…at Hank Stern’s InsureBlog. And apparently, I’m a “posting machine.”

In September 2005, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced the creation of a commission charged with formulating a “comprehensive national strategy” for higher education. The commission was chaired by long-time Bush pal Charles Miller – who’d helped create the Texas predecessor to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) when Bush was governor – and it seemed very likely the commission would recommend federally enforced standardized testing for all colleges and universities. Thankfully, federally mandated testing was not among the recommendations in its final report, an outcome almost certainly attributable to adamant opposition to such lunacy both from within and without academia.

Ah, but in Texas they don’t give up easily!

Unwilling to face what would no doubt be major opposition to publicly trying to force inane, NCLB-esque standardized testing on the Ivy League, Seven Sisters, etc., the Department of Education has chosen a different tactic: it’s tried to sneak it in through the ivory tower’s back door. Rather than putting testing requirements into legislation that would have to get through Congress, the administration has been quietly trying to rewrite regulations governing accreditation in order to make accreditors force schools to administer standardized tests.

Thankfully, there’s been a lot of resistance among accreditors to this assault on academia, and Education Department negotiators have had to tone down their once explicit demands for testing. As Inside Higher Ed reports:

As the department’s various proposals have evolved over the weeks and months, they have become slightly less intrusive at each turn. Most recently, the department issued draft regulatory language — based, its officials repeated again and again, on a proposal that some of the “non-federal” negotiators had suggested — that would no longer require accrediting agencies to dictate to colleges the levels of performance they must achieve in student learning.

That’s good news, but as IHE continues, it hardly gets schools out of the woods:

But because the government would still require accrediting agencies to judge whether the standards that colleges set for themselves and their success in meeting those goals are sufficient — and because the accreditors would be doing so knowing that the Education Department can (through its process for recognizing accrediting agencies) punish any accreditor who doesn’t set the bar high enough to satisfy department officials — some members of the negotiating panel argued Tuesday that even the less-aggressive changes amount to federal control of accreditation, and ultimately of higher education.

In light of all this, I have a confession to make. When Spellings first announced the creation of her commission, and as the national strategizers conducted their work, I was almost certain we’d see the Bush administration try to assert explicit federal control over higher education, just as it had done in K‑12. Well I was wrong. The administration hasn’t tried to do anything explicit in higher education. No, it’s tried to hide what it’s been up to ever since the commission’s final report came out.

Just when it seemed that control over the direction of U.S. trade policy was hopelessly and totally in the grips of congressional forces of darkness, there is a faint glimmer of hope that some Democrats might remember the days when they weren’t forced to consider trade a dirty word. Given where things stand today, that’s not a trivial matter.

In a letter (sorry, subscription required–see excerpt below) dated May 2, six members of the House Ways and Means Committee (five of whom are Democrats!) urged Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez to abandon (or at least work to minimize the disruption to trade caused by) his Department’s Import Monitoring Program of Textile and Apparel Products from Vietnam. The novelty alone of a letter from Congress urging the administration to tread lightly where imports are concerned warrants this post.

As you may recall from a previous post, the Bush Administration felt it had to buy off opposition to the bill that granted Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status to Vietnam. Prominent holdouts demanding compensation were Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R‑NC) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R‑SC), and the price, ultimately, was a commitment from the administration to monitor imports and to self-initiate antidumping cases if the situation warranted. That commitment from the administration was unprecedented, unnecessary, and disappointing. Today it is reported to be scaring away investment in the Vietnamese industry and deterring trade between Vietnamese producers and U.S. customers. On trade policy, Democrats have earned most of their scorn by marching to the tune of labor unions, which would just as soon permanently separate U.S. customers from their foreign sources. But Democrats also count among their constituents importers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, producers, truckers, warehouse operators, port employees, and consumers who suffer when supply chains get tangled and severed. The authors of the letter acknowledge:

Congressional passage of [PNTR] for Vietnam was intended to provide benefits for both United States businesses and consumers, as well as strengthen the U.S.-Vietnam relationship and provide opportunities for economic growth that would benefit the Vietnamese people. We are deeply concerned that the disruption in trade caused by the import monitoring program is cutting away at many of the benefits of granting PNTR status to Vietnam.

Well put, indeed! Hopefully, the congressional trade leadership was copied because its recently unveiled New Trade Policy for America reflects predominantly an antitrade perspective that has been allowed to fester and metastisize within the Democratic caucus.

