counsel of the national association of evangelicals for many years, was a key voice in those early agreements, forrest montgomery, when we got to an agreement years ago on religious liberty and public schools and so forth, we got to the end of the agreement, and he insisted that we add some language like this. and this is what he said we should add. he said, even when our differences are deep, all parties engage in a public dispute should treat one another with civility and respect. . . require is a

considerable amount of heat and energy in order to figure out what it is we're cooking here. and such it seems to me is the nature of the diverse pluralistic society that is the gift of what our founding fathers gave us. they talked in terms of the world being an ordered liberty. there are certain things that are required in order for a civil and constructive society to go forward. among those are a way in which you can vent your views and your desires for the aspirations of the country. and do it in a manner that ultimately ends in some kind of a consensus.

you cook it down and eventually you get to some consensus. in that process lots of times you won't ultimately be fully satisfied, but it's a lot better than the alternative, if you will. and the alternative many times has driven man to do other things that i think most of us -- all of us in this room would agree are not particularly constructive. so our hope is that we are part of the crucible process which is continuing to define and otherwise give contour to what it means to be an american. what it means to have a civil society that allows us to have ordered liberty. and a civil society that allows us to be able to bequeath to our children the same kind of opportunities and gifts we were given. and if we're really fortunate, more than what we were given. and so every time we're given opportunities to participate in this kind of thing, it doesn't always end with the kind of consensus or joint statement

that this one does. but nevertheless, the process in itself i submit to all of you is very, very important. i would encourage all of you to do the same. and it's a joy to see you all here and to say in running the risk of not offending anybody, but god bless you because that means something to me. [laughter] >> thank you very much. >> thank you. and i wanted to say again to thank rich for his eloquent words. we could have asked him to talk about any subject in this book but i'm grateful for his leadership especially in the workplace issues and explaining those. i'm grateful for the leadership on church/state issue and he has led a common ground in the american jewish community and has been a real leader in another area where we sought consensus and where it was difficult and arrested but the a.j. committee and rich fulton led us to a happy result. i also wanted to just point out and maybe you could give that to me -- this web version of this statement is posted on the front

page of the center for religion and public affairs. and you could see that web address on the back of your booklet. so we hope -- >> can you say it for the c-span audience. >> excuse me. it's divinity.wfu.edu/rpa/. i guess we need to work on that a little bit. [laughter] >> google it. >> i hope that you will be -- you will visit that and share it with your friends. and neighbors. and help us be a part of this dissemination work and this ongoing conversation. which i sincerely mean is an ongoing project. that is welcoming to those who would like to be a part of it. i also want to just conclude by -- especially thanking e.j. for participating in this and leading it so thoughtfully. and to thank each member who has contributed to this. whether as a drafter or an endorser. it's not easy to do this work. it's hard. it's difficult.

it's time-consuming. it draws you away from many other things. and, frankly, sometimes i'm surprised that we show up again. for the next time. it's like hit me again. here i am. i am deeply, deeply inspired by the fact that all of us will come to the table a. and that all of you return again and again to this table for conversation, for sharing views. and for the hope that we can find consensus together. and that we can respect each other where consensus is not present. so let me thank you for inspiring me and for returning for that very important task as fellow americans. >> in about an hour, a defense department briefing on relief efforts in haiti with the deputy commander of the joint task force operating there. he'll speak to reporters at the pentagon. and you can see it live at 10:00 am eastern on c-span.

>> this weekend on c-span2's book book

money and enhance student achievement in the face of declining funding. we'll hear from school leaders and teaches who will present can overcome current economic factors. at this conference hosted by the american enterprise institute. this panel runs an hour and 20 minutes. >> i'm chuck with fordham. this is the panel where we actually get serious. there was a very good question at the end of the first panel about are we just going to tinker. hush! tush! a very good question about whether we're just going to keep tinkering around the margins and fiddling some little stuff and have some redesign and reconstruction of how we deliver primary secondary education in the united states.

and that's exactly what this panel is going to be discussing. very interesting papers on exactly that point by john chubb and steve wilson. and two inspired discussants. and without further ado, let me just say the presenters have 12 minutes each, the discussants 10 minutes each and if everybody is brisk we will have time for some conversation and discussion. take it away, john chubb. >> good morning. this morning and in the first panel you heard about mostly operational savings. now we're going to switch to the topic of educational opportunities. the country for the last two years has been going through the worst recession since the great depression. and every industry has been under enormous, enormous pressure to change. education is not unique in that regard. i want to start with an example.

to illustrate this. the state of hawaii, like many other -- every other state in the nation has been under enormous pressure to try to deal with its budget gaps. it came to the decision last summer that it would balance its education budget by reducing teachers' salaries for the year by 8%. but also by closing school for 10% of the days for the school year. that is every friday for 17 days. lots of political reasons why that happened. obviously not good for kids. the economic crisis is leading to budget-balancing but also potential reductions in achievement. clearly a bad thing. at the same time, general motors over the last couple of years has endured a 50% drop in its sales in response to that.

it went into a supervised bankruptcy, massive restructuring, eliminating multiple brands, laying off many workers, closing down scores of dealerships. and they are hoping to be a much better company as a result of this. are the changes in education measuring up to the kinds of changes that are taking place in the private sector? it doesn't appear to be the case. but in both the private sector and in the public sector we have -- we have the same kind of situation, which is high spending, high spending relative to what consumers need. and results that are less than desirable. in this time of economic crisis, what's going to happen? are we going to come out of this with something much better? a more productive system? or are we going to come out with more of the same? it would be a tragedy in education if as a result of this crisis all we do is tighten our belts and don't do anything better for our kids. the opportunity in education

goes beyond the operational opportunities that you saw this morning. there are, in fact -- there are, in fact, great opportunities both for cost savings and i would argue for achievement gains. if we look at, quotee the technology of education as jim guthrie and others emphasized this morning has several well-known characters. -- characterics. half of school budgets go to teachers. 70% go to other kinds of educational personnel. it is also a system that is based entirely as jose emphasized on whole group instruction. which is a teacher with a classroom of kids, 15 kids, 20 kids, 30 kids, whatever. that is how education works for almost every child in public education. there are a lot of issues with whole-group instruction. it's very difficult for kids to receive individual attention. it can be very demotivating for a kid who's behind sitting in a

large class where they can't -- where they can't keep up. the pace has to be one for kids who are at very, very different very, very different levels, very difficult for teachers to supervise for kids as they practice, very difficult for kids to master content before the class moves on. and then in addition to that, this whole group model is led by teachers who are on average, i would emphasize, are mediocre and not up to -- not up to the job. so that's the technology of education today. it is possible with computer-assisted technology for the technology to be different. as one of the questioners emphasized, educational technology today is capable of doing remarkable things. it's obvious that kids today are digital natives. they take to technology in a fully intuitive way. they are highly -- they are highly motivated by it.

