations be allowed to exercise such overwhelming— and often such toxic— influence over the ways in which public school students are taught?

Despite the New Dems and other corrupt corporate Democrats looking to line their own pockets and advance their miserable careers, most Democrats do support public education as much as most Republicans want to abolish it. The Education Opportunity Network makes the case that Democrats can win electorally by standing up to the Jeb Bush profiteers and fighting to fund public education.

Both anecdotal information and empirical data drawn from surveys confirm that voters don’t just value public education; they want candidates who will support classroom teachers and oppose funding cuts to public schools. The evidence is strong that Democrats can make support for public education a winning issue— if they’re willing to take the advice.

Democrats looking to score points with the voting public should talk up public education. At least that’s the conclusion that can be drawn from new survey data from pollster Celinda Lake.

…Education is not often viewed as a hot button issue that will turn out voters. Thus, candidates often mouth virtually identical platitudes about education being “a way out of poverty” and “America’s great equalizer.” Then after the election, they proceed to cut funding for public schools and saddle classroom teachers with more and more burdensome “accountability.”

But 2014 may be different.

According to Lake’s research, “The top testing turnout message overall emphasizes education, specifically Republicans’ efforts to cut programs for students while giving tax cuts to the wealthy. This message is the strongest argument for coming out to vote in all of the states except Colorado (where it ranks second, just behind a message focused on how Republicans are working to turn back the clock on women’s rights).”

Taking a strong stance for “education and public schools” was far and away the message that most survey responders found “very convincing.”

Further, Lake found that the “turnout message” with the greatest “intensity was:

Education & Public Schools


Republicans keep cutting education and attacking public schools, hurting our ability to compete economically and taking away opportunities for our children. Republicans proposed cutting billions in public education, including programs like Head Start, to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. That hurts our children, as good teachers leave, class sizes increase, art and music programs disappear, and schools become less safe. Families are struggling, paying for basic supplies, and seeing their schools decline. Those priorities are just wrong.

Lake’s work also examined more closely a potential target of “individuals who shift to higher interest (‘10’) in voting in November.” This group is a significant part of the sample (39 percent), which tends to be women (62 percent), married (54 percent), and under the age of 40 (42 percent).

These voters are particularly moved by education messaging. They are concerned that a GOP takeover of the Senate would result in Republicans shutting down the government again (71 percent) and cutting funding for Head Start and K-12 education (71 percent).

“Two messages are particularly strong with this group,” Lake found. “A message focusing on the middle class falling behind (73 percent very convincing) and the education message (72 percent)” were “the most effective with these targets.”

After hearing messages that include strong support for public schools, 39 percent of these important voters say they are “very interested (rate ’10′) in voting this November.” After being told the election in their state would “determine control of the U.S. Senate, 50 percent say they are very interested in voting.”

The discovery that Americans are highly supportive of public schools is nothing new. Recent polling results from the annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Towards the Public Schools show that Americans overwhelmingly support their public schools and respect classroom teachers.

That survey also found that a majority of Americans do not support current public education initiatives— such as new standards and teacher evaluations based on test scores— that most political candidates are touting as “reform.” When asked what they think are the biggest problems that public schools in their community deal with, Americans of all political persuasions cite “lack of financial support” number one.

This strong support for public schools is having an impact on upcoming elections. As an experienced education journalist at Education Week recently observed, education is top issue in most important senate races in November.

“In North Carolina, candidates are locking horns over education spending and teacher pay; in Georgia, the Common Core State Standards are taking center stage; and in Iowa, higher education and student loans are the subject of the latest skirmish between Senate hopefuls.”

The results of many of the gubernatorial races around the country also hinge on education.

In Georgia, education funding and the role of charter schools in the state’s system have come to the fore in the contest between incumbent Republican Nathan Deal and Democratic challenger Jason Carter, a state senator and grandson of former President Jimmy Carter.

In Kansas, widespread voter anger over school closures and funding cuts have imperiled the reelection of Republican Governor Sam Brownback.

In Florida, Republican incumbent Rick Scott’s support for new Common Core standards and his cuts in education spending have put him in hot water with a range of voters, from conservative Tea Party activists, to Independents, and Democratic Party voters alike.

In Pennsylvania, voters rank education as the most important issue, and current Republican Governor Tom Corbett has been rated “the most vulnerable governor in America” due in part to his support for severe cuts to education funding.

Whether Democrats can overcome the staggering odds against them this election remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Democratic candidates in these contests and others need to make support for public education front-and-center of their campaigns.