In today’s Washington Post, government schooling advocate Gerald Bracey argues that American education is just fine, thanks. He makes this case by noting that NAEP 4th grade science standards are set too high. Only 29 percent of kids are deemed “proficient” on that test, while the U.S. ranked third in an international test of 4th grade science a few years ago. If these are the only data you look at, Bracey’s argument is not ludicrous on its face. If you look at all the available data on U.S. student performance, it is.

Jerry has a habit of glossing over the evidence on the performance of older U.S. students and young adults. I ran into this eight years ago when I had an on-line exchange with him over my book Market Education. As I explained then:

While U.S. students sometimes do well and usually do adequately at the 4th grade, their performance deteriorates significantly by the 8th grade, and they hit rock bottom by the 12th grade. American 16–25 year olds are among the most illiterate in the world, with nearly a quarter scoring at the lowest possible level measured by the International Adult Literacy Survey. Since most Americans are chiefly concerned with how well their children are prepared for adult life at the end of their education, the appalling performance of U.S. high-school seniors and recent graduates represents a genuine and not a manufactured crisis.…

Regrettably, but not at all surprisingly, little has changed in the intervening years. I updated my analysis of U.S. peformance in an international context when the latest TIMSS and PISA tests were released two years ago. The data continue to show that “the notion [our] public school problems are confined to inner cities, and that our wealthy suburbs produce world-beating high school graduates is a myth.”

Pat Lang posts a fascinating narrative from a retired senior Army intel officer regarding his dealings with tribal sheiks in Anbar province in December 2003 and January 2004. Essentially, the officer relates that the tribes in Anbar province wanted to ally with the Americans in fighting against al Qaeda at that point, but a plan the Army intel officer drew up was killed for a variety of bureaucratic reasons. He concludes by noting that “[w]ith or without our support, they wanted to do this — they did not want AQ in there screwing up their areas and their lives.”

Worth keeping in mind the next time the president insinuates that if we leave Iraq al Qaeda is going to take over.

I have an article over at NRO that critiques the hate crimes legislation pending in the Congress. Interestingly, Bush took a strong stand against hate crimes legislation when he was the governor of Texas. He refused to sign the James Byrd Hate Crimes Act, saying “all crimes are hate crimes.”

Just this morning, the White House has announced its intention to veto the hate crimes measure. This is a most welcome development as the bill is an affront to the constitutional principle of federalism.

The alternative minimum tax is a wretched system affecting a couple of million taxpayers per year, but the AMT is scheduled to expand dramatically if current law is left untouched. Democrats do not like this tax, largely since it indirectly takes away the state and local tax deduction – and thus aggravates taxpayers in high-tax, Democratic states like New York and California. The AMT should be abolished, but the question is whether the elimination of this built-in tax hike will be “paid-for” with a tax increase on other taxpayers. Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal opines on the growing possibility that Democrats will try to increase income tax rates on the so-called rich, even if it means that tax rates in America will climb above the oppressive levels found in welfare states like France and Germany:

Democrats want to go after high-income earners, whom they call “rich.” What is surprising is how high rates must be raised to make their plan’s numbers add up. The top AMT rate would increase to 31.5% from 28%. Democratic tax experts also recommend eliminating the lower rate for capital gains and dividends for those subject to the AMT. This would raise the capital gains tax rate to about 31% from its present 15% rate. …The changes in the AMT rate, and the treatment of dividends and capital gains, still leaves Mr. Rangel at least $600 billion short of paying for the AMT fix. House Democrats have acknowledged that to close this final gap, they will have to look to personal income taxes. Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the head of the Ways and Means tax panel, says this will require raising the top tax rate of 35% by no more than three to five percentage points. Mr. Neal should check his math. Tax experts on Capitol Hill and in the Treasury Department calculate that to get $60 billion a year from the top 1% of income earners would more likely require rate hikes of 10 to 15 percentage points. This would lift the top federal marginal income tax rate as high as 50%. “I can’t think of a better way to throw the economy into recession and end the bull market expansion of recent years than to raise tax rates like this,” warns Michael Darda, chief economist for MKM Partners. It’s hard to argue with that assessment. Overnight, the U.S. would go from being a nation with one of the lowest set of income-tax rates to one of the highest in the developed world. …In countries as diverse as Ireland, China, India, Japan, Russia and Hong Kong, tax rates are flat or falling, part of a world-wide effort to reward growth and get more of it. Yet Reaganomics, alive nearly everywhere else, is dead in the halls of the United States Congress.