and the best instructional technology has all kinds of benefits. it has the possibility of presenting lessons to kids in multimedia, not just in direct presentation by a teacher. it allows for kids to move through lessons at their own pace. it can be highly interactive. it's not just a presentation of a video but back and forth with the technology. it allows students practice as they work through problems to be guided by additional problems that identify their weakness and tutor them -- and tutor them intelligently as the terminology goes. it's possible for assessment to take place off an hourly basis and to adjust instruction and response to the -- in response to the assessments. it's possible for teachers to work with kids one-on-one online for them to get more individualized attention. it would be terrific for certain special needs -- jim guthrie

mentioned reading instruction, tremendous software innovation for reading training. and this is a system that's also -- it's not just about technology because with online instruction, teachers are also involved online. and the great thing about technology is it's possible that the -- for the technology to do a lot of the heavy lifting that teachers currently have to do. it takes care of lesson preparation. and it takes care of preparation of assessments. it takes care of a lot of the assessing, the grading, the reporting. and so forth. and it allows for teachers who are working with kids online often one-on-one to just teach. and lest anybody think this is some new sort of new fangled idea, online instruction has been in the marketplace for at least 30 place. -- 30 years. and there's soft as well the overall effectiveness on online instruction. now, onto the economics. this is something that can be very good for kids.

it's also something that makes economic sense. first taking a look at the ratios. terry moe, my colleague and i just published a book entitled "liberating learning" and the research on that book looked at online charter schools. these are kids that are full-time online instruction, their staff and their economics look like. this is an illustration based on looking at a large number of online charter schools. staffing ratios are very different. graders, people who specialize in evaluating student essays, giving feedback within 48 hours. they generally are working with 200 kids simultaneously. advisors, those who are paying close attention to kids, making sure they are staying in pace. they are in 60 to 1 rewards. ratios. they are in ratios of 150 to 1. the overall ratio of educators to kids in an online environment is about 35 to 1. you compare that to the brick

and mortar environment which is teachers 15.8 to 1 and it's labor efficient on a full-time basis. this is a comparison of the economics of full-time online schools to brick and mortar schools. and what you see here is this is assuming full funding the share of the budget that goes to the different categories for teachers, 52% half of that in online. a 26% budget savings. transportation and food yes online schools do meet face-to-face. there are some transportation costs and food costs. but there are huge savings in that area as well the -- as well as the teacher staffing area. on the other hand kids have to have computers one-on-one. they have to have internet access and so relative to budgets it's about 10% versus 2%. that's 8% additional. and then the instructional systems, these elaborate computer-based instructional systems -- the technology, the content and so forth is

considerably more expensive but that's a 25% advancement in technology versus only 3% -- that's all schools put into curriculum. they rely heavily on teachers. so that's additional costs. but there's the potential in full-time online instruction of 11% savings overall. that's a big number. now, i want to stress that nobody thinks that in the future all kids are going to sit at home in their pajamas and go to school supervised by their parents who won't be working. that's not a model that works for most families. 100,000 kids in full-time online schools that could conceivably go into a million but kids will be involved in hybrid schools. and that's simply without making too fine a point on it, an institution where kids will attend and part of the time they'll be receiving instruction directly from teachers. and part of the time they'll be receiving instruction online.

and when they're receiving instruction online using technology there are going to be fewer teaches involved. so the opportunity here is not only economic, fewer teachers, but it's also possible to optimize the mix. let's say that i learn very well with technology. well, i can do more of that or let's say i learn with a particular subject better with technology or better with teachers, you can optimize the mix so that kids are getting what they need in is appropriat whether it's technology or teacher-based. and there are all kinds of things that technology can be superb for. it can accelerate. it can remediate. it deals with the whole problem of whole-group instruction, not being able to be customized to the individual needs of kids. now, what about the economics of hybrid schools? and this i if you take a simple model of a hybrid school and use a six-hour day, and let's assume that in k through 5, kids are receiving one hour, just one hour of instruction online and while

they're receiving that instruction, rather than being supervised by a teacher, who by the way is not now doing the instruction, they're just supervising and helping, that you work in ratios of class size of 2 to 1 instead of 1 to 1. that would be the model for k-5. middle school, you're looking at two hours a day. the same supervision ratios. by high school when kids are more mature, three hours a day with 3 to 1 supervising. what does that mean in terms of teacher savings? it means a 7% fewer teachers in elementary, 14% fewer in middle. and 29% fewer in high school overall averaging across the 13 grades. that's a 15% savings in teachers relative to the budget. 52% being devoted to teachers. that's an 8% savings or $800 per student with a modest hybrid model. now, you have to pay for the curriculum. that reduces the savings somewhat but you're talking about a 5% or $500 savings per

pupil on national basis. that's $30 billion nationally. summing up, moving from the model that we have today to a model that changes the mix of teachers and lo, this can be good for both kids and it can be good for taxpayers. you have lower costs, $30 billion of savings are possible right now. and then you also have the potential for not only better instruction technologically, but a better quality -- better quality teachers within the schools. and the way that works is through the reduction and the demand for teachers. with the 3.8 million teachers in the system today, if you had a 16% reduction by moving to a full-scale hybrid model, that would require us to hire 600,000

fewer teachers than we do today. and with 600,000 fewer teachers required, the possibility then is enormous to raise the average quality of teachers. better technology, the better mix of technology and higher quality teachers is a better outcome for kids. and that's really what productivity gains are all about. getting more bang for the buck. and for the first time in history, it's possible that occasion could, in fact, get more achievement for the dollar. thank you. >> admirably done, john. and perfectly timed. take it away, steve. >> okay. is the powerpoint ready here? good morning. i'm going to address the question of the efficient use of teachers as we've all heard this morning again and again.