One of Blue America’s most ardent supporters of public education is former ACLU-Executive Director and current candidate for the Senate from Maine, Shenna Bellows. Her opponent, Susan Collins, is a lockstep Republican zombie who consistently votes for the for-profit education complex agenda. If you’d like to help Shenna beat her, you can do that here on the Blue America Senate 2014 page. Shenna:

I wouldn’t be running for US Senate today if it were not for good public schools. We are in a vicious cycle of testing and austerity that is hurting our schools and our children’s future. The only people who benefit from some of these testing schemes are private testing companies. Schools are not businesses, and our children are not a commodity. Susan Collins, has been on the wrong side. So-called bipartisan reforms like No Child Left Behind, which Collins voted for, are being implemented in such a way that is hurting our local schools and good teaching. In my husband’s hometown of Skowhegan, Maine, the local public schools are reeling from the diversion of much needed public funds to a new charter school with questionable civil rights practices. We need to get back to basics, and that means investing in good teachers and adequate infrastructure in a community-based system that strengthens our local public schools instead of tearing them apart and diverting students and resources into a profit-driven model.

No one in Congress has a worse record on education than the man John Boehner appointed chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, right-wing ideologue John Kline (R-MN). Since 1990 the for-profit education industry has handed out $10,453,60 to Members of Congress in legalistic bribes. The number one recipient— not just among House Members but among senators as well— was Kline: $441,258, significantly more than Speaker Boehner, who they gave $183,000. This cycle alone Kline is raking in more than anyone else in Congress: $168,849. The runner-up, another anti-education lunatic on his committee, Virginia Foxx (R-NC) “only” got $86,380 and Boehner only took in $34,800 from these predatory operators. In return, Kline has done more than anyone else in government to further their toxic agenda.

Last week, following an endorsement of Kline’s progressive Democratic opponent, Mike Obermueller, by the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association (NEA) also came out for Obermueller against Kline. "When you consider the number of votes Kline has taken against the best interest of students, teachers, and education support staff, it's not hard to figure out why these groups are tired of having Kline in Congress," said Obermueller. "We have problems to address in education, and we don't have an education chair willing to do what's necessary to solve those problems. People are tired of inaction, and it's time for change… "We need to be doing everything we can to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible. That means supporting our teachers in the classroom, making sure our young people are in safe learning environments, and prioritizing education above special interests."

Kline wrote and passed the #1 priority of the for-profit education industry, an amendment to prevent “the use of funds by the Department of Education to implement and enforce the gainful employment rule, which would prohibit college programs from receiving Federal student loans unless new complicated loan repayment criteria are met.” It passed 289-136, only 4 Republicans joining 132 Democrats sticking up for students and for public education. 58 mostly corrupt Democrats crossed the aisle and voted with the Republicans, including almost all the corporately-owned New Dems and Blue Dogs, reactionaries and bribe-takers like Steve Israel (Blue Dog-NY), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (New Dem-FL), Gary Peters (New Dem-MI), John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Joe Crowley (New Dem-NY), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), and Ron Kind (New Dem-WI).

If you'd like to help replace Kline with Mike Obermueller, you can do that on this ActBlue page. Not sure? Watch the forum on this video and I think you will be:

A Philosophy Of Governance-- Why We Help Our Neighbors… Or Not

Generally speaking, states that elect Democrats to public office spend far more money on public education than states that elect Republicans. The half dozen states that invest the least per student are Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arizona, Mississippi, and Tennessee, essentially one-party states with solid GOP control who take all their orders directly from ALEC. This morning Reid Wilson looked at education spending around the country for Washington Post readers. "There is disagreement," he began, "within education circles over whether spending more money per pupil leads to better results. But there is no disagreement that the amount of money states spend on education has erupted in recent years… Today, the average student costs taxpayers in New York $18,167 a year, while Utah, Idaho and Oklahoma spend less than $8,000 a year on their students." There's "a growing gap between the amount liberal states and conservative states spend on education. Most liberal-leaning states have focused spending on low-income students, the report found, accounting for much of the cost increases."

Among the 10 states that spend the least amount per pupil, students in only one-- Utah-- perform higher than the national average in reading. Five have students who perform significantly worse than the national average in reading in both 4th and 8th grades, and students in three states perform below the national average in math.

Our go-to education policy expert is Compton School Board President Micah Ali, who is worried about the effective day-to-day allocation of resources of a school system struggling with integrating long, medium and short-term goals for lifting a largely economically-stresed population out of danger.

"It's a fact," he told us this evening, "that the United States spends more money on public education than other developed nations. Funding public education is a conundrum for most, as it involves an amalgamation of federal, state and local funds. In a country that believes we are all 'equal under law,' Compton USD students arrive at their very first day of school already behind their peers from Santa Monica or Beverly Hills. Federal funding should help us close that gap. Investing in early childhood education, school-based health centers, and expanded school lunch programs are proven winners that address the societal needs of children in this corner of America's community." He's not far from what billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates have been advocating and effectuating in other parts of the world.

For the most part, the Gates have been on the wrong side of the education debate here in America, funding the worst and most avaricious opponents of public education. They've been a lot better about promoting equality of opportunity outside the U.S., in the Third World. Bill Gates' latest newsletter tackles 3 right-wing myths that poor counties are doomed to stay poor. "The global picture of poverty," he wrote, "has been completely redrawn in my lifetime. Per-person incomes in Turkey and Chile are where the United States level was in 1960. Malaysia is nearly there, as is Gabon. And that no-man’s-land between rich and poor countries has been filled in by China, India, Brazil, and others. Since 1960, China’s real income per person has gone up eightfold. India’s has quadrupled, Brazil’s has almost quintupled, and the small country of Botswana, with shrewd management of its mineral resources, has seen a thirty-fold increase. There is a class of nations in the middle that barely existed 50 years ago, and it includes more than half of the world’s population."

[D]on’t let anyone tell you that Africa is worse off today than it was 50 years ago. Income per person has in fact risen in sub-Saharan Africa over that time, and quite a bit in a few countries. After plummeting during the debt crisis of the 1980s, it has climbed by two thirds since 1998, to nearly $2,200 from just over $1,300. Today, more and more countries are turning toward strong sustained development, and more will follow. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies of the past half-decade are in Africa.

Africa has also made big strides in health and education. Since 1960, the life span for women in sub-Saharan Africa has gone up from 41 to 57 years, despite the HIV epidemic. Without HIV it would be 61 years. The percentage of children in school has gone from the low 40s to over 75 percent since 1970. Fewer people are hungry, and more people have good nutrition. If getting enough to eat, going to school, and living longer are measures of a good life, then life is definitely getting better there. These improvements are not the end of the story; they’re the foundation for more progress.

…I am optimistic enough about this that I am willing to make a prediction. By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. (I mean by our current definition of poor.) Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer. Countries will learn from their most productive neighbors and benefit from innovations like new vaccines, better seeds, and the digital revolution. Their labor forces, buoyed by expanded education, will attract new investments.

A few countries will be held back by war, politics (North Korea, barring a big change there), or geography (landlocked nations in central Africa). And inequality will still be a problem: There will be poor people in every region.

But most of them will live in countries that are self-sufficient. Every nation in South America, Asia, and Central America (with the possible exception of Haiti), and most in coastal Africa, will have joined the ranks of today’s middle-income nations. More than 70 percent of countries will have a higher per-person income than China does today. Nearly 90 percent will have a higher income than India does today.

It will be a remarkable achievement. When I was born, most countries in the world were poor. In the next two decades, desperately poor countries will become the exception rather than the rule. Billions of people will have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The idea that this will happen within my lifetime is simply amazing to me.

Some people will say that helping almost every country develop to middle-income status will not solve all the world’s problems and will even exacerbate some. It is true that we’ll need to develop cheaper, cleaner sources of energy to keep all this growth from making the climate and environment worse. We will also need to solve the problems that come with affluence, like higher rates of diabetes. However, as more people are educated, they will contribute to solving these problems. Bringing the development agenda near to completion will do more to improve human lives than anything else we do.



I worry about the myth that aid doesn’t work. It gives political leaders an excuse to try to cut back on it-- and that would mean fewer lives are saved, and more time before countries can become self-sufficient.

So I want to take on a few of the criticisms you may have read.3 I should acknowledge up front that no program is perfect, and there are ways that aid can be made more effective. And aid is only one of the tools for fighting poverty and disease: Wealthy countries also need to make policy changes, like opening their markets and cutting agricultural subsidies, and poor countries need to spend more on health and development for their own people.

But broadly speaking, aid is a fantastic investment, and we should be doing more. It saves and improves lives very effectively, laying the groundwork for the kind of long-term economic progress I described in myth #1 (which in turn helps countries stop depending on aid)… The U.S. government spends more than twice as much on farm subsidies as on health aid. It spends more than 60 times as much on the military. The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

One of the most common stories about aid is that some of it gets wasted on corruption. It is true that when health aid is stolen or wasted, it costs lives. We need to root out fraud and squeeze more out of every dollar.

But we should also remember the relative size of the problem. Small-scale corruption, such as a government official who puts in for phony travel expenses, is an inefficiency that amounts to a tax on aid. While we should try to reduce it, there’s no way to eliminate it, any more than we could eliminate waste from every government program-- or from every business, for that matter. Suppose small-scale corruption amounts to a 2 percent tax on the cost of saving a life. We should try to reduce that. But if we can’t, should we stop trying to save lives?

…Second, the “aid breeds dependency” argument misses all the countries that have graduated from being aid recipients, and focuses only on the most difficult remaining cases. Here is a quick list of former major recipients that have grown so much that they receive hardly any aid today: Botswana, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Thailand, Mauritius, Singapore, and Malaysia. South Korea received enormous amounts of aid after the Korean War, and is now a net donor. China is also a net aid donor and funds a lot of science to help developing countries. India receives 0.09 percent of its GDP in aid, down from 1 percent in 1991.

Even in sub-Saharan Africa, the share of the economy that comes from aid is a third lower now than it was 20 years ago, while the total amount of aid to the region has doubled. There are a few countries like Ethiopia that depend on aid, and while we all-- especially Ethiopians themselves-- want to get to a point where that is no longer true, I don’t know of any compelling argument that says Ethiopia would be better off with a lot less aid today.

Critics are right to say there is no definitive proof that aid drives economic growth. But you could say the same thing about almost any other factor in the economy. It is very hard to know exactly which investments will spark economic growth, especially in the near term. However, we do know that aid drives improvements in health, agriculture, and infrastructure that correlate strongly with growth in the long run. Health aid saves lives and allows children to develop mentally and physically, which will pay off within a generation. Studies show that these children become healthier adults who work more productively. If you’re arguing against that kind of aid, you’ve got to argue that saving lives doesn’t matter to economic growth, or that saving lives simply doesn’t matter.

…Going back at least to Thomas Malthus, who published his An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, people have worried about doomsday scenarios in which food supply can’t keep up with population growth. As recently as the Cold War, American foreign policy experts theorized that famine would make poor countries susceptible to Communism. Controlling the population of the poor countries labeled the Third World became an official policy in the so-called First World. In the worst cases, this meant trying to force women not to get pregnant. Gradually, the global family planning community moved away from this single-minded focus on limiting reproduction and started thinking about how to help women seize control of their own lives. This was a welcome change. We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

The fact is that a laissez faire approach to development-- letting children die now so they don’t starve later-- doesn’t actually work, thank goodness. It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too. Scholars debate the precise reasons why, but the correlation between child death and birth rates is strong.

…When children survive in greater numbers, parents decide to have smaller families. Consider Thailand. Around 1960, child mortality started going down. Then, around 1970, after the government invested in a strong family planning program, birth rates started to drop. In the course of just two decades, Thai women went from having an average of six children to an average of two. Today, child mortality in Thailand is almost as low as it is in the United States, and Thai women have an average of 1.6 children.

…Mothers in Mozambique are 80 times more likely to lose a child than mothers in Portugal, the country that ruled Mozambique until 1975. This appalling aggregate statistic represents a grim reality that individual Mozambican women must confront; they can never be confident their children will live. I’ve spoken to mothers who gave birth to many babies and lost most of them. They tell me all their mourning was worth it, so they could end up with the number of surviving children they wanted.

When children are well-nourished, fully vaccinated, and treated for common illnesses like diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia, the future gets a lot more predictable. Parents start making decisions based on the reasonable expectation that their children will live.

Death rates are just one of many factors that affect birth rates. For example, women’s empowerment, as measured by age of marriage and level of education, matters a great deal. Girls who marry in their mid-teens tend to start getting pregnant earlier and therefore have more children. They usually drop out of school, which limits their opportunities to learn about their bodies, sex, and reproduction-- and to gain other kinds of knowledge that helps them improve their lives. And it’s typically very difficult for adolescent brides to speak up in their marriages about their desire to plan their families. I just traveled to Ethiopia, where I had a long conversation with young brides, most of whom were married at 11 years old. They all talked about wanting a different future for their children, but the information they had about contraceptives was spotty at best, and they knew that when they were forced to leave school their best pathway to opportunity was closed off.

In fact, when girls delay marriage and stay in school, everything changes. In a recent study of 30 developing countries, women with no schooling had three more children on average than women who attended high school. When women are empowered with knowledge and skills, they start to change their minds about the kind of future they want.

…[T]he virtuous cycle that starts with basic health and empowerment ends not only with a better life for women and their families, but with significant economic growth at the country level. In fact, one reason for the so-called Asian economic miracle of the 1980s was the fact that fertility across Southeast Asia declined so rapidly. Experts call this phenomenon the demographic dividend.8 As fewer children die and fewer are born, the age structure of the population gradually changes.  Eventually, there’s a bulge of people in their prime working years. This means more of the population is in the workforce and generating economic growth. At the same time, since the number of young children is relatively smaller, the government and parents are able to invest more in each child’s education and health care, which can lead to more economic growth over the long term.

These changes don’t just happen by themselves. Governments need to set policies to help countries take advantage of the opportunity created by demographic transitions. With help from donors, they need to invest in health and education, prioritize family planning, and create jobs. But if leaders set the right strategic priorities, the prospect of a virtuous cycle of development that transforms whole societies is very real.

The virtuous cycle is not just development jargon. It’s a phenomenon that millions of poor people understand very well, and it guides their decisions from day to day. I have the privilege of meeting women and men in poor countries who commit the small acts of love and optimism-- like going without so they can pay their children’s school fees-- that propel this cycle forward. The future they hope for and work hard for is the future I believe in.