Dana Goldstein reports on how Finland's education success shows that reform is both possible and more complex than we think:
That's right: Merit pay exists in Finland. So does school choice; only the most academically-inclined Finnish 15-year-olds continue their education in general (as opposed to vocational) upper secondary schools, which compete with one another for the students with the highest grade point averages.But Finland is also home to strong, politically powerful teachers' unions. And tenure. And principals who complain tenure makes it too difficult to fire bad teachers. Alcoholism is one of the few offenses that allows primary school principal Timo Heikkinen to axe a teacher, he said, and only after providing the employee with counseling and negotiating with his or her union. Sound familiar?
Robert Kuttner says that Mary Schapiro, Obama's pick to head the SEC, is just what Wall Street wanted:
And of course, her appointment is no accident. There were much tougher, more public minded appointees for SEC chair on the short list, but they were blocked by fierce industry lobbying warning that tough regulators would be divisive or controversial -- which they indeed would, if they did their jobs. Wall Street fundraisers for Obama used their ample access to resist a tough appointee. People in other power centers, like the Treasury and the White House, did not want a tough and independent SEC. If you think the appointment process exists in some kind of platonic post-ideological vacuum, get real.
Matt Yglesias writes that the current situation in Somalia is largely our fault:
Americans don't spend much time thinking about Somalia. And what time we do spend has in recent months been focused on somewhat amused accounts of the uptick in pirate activity off the Somali coast. But the piracy is but a symptom of the larger problem of lawlessness and anarchy in Somalia. To Americans who have paid no attention to East Africa in the time between the departure of U.S. forces from Somalia in 1995 and the recent spate of pirate attacks, this situation may appear merely endemic to the region. But it's not. The Somali situation was, in many ways, improving as of two years ago. At which point the Bush administration initiated a new adventure that, like most Bush administration deeds, was ill-conceived and worked out poorly. In this case, it destroyed the country, has been responsible for the deaths of untold thousands of people, has created the pirate problem, and is breeding a new generation of anti-American jihadists.
And Tim Fernholz explains the numerous skills of Obama's pick to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the numerous challenges he faces:
Shaun Donovan had a problem. As deputy assistant secretary for multifamily housing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during the Clinton administration, he learned of two troubled low-income senior-housing developments in Atlanta, comprising some 500 units. The nonprofits that managed the homes lacked the capital to rehabilitate the aging buildings. A larger nonprofit was in negotiations to take over management of the buildings and find further capital for rehabilitation, but HUD rules prevented the takeover until after financing for the rehabilitation was completed -- and the money wasn't there yet. The developments were set to close without new management, so Donovan intervened to shepherd the deal through HUD's bureaucracy. Within three years, the new managers had rehabilitated the buildings by securing state tax breaks and issuing bonds.
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--The Editors