we're mainly buying teachers and nearly all of the dramatic increase in spending over the last 30 years but also over a much longer period has gone to reducing class size and changing ratios. and yet over that whole period achievement has remained essentially flat. so the urgent question now more than ever, of course, is could teachers be deployed more effectively boosting achievement by lowering costs? and i would like to submit to you t that this is an eminently achievable objective. and what i'm going to look at very briefly as we race through these points is what specific and practical initiatives could districts undertake that would increase compensation costs while improving outcomes? and so to study that, thanks very much to marguerite, i looked at a specific district in the northwest, midsized, 29,000 students, 37 elementary schools, 60% from poverty, employs about 2,000 teachers.

and teachers' salaries and all salaries and benefits that you would expect, 84% of spending. this district like so many others is facing a dramatic decline in revenues or the threat of that. particularly after the federal assistance vanishes and what can they do. so i look at three different init is staff deployment and instructional technology initiatives. the second is teacher quality. and the third is program initiatives. i really want to stress that as we go after the inefficiency of class size and how teachers are used we can't do it in isolation. we also have to at the same time pay much more attention teacher quality. there will be fewer of them but they're going to have a harder job to do. so the first one is, of course, the obvious. we have to increase class size. i know this is heresy in many circles. but there is no alternative and i would suggest that it's going to be relatively easy to do.

increase class size in this case, initiative number one by two on average. different amounts in different grades. and you'll not only have these benefits, 17.6 million in savings in this district but you'll also have unaccounted savings or savings that i don't account for here for many other things, facility costs, utility maintenance and so then. -- so on. you may worry about increasing class size but it's more or less an article of faith that smaller better outcomes. but the data do not support this. if you look at the largest experiment on class size in tennessee, the benefits from much smaller classes, classes that were much smaller than were actually practicable, 13 to 15 students. no one is proposing that's achievable. you still have very modest gains. moving from about the 50th percentilewíx in achievement toe 58 58th percentile. california tried to mandate this

at scale district wide. dismal outcomes. and you can see in the last bullet there just how expensive it is to get a 37.5 decrease which would be roughly like star. you'd have to spend 30% more on spending. and all the while we have that curious and disturbing fact that the highest-performing districts around the world, highest-performing districts don't use small class sizes. they use much larger classes. and one of the most interesting piece of research looked at this in detail. marty west and others. and found that it's a question of your teacher capacity. good teachers, capable teachers can manage large classes with ease. but it's, you know, it's not about size. it's also about who's in the class. not how big they are. and class formation is a much neglected topic. if you have students of widely disparate, prerequisite knowledge in the class the teachers task really requires a hero to achieve.

if instead everybody knows the skills in advance, just the way if you were in college and you went to chestry 2 class, you wo'tw e skills of chemistry 1 and yet that's the circumstance that routinely attends in school every day. so if you fix that problem by paying attention to who's enrolled in your classes and if you overcome some of these current trendy mistifications like differentiated instruction, then you have a manageable task. you prevent learning gaps from forming in the first instance by frequent assessment. not assessment that is worrisome and disturbing. but is something that just is like breathing every day for kids. and mainly to inform teacher practice so that teachers know whether they were successful in what they just taught. then in a mastery-based curriculum you can progress up through the grade successfully and just very quickly two instances i'm going to focus on the sabass program for a moment.

this is a school that has 50% increase. nine years in a everyone everybody went to college. 49 charters, 49% less cost delivering far more for far less. so the second initiative is get rid of teacher aides in first grade. we save there 6.4 million. complement teacher-led instruction, allocate one-quarter of instructional time to independent learning. we now have as john has emphasized new technology tools that finally really work. it's a very exciting time. the amortization of the capital investment and so then, we still deliver a whopping 16.2 million in savings from moving to more of a hybrid model.

an example of this is rocketship education in san jose. $500,000 savings per school and the third highest scores in the state for demographically similar schools. next, unpopular but essential. we've got to stop this practice of having 5 or 10% of the teachers in the district be teachers that no one wants in their schools. and usually superintendents rotate them precisely the schools so no one is burdened too much by them. this is an obscenity, of course. and we have to do something about it. and so this would save $6.4 million from that. underperforming teachers, you know, the obstacle has been it's so expensive to do anything about it. the first step is to turn to a mckinsey organization and put in place a meaningful assessment system. in chicago, you know, we have

.3% of teachers are rated unsatisfactory. this is not the real world. some people teaching is their calling and for others it isn't. and we need to face up to the actual situation. and i think recent accounts in the "new yorker" magazine and things like the rubber rooms are finally awakening the general population to this situation. and maybe for now especially in light of these financial stresses we'll begin to do something about it. revamp professional development. most of p.d. spending is scatter-shot, ineffective and doesn't result in student outcomes or demonstrable improvement in teacher performance. so if we were to retain and place 50% of the legacy spending in bellevue and replace the other 50% of it with stuff that is much more like what you see in some truly innovative new initiatives like the teacher u

program at hunter college that doug and others are doing where you're actually teaching specific instructional skills. not what happens at those schools. we will be instead be looking at how do you organize behavior in a classroom? how do you do cold-calling effectively? how do you improve on answers that aren't really the answers instead of saying that's the right answer -- how do you stress that a right is right. and elicit the correct answer. this is a collection of small skills that define the difference between mediocre teaching and great teaching. they can all be codified and they can all be taught. establishing a teaching fellows program. we need to -- if we're going to do this especially we need to radically improve the quality of who's in the classroom. and until such time as we can reform teacher training institutions in this country, a whole other topic, we can simply

in a sense bypass them. and we can create a fellows program that induces capable people, whether they're from top undergraduate schools or whether they're professionals at midcareer to enter teaching. and modeled on programs like that of new york and chicago and boston that have very exciting results. in new york, it's not a minor initiative. it's 17,000 applicants per year. accounting for one-third of new math teachers. so this is not a savings. changing the ratios.nvestmenfr i think we also need to increase teacher pay. we need to make teaching a more attractive profession financially to attract those very kind of people we're talking about. and we need to very much reform how we pay for who is in the classroom. so this is -- this would save us 13.8 million right here through a combination of different initiatives. merit pay, differential pay so

we should pay more for teachers that are in short supply. it makes no sense that to recruit that extremely hard to find science or math teacher in high school that we would not be offering more money to take that person out of working in a high paid job in the technology sector, for example. we need to be able to compete with those other alternatives for those particular teachers. we need to pay more for hardship situations. if you're teaching in the toughest schools, you should make more money. we need to stop paying for what doesn't matter, you know, for the last 50 years, we've been paying for two things that don't matter at all. we pay for seniority. and there's no data that suggest that beyond three years you've got anything better. in terms of effectiveness, that's the hard fact. and we're paying for master degrees which also shows no correlation to teaching effectiveness. so we start paying for what does matter. teachers with great results and

teachers in short supply and teachers with great academic backgrounds. we've heard something and we'll hear more about that today i suspect. this will deliver nearly $8 million in savings. and we -- i'll skip over this. we need to address teacher absenteem. this would result in approximately $3 million savings in this particular district by closing the gap as we heard about earlier between the industry norm and those of schooling. even if we just got 75% of the way there by offering financial incentives and other changes in operating practice, we could achieve that goal. and lastly on the program side, just to pick one. if we did much more work on establishing robust prereferral mechanisms to special education. so many students that enter special education -- and by the way almost never leave it. could stay within a more robust and effective regular education program.

and would not be labeled as somehow defective. d all told this is about $42 million of savings in this particular case. substantially more than is needed to meet the target of, say, 7% reduction that the district is facing. so i think it's really -- this is an opportunity as we heard about earlier. this is a time for innovation, an opportunity for innovation. and probably the most important thing to do is we need superintendents who have the leadership to be able to step up and say, it's time to stop investing in a failed reform strategy of smaller class size. the results are climare cal and it's never going to happen and it's expensive and there are alternatives for delivering great results for less money and i think the philanthropic community can finally help with

this by providing a national center to provide legal and technical assistance to exactly those kinds of leaders that would contemplate these kind of controversial and difficult initiatives. thank you. >> thank you very much, steve. mike? >> this is the one that didn't work. thank you. >> much better. >> yeah. okay. well, thank you. i have some slides and i sent them in a week ago and, of course, being an academic i think about what i really want to say the night before. so i'm going to sort of follow these. and just make some remarks and try to keep it short so we can have some discussion. these are both very interesting papers. they're very thoroughly footnoted and -- i mean, one reaction is we should go do this

stuff and evaluate it and see that it works. these are on the face of it very plausible models for cost-savings and improvement. i just want to make a couple of remarks here. one is about -- and jim guthrie kind of beat the heck out of this but i'll put it up again. this is a chart of teacher hires or teacher employment, nonteacher employment and student enrollments. now, i just -- i didn't go back to the dawn of man like jim did. i started in 1980 here and it's indexed at 100.0. but you can see that the situation we're in now -- we begin to think about a recession and, you know, teacher layoffs orwnsing, it's in a context in which the employment -- the number of bodies on the payroll

just far, far outstripped enrollment growth. so there was just a huge absorption of manpower in this sector. over this period enrollment grew by about 20%. teaching employment grew, i think, about 44%. and nonteaching employment grew even faster. and over this same period, real spending per student grew by 2.2%. and average teacher salaries grew in real terms from about 45 to 49,000. one of the things i like to point out is that if we had held those staffing ratios constant, in other words, if spending per student goes up by 10%, you can either lower staffing ratios by 10%, raise pay, hold staffing ratios constant and raise pay by 10% or any combination of the two that ends up to 10%. if you held these staffing ratios constant and held the mix

of compensation between benefits and salaries constant, you could have been talking about $80,000 a year teachers now. in other words, you could have pay of the teachers could have risen by 2.2% a year. again, the opportunity cost of going to this labor-intensive policy is to pay increases that you forego. now, i want to jump ahead here and talk about -- steve is talking about, you know, this tradeoff of class size and the staff class size and savings. one of the things that struck me -- and oth i'ms have drilled into this more and i look forward to audience comments. but i just made up a slide here. and the left bars, the left four bars are the average class sizes

in the four years of treatment groups in the star experiment. this is kindergarten, first, second grade. these are the treatment groups with the small classes. so it was 15.1 the number of students in kindergarten. and then by third grade it went up to 16 students, okay? now, on the right, we see that the current student teacher ratio in the united states is 15.8. and, of course, that's an average. states like my own, the student-teacher ratio is 13.7. so i guess one question i have in my mind is, why do we even have to trade off class size? you can take the whole star thing as true. and still given the levels of staff we have, it seems to me you could implement these sizes with the staffing we have. obviously, you're going to trade off something else. i mean, to give you an example, although our student-teacher ratio is 15.8 nationally from schools and staffing, the average elementary classroom has 20 students, 20.3 if it's self-contained.

and if it's departmentalized, it's 23.7 students. so again there's teachers on the payroll doing things, but they're not in these elementary grades where at least some research suggest they can be effective. steve also cites the -- and raises the issue of benefit costs. so even though real salaries have increased the rate of pay of salaries for teachers has been modest, the benefit costs are -- and again for all of these staff that are on the schools are an ongoing source of cost increases. steve cites a paper that bob and i wrote in education next published in "education next" that looked at the difference between employer contributions -- employer costs for pensions in public schools

for teachers versus private sector professionals. and he cites this 4.2% number. these are data from the bureau of labor statistics. and it starts in march '04. so the left-hand side of this is march '04. that's the earliest they start breaking out teachers. and the last date is september '09. well, you can see the upper line is the teacher trend. and the lower line is private sector professionals and managers and techn. but you can see that just over this period, the gap from the time the article was published, the gap has grown from 4.2% to 5.1%. a related figure -- and i apologize i don't have a slide on it. i can make one up and send it in. later ex post slides. but you it shows up in the employment cost index data. you know, we're in a recession, right, a very deep recession. consumer prices -- if you look back 12 months, consumer prices

have fallen. if you look at the employment costs overall, salaries and benefits in the private sector, it's dropped from running about 3% a couple of years ago down to 1.2% a year-over-year in the most recent data. but in k-12, public k-12 education, those compensation costs are still rising at 2.6% a year. so even in this recession, even with the budget difficulties of the states, these compensation costs are still rising as of the last quarter of data at 2.6% a year. so, you know, the bottom line here is labor is expensive. the sector has absorbed a lot of it. and it's costly and the costs keep rising. so what we have are a couple of papers here that are talking about strategies to bring more efficiency. what do i have left? give me a time. 2 minutes.

okay. so i don't have -- i can't do most of this. >> you can yield the rest of your time if you want. >> no, i'm going to -- but i'm going to use like a minute. i'm going to put a marker here. so i move away from data. , thus, just anecdotal. i don't know much about this research on technology and distance learning. it just seems to me these papers have made a good case for these investments. my observation is mr. wizard. i learned most of my science in elementary school from reading outside and from mr. wizard for those who are older, he was on tv every saturday. he was great. but it raises this point of scalibility. if you get in a plane and you fly over -- they call my state, we're in these flyover states. if you look out the window you'll see a lot of nothing. but, in fact, what you'll be looking at is a school district. everywhere you look out of that plane, there's a school district out there. and it's always struck me that, you know, these school districts are trying to staff chemistry classes and so then. and it always struck me that

what -- you know, rather than trying to recruit, you know -- have four rural districts, trying to recruit four chemistry teachers at $30,000 a year. why we can't move to some kind of distance learningñw" model paying one of these teachers, you know, 80 or $90,000, a very good one and beaming them in somehow. and this is called scalibility if you read this book called "black swan." there's a lot of discussion of this in terms of pay. and, you know, in higher ed, i can't comment on most of this. but if you think about this, we really do this a lot in higher ed. we take some of our best teachers and put them in classes with 500 students. i'll close with just one observation. you know, the teaching companis is really a fascinating company. and i buy a lot of their products. and theysñi around and they're finding the best professors in the united states. they're going to put us out of business, too.

and they interview them and audition them and then they put these things on dvd and mp3s and these guys are fantastic. i watched this guy -- there's a guy at university of texas that does calculus. it's a wonderful dvd. i actually bought it 'cause i hope my daughter would watch it but she wouldn't. but i watched it. and this guy is great. and there's another guy at middle bury -- like a modern day mr. wizard doing physics, introductory physics. and it just strikes me -- and again i don't have evidence on this, but the -- it just seems to me our capacity in the -- at least in the area of stem to address these problems through these kinds of technology models, augmentation and in distance learning is just untapped. at least superficially seems to be a strategy that could be more

cost-effective than this -- you know, just endless expansion of the k-12 payrolls in this area. so i'll stop there. >> it isn't just stem. i learned more about classical music from the teaching company than i ever did from school or college. >> they're great. >> but last but not least, michelle? >> thanks. can you hear me. i'm going to take this in a slightly different direction. so wilson's paper obviously makes several policy recommendations, bu{ñ my bigges take-away is that, you know, he's making an argument that a district's best investment is in its people attracting developing and retaining them. and that's hard to argue with. whereas chubb's paper is technology could potentially make up for the lack for the uniformly great teaching that takes place across all school districts. one of the things that chubb says in his paper that whole group instruction not everybody will help every student succeed especially if many students are under-achieving and we cannot

all teachers to be extraordinary and, therefore, technology offers a solution. in my view i have to say -- sort of weighing the two papers together, i think i fall more on the side of what wilson is talking about. and share i think his paper is a little more optimistic as well. and that seems to be where i lie as well. i do think that the -- the core issue is the quality of instruction. and there's really not any way to get around that. and what's behind that is, of course, how we prepare and support teachers. wilson mentions teacher u which our folks teacher america folks participate in teacher u. i'd like to just talk a little bit about how we approach this work. we have a textbook that we've developed that we use with our core members called teaching as leadership. we're releasing a version actually this month or early this month that we're hoping to sort of share that knowledge that we've accumulated by looking at our exceptional teachers more broadly and really just enter into a conversation

with people in this sector about what we can do to better prepare and support teachers in general. and one of the things that we focus on that we found in our high performers is their ability to invest students in their work. and, you know, chubb says in his paper students begin lessons unmotivated, they will simply not make the hard effort necessary to learn. agreed. i mean, i couldn't agree more. but i'm not sure that technology will motivate students. i mean, and i'm not sure how you get students to engage in the technology if they have this past of not being successful and don't feel like they want to engage in the work and doubt their own ability to do their own work. so for me i don't see technology being able to address that issue. and so we have a section in this book and we certainly talk with our core members about that as how do -- how do you influence -- how do you invest

students in their work and i'm just going to talk about two ways that we do that. one is developing their rational understanding that they can achieve by working hard. it's sort of i can and develop students' rational understanding that they will benefit from achievement. swooint. -- so i want. and so our students teach in schools that are underresourced where kids, you know, come from poverty and they've got a lot of natural disadvantages coming into the schools. and i think, you know -- many of them have not experienced the success in school. and so there is a huge amount of work to do in terms of changing their orientation and belief that they can succeed. and i think there is a lot of work that has been done in this area. we certainly have capitalized on that work in our text. but others -- i'm sure other successful teacher preparation programs do as well. carol is one person who talks about moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. and i think that's where we have to go. and it's really hard work. i don't want to minimize how hard that work is for teachers

to do. but we have to do it. i did get the feeling -- i've read some of wilson's other work and he upderstands because he studied some of these high performing school networks where it's being done. all that said, i'm not completely cynical about the possibilities of online instruction to improve learning and perhaps decrease costs through just working with rick, i've seen the work of wirelessiation. -- generation. i'm very impressed about what they do. i'm not sure where they fit in the scheme. using these handheld devices teachers are able to provide immediate and direct feedback to students is incredibly powerful. and so i'm excited to see that kind of work in our sector. and i'd like to have seen a few more examples in chubb's paper to help me kind of get my mind around what this would recollect looks like. -- would look like. and i would like to put to the

panel in the discussants and the audience. isn't one of the issues in potentially areas for cost savings is that we just have a school with lots of teachers, and sure we have teacher aides in someplace but do we have differentiated rules where people are doing different things like, for example, hospitals and if there's anything to learn. i'm not sure hospitals show there is cost savings but maybe they do. and finally just on a final note, i guess -- you know i don't know if i feel like poking at rick's work but -- >> we all do. >> i just feel very optimistic. i feel like the national conversation is focusing on the quality of instruction and that's where we need to be. so i just approach all this with a really strong sense of optimism. >> thank you very much. poking at rick is becoming a parlor game in washington. you said your school are underresourced. and i know that's the conventional wisdom at tsa about the schools that people go to

but if you did the kind of analysis that those schools that steve wilson did of their district would you end up concluding they are underresourced? >> i can't really speak to that. i do know that the work of marguerite rose and others have shown that there is -- there is inequity in resource allocation between schools. >> largely because of lower teacher salaries because of newer, more junior teachers, i think. >> yes. >> okay. why did you find steve's paper more in your word optimistic than john's? >> i guess because in speaking about the motivation piece and that's sort of why i chose to focus on that, i think it's a little defeatist to say, well, it's really hard for a teacher to invest students so we've got to turn to technology. i think that's letting the profession off the hook. i mean, i think that's the hard work of teaching. you have to figure out how to do it. you have to figure out how to

invest students and people in their lives that are influencers in order for kids to really succeed. >> one more for you and then i want to start giving the authors a little bit of grief for a few minutes. if schools adopted a kind of why brid model such as john emphasized and steve alluded to and says a little bit more in his paper than he said this morning. if schools adopted a hybrid model, what would tfa would do in let's say its preparation or supervision of its people to adapt to that? >> yeah. i think that's a great question. i think in terms of what we do before they are dispersed and go out to their respective districts it might not change that much because i could see this be district by district but at the regional level we are at 28 states plus the district of columbia. we're in over 100 school districts. so at the regional level we're always looking to have alignment between what we do and what the districts are doing. and i'm confident we can figure it out. >> okay.

mike, you did demonstrate you were an academic by opening up these papers are very interesting, comma, they are very foot noted. i wonder if you flew over the university of missouri and looked down, would you also see a whole lot of nothing? [laughter] >> never mind. never mind. john, this question gives you a little bit of a conflict of interest with your day job, i know. you seem to take for granted schools using online learning would have to buy at least or license it from a proprietary company. could you not envision the evolution of a kind of open sourced version of this. that school and school systems could use for free? >> i think that's -- i think

that's not only possible but i think it's eventually likely. i think high quality content will become publicly available. and the businesses that work in this area will find -- will find the best way to add value. so it may be that -- it may be content -- the content becomes easily available at no cost or very little cost on the internet or something like that. but where businesses add value are building the systems to help school districts and schools make use of that information. and one of the difficulties -- one of the difficulties with the use of the internet technology right now is that there's tons available. but it's not structured in a way that's easily accessible for kids. so a kid outside of school who's

highly curious and has access to a computer and the internet, you know, may learn a lot as they, you know, surf -- as they surf the web. but being able to take all of that information, harness it, sort through it, identify what's really good, what's not so good and to organize it in a way that is most effective for instructing kids at different levels, that requires, you know, a fair amount of -- a fair amount of engineering. and a big school district might invest themselves in engineering that or a company may find that's a good way to bring value to school districts. >> okay. steve, i thought i heard you both talk about more homogenous classes but also more mainstreaming of special ed. kids. did i mishear or both of those recommendations? >> no. yes, both recommendations. >> and you think they're consistent? >> yeah. i'm not sure i see the

inconsistency. >> well, ordinarily more homogenous classes means giving the teachers a room full of kids who are all about the same level of -- either achievement or ability or some combination of the two. >> yeah. so i think the first thing is if you have a stronger classroom, then fewer students are not going to succeed in it and be pushed off to special education. but i agree with you. you also have to have another remediation mechanism that isn't special education. and i think most districts rely on special education as really their only effective remedial place. and so what i would be suggesting is classrooms that are homogenous in the sense that all students within it have mastered the precursor concepts. but heterogenius in the sense of the different abilities and capacities of the students. and in any case complemented by

a mechanism by which students who are falling behind can catch up very quickly and return to the classroom. that has to be a piece of it. but what we shouldn't be doing in my view is shuffling off lots of students particularly as it turns out african-american boys to special education for disabilities that are, in fact, schooling defects and not intellectual defects. >> okay. you also -- just one more in the special ed. area. when you talked about more or less doing away with classroom aides as a cost-saving device, i believe i saw you say except for special ed. aides. did i hear you right? >> yeah. i'm not particularly attached to that aspect of the recommendation. but i think -- i was just trying to say that even if you didn't go after anything in front how special education was organized and just looked at the regular ed piece that's what you could do.

>> somebody else in the room, i won't put him on the spot by naming him but with special ed. nearing the third of the cost of budgets, carving it out is something we just don't touch as we redesign the rest of the system. it's probably unrealistic, short-sighted and very costly. >> yeah. and what i'm suggesting is that we -- the most effective way to go after it as a cost problem is to much, much more thoughtfully restrict entry to it. >> okay. john, do you see the technology as -- i promise my last special ed. question. do you see the technology as a major asset for disabled youngsters in learning? >> i think the technology can make a big difference for -- well, for specific issues and then general issues. first, i'll just give you a few examples. first for reading.

for kids who have lots of opportunities to practice the basic skills of phonics through exposure in the home environment, learning the decoding process comes relatively easy for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who don't have that when they get to school, it requires much more practice than they generally have opportunity to in class. there's terrific already on the market software that gives kids opportunities to sound out letter combinations, to create words, to get feedback through speech recognition and to practice one-on-one in a way that they never could in a classroom. ...

to them while they are -- while they're reading the lessons along on a page provides more opportunity for practice, more opportunity for customized feedback. talk about response to intervention, rti, which has swept the nation as the sort of the both latest good idea and late estimate depending how you watch it be >> the basic idea of having interventions frequent assessment, frequent adjustments to this intervention can be much more easily supported, implemented with the support of technology than it can with teachers simply trying to do it unaided by technology. this is a question for steven, to create an opening for my. did you look at pension costs and retirement costs to districts in your collection of cost savings?

>> yes, both. but i think mike has much more to say about that but i do. >> i just want to know from you, and the hypothetical district of bellevue, did you can't let what you could save? i miss that. >> it is one of the proposals at. >> mike, this smoking gun, pension and other retirement benefit costs, how much is that camino to cost savings in the present day? or could be made amenable? >> by the way, the chart i put up there didn't include retiree benefits, which are the second smoking gun. how much are they amenable? we will find out. you know, the point is, the question, the legal status of all these promises is going to get tested. i think in the next few years. you know, i mean, one view is

that the only thing sort of one position over here is that the only groups for whom you can change that benefit our new hires. and if you take that position, then you're not going to save much in the short-term. you can't have much cost savings. other views are, and that's much far, far more stringent in the private sector where you're protected under the erisa standard that you're protected on what you accrued up to now, but going forward a good thing is, the other position, you protect what's accrued until now but then you can change the rules. where things are going to fall down i think will get tested in the courts. >> you can only change it for new hires, you mean under current structures of law? >> under the current belief system. >> belief system. it strikes me that all of you, except possibly the show, though

you chose the current system, but the rest of you it seems to me our challenge and an awful lot of major shovel is in the world of k-12 education, from class size to individualized instruction, to the indispensability of face-to-face instruction, i could go on. but basically, almost everything in at least certainly in john chubb's package, but in any of steve wilson's recommendations, seemed to me to go against both current law and current contracts, but more important as current belief structure about what's important or good or valuable or desirable in education. am i getting this right? >> you're asking us?

>> both of you. >> absolutely. i think whether or not these reforms can be successfully done within the existing regulatory environment is obviously an open question that i think many more than one might think can be done. but it does challenge the belief system, and i think for any of this to happen, we have to have and this was mentioned earlier, it all comes back to superintendent leaders who are willing to challenge the belief systems and take the heat for it. and point out that overall, not just their district, but american schools in general are extremely uncompetitive. and this may sound dramatic, but if we want to merge american decline in the next century, we have to be willing to take radical measures and really challenge some of this conventional wisdom. and if the answer, when the superintendent proposes it, is its impossibility, then i think a leader has to ask, am i running an employment system or

am i running a school system? and the obstacles are thrown up everywhere to being able to go to the kinds of reforms that i'm talking about and john is talking about, then, of course, the next it should be to walk up to legislature and say, i want to create a district of charter schools were these rules don't apply. and i think we're going to be seeing more and more of the. we already have leaders like bill clinton who see charter schools not as the enemy, but as a very useful to return to their majority system. i think we're going, i hope you will see a lot more of them. >> if i may. i think the common point that steve and i were trying to make is that, you know, in the midst of this economic crisis we need to recognize that the basic practice, the structure of public education, are not only expensive relative what the economy and the taxpayer can afford, but they are not in all cases were on average great for

kids. and so as we look at the crisis that we are facing, this is not just about trying to figure out how we can stretch dollars. but it's an opportunity, look at how we can do things that are going to be better for kids. so everything that steven talked about can save money, but it also raises quality. then when it comes on the technology side, what i'm trying to to make clear here is that education, public and private alike, have relied on one model for effort, which is to place a teacher in a classroom with a group of kids. and that was necessary, arguably, a century ago. and even maybe more recently. but today there are lots of ways for kids and everybody else to learn that intel's technology. and every other industry on the planet has, over time, substituted technology to make the people in the industry more

productive. jim mentioned farming, but it's across the board. the time has come for that is going to happen in public education. not full-time online schools that will work for some kids, but some mixture of technology and teachers will change over time and will make the schools not only better for taxpayers, but also better for kids. it's inevitable. >> michelle? >> i guess the one thing i take my hat off and put on my mom had for a minute, i think i just wonder about the cost savings for the online piece because it seems like you're just pushing the cost back on the parents. i would just love to hear more about beyond the 10 percent of the student population you think this works for potentially, what happens to other kids. especially with the equity lens on it. because somebody who is to young

kids in daycare, it's really expensive. >> john shad into, i should assume he's going to distinguish between a full-time and the hybrid? >> right now they're only 100,000 kids nationwide out of 55 million that are doing online education full-time. there are another several million that are homeschooled, but as i said, only a fraction are getting their homeschool environment supported by full-time online instruction. and i think most people believe that both for the needs and wishes of the parents and perhaps for the arguably for the betterment of society, kids are better off and will in the future largely congregate in places called schools. the argument then for the vast, vast majority of kids is what will those schools look like, and the modest observation, this paper, is the schools will evolve so that some of the instruction will look like it does today, but much of the

instruction will involve some combination of using technology and online instruction and distance learning and so forth. that that will be good for kids and they will have a chance to learn at whatever way works most effectively for them. and will probably also end up costing a little bit less overall. >> i'm going to ask one more and then the mike should get ready to roam. this being washington i have to ask a federal role question. some people are taking away from the current race to the top competition the belief that if the secretary of education armed with dollars go rocketing around the country telling states to change their laws, they will change their laws. is there a potential here for some of the changes that are needed in the cost savings area, as well as some of the changes that secretary duncan is currently trying to advance? in other words, could've properly targeted federal program or policy of some sort

helped to bring about any of the things that you all are recommending? >> one, i think the obvious one that comes to mind is that the administration has been very tough on the data front with the emphasis on the need for building comprehensive data systems information systems about students and teachers, and most importantly, in eliminating the wall between student data and future data, which is to say, we need a data system to identify who taught the kids. so we can help schools and teachers understand who is being successful and who is not. the point is, the more information we have about what is working in the schools, the better able, the better able to shoot will be to make wise decisions about how to spend money on professional development, about which teachers to promote, about which teachers to provide courses and additional compensation. and you know, and in also about

which teachers to remove. >> any thoughts? >> i would quickly add, i agree with all that and i would just add i think the bully pulpit function is powerful, as we've been talking about how beliefs, and i think in many cases, false beliefs have driven so much of what happens with spending that where president obama and others leaders to step forward and to challenge some of this conventional wisdom very straight on and say, it may feel like to you as a parent or teacher or as a school board member that small classes are the solution. we need to really step back and look at what the data show and see that, in fact, this isn't the case. and here are some of the things we should be doing. it would be absolutely galvanizing for people to have the courage, i think him in those kinds of roles to step up and question those beliefs. >> michael michele, any thoughts on the federal role? >> i would say seeing how race

to the top has played out in some of the states we're looking to go, i mean, i think there is a huge potential role there for a federal program. but i guess i sort of think that people, hearts and minds, would be changed more on cost he's. >> okay. mike? >> you have to keep in mind when you get into the area of compensation that a lot of this is driven by court decisions and, you know, you can get on a bully pulpit and talk to the legislature, but there's some judges out there and history of litigation that can be a challenge sometimes. >> okay. we have time for a few obvious questions that as rick said to the previous session, you must identify yourself, you must be brief and it must be a question. go ahead. >> geniality of center for education reform.

jon and steven, it sounds like a lot for the model you're describing is a school of one. at chancellor joel klein's new proposed individual learning assessment plan. is that a viable model? do you agree? can you comment on that? >> just a start, i love the school of, i think it has a lot of promise. and just for those that are similar with it, the idea that students spend some part of their time in this kind of lab and there's a playlist of activities that they follow, and the playlist describes some teacher might instruction and some online or other software based learning, there's a lot of accessibility and. and the particular things on the playlist are very directly targeted to the deficits and been identified of learning gaps of each child. i think it's a very powerful idea. obviously, it all depends on the quality of the software choices that populate that setting.

>> for those of you who aren't aware of it, it's an initiative in the new york city public schools, and it individualize is, i mean, the name, the school of one estimate indicate that every child has an education that is customized to the needs of the individual child. so that the mix of instruction at the get, whether it is a whole group instruction, tutorials by teacher, or online instruction or instructional technology, what have you is customized to the individual. that is taking the hybrid concept to the extreme. that is, it is customized one-to-one. i think the great thing about the idea is that it has captured the imagination, partly in its labeling, partly because it's in new york city close to where the media is located. i think time magazine picked it as one of maybe the best education idea of the year, the decade, i don't know what it was. but at any rate, it's

publicizing this concept. i think it's very important and there is lots of those around the country, not media markets, that you don't hear about. but that is the kind of thing that we're talking about for the future of. >> are the cost savings built into it? >> it set up to be cost neutral. part of the idea of getting disapproved is that, new york city is a very political place. they had used exactly the number of teachers, exactly the same cause and so forth. >> and a thompson from the schwab foundation. this is a question for john chubb. you've given your view of the future, and the necessity of online learning. we've heard mention of open-souropen-source and you mentioned playlist. can you talk about the role and he sort of enlightened self interest of the textbook copies, what they're doing to move us toward them what they might be doing to hinder it? >> are you sure it's enlightened?

[laughter] >> i don't work for a textbook company. i compete with them, so this is -- i'm speaking from a position that i am looking at this. the textbook companies, i think there to say the textbook companies are concerned about the evolution of this model. textbook companies have always supplemented their textbooks with instructional software, dvds and so forth, that frankly, anybody an education which area they generally do not get used. but these are very big, very successful companies that are tonka figure out how to deal with the. i wouldn't say that there are impediments, but i would say that if you look at the online offerings, they are largely by small startup companies that are not as a burden by the history of past investments and business

practices. so right now most of the innovation in online instruction is occurring outside of this, outside of those companies. and if you read clay christiansen's book, disrupting class, clay has written about disruptive technologies and a host of industries and how that's happened. and more often than not, the existing, the existing dominant players in an industry are not the ones that introduced the innovation, the innovations come from small players who inject these new approaches around the edges. so in public education, if you're a regular kid, you're likely not to see much technology. but if you dropped out or you have a special education needs, or you know, you have some other extraordinary need, that's where it's being used. and so i think that what you're likely to see is the technology is not going to come through the big textbook companies, but it's going to come around the edges.

>> okay. go ahead. >> hi. i have questions that are related with regard to the cost that is there a strategic plan with regard, if we're going to let the i.t. protocol, that it's going to be rolled out x. number of years, and if you're going to do that why not take it to the next that further where you do the webcasting if you have a master teacher, that if you are doing ap, that all those high school students that are in the program can be subjected to that class, maybe two to three times a week, and then the other remainder of the week is working on that instruction with the regular teacher in the classroom. i think that would be a much better way of saving cost. but also introducing kids to what they can expect when i go out in the future. >> stiegler john? >> quickly, i love the idea. i think one of the things we need to do is look at teachers who are the most effective. there's an initiative called

three x. initiative that goes to this idea that teachers that are in the top quintile of performance, that we should take those teachers and greatly increase their audience in various kinds of, to use john sturm, synchronous and asynchronous ways. on one way is through broadcasting their great teaching through many more students. it just makes sense. teachers that are exciting, engaging, should reach more students and fewer students should be subject to unengaging and ineffective teaching. and technology can have a huge role on that. >> and it's also possible with technology today for these great presentations to be more than lectures. that is simply where kids are passively watching a presentation that they can be interactive, and it can be any environment so that kids can click in to answer questions, and also, every college lecture hall today, there is clicker technology. so to help keep the kids

engaged, professors ask questions of every kid has a click of. they click the answer, immediately the responses come up there and if it is well used and provides information on where the kids are getting it or not getting it. all that can happen on my pixel of 100 kids are logged in to a lesson, as the teacher is presenting he or she can ask questions, kids can respond online. the teacher can use that as a point of discussion. this is so much more than the old days where -- i mean, mr. wizard was phenomenal but imagine if mr. wizard could interact with the kids. >> this also, it isn't just a question of cost savings. the scalability idea is there. this gives you a basis for paying those teachers more. the more custom, you know, if you're a lawyer you make more money if you have more customers, right? that are only exposed to 20 kids. if they're exposed to 300 kids

and that can be a foundation for differentiating the as will. >> i think it's important that when we think about technology, we think about technology very, very broad terms. a textbook is a great piece of technology and i think we have to think of it that way. that what we need i think so desperately is to have an entrepreneurial sector that promotes the development of new intellectual property for schools to test. so that teachers are debating themselves of transformative technology. that technology could be better assesses that it could be better lesson plans. these new organizations that are compiling great lessons so that every teacher, it's a kind of man is that right now every teacher has to reinvent the lesson would introduce some traction for the first time. you're going to have the distribution of the qualities of lesson and most are going to be mediocre and some are going to be great. why not allow all teachers to avail themselves to that part of the poker. i think that we need to think of

i.t. as very, very broad and not just instructional technology per se. >> i wonder when technology based interactivity is going to take over the archaic art form called the washington conference? i didn't have time for one question from back there somewhere. go ahead, jack. >> high. i'm with national youth employment coalition and i was hoping you'd speak a little bit about how these hybrid bundles or new way of thinking about educating students relates to dropout prevention and recovery and helping students who may be off track to graduate get back on track, and it kind of relates to what someone mentioned earlier maybe about moving away from see time as a requirement for getting students credit and how that might interface with some of the technology you are talking about. >> just very briefly, there's probably more experienced in

that sector actually than any other sector with the new uses of instructional technology. when it comes to helping kids graduate from high school, kids fail classes all the time for a host of reasons, and in districts are looking for ways for them to make them up. if they have to make them up the following semester or the following year, then it cuts into the time that they have to take the additional credits that they need. if they tried to do it in summer school, teachers are trying to cram a year or semester's worth of work in four weeks and longer days and that doesn't work very well. but with instructional technology, let's assume that you have -- let's assume there's been a failure of an algebra two class or something like that. let's assume that algebra to include 180 days of instruction, or 180 blesses.

online assessment can be given to identify what students strengths and weaknesses are, what they've mastered, what they have failed to master, customize the course, perhaps 75 lessons or whatever the number might be once they master those lessons that it would demonstrate that they have mastered the course but it's not about seat time that has worked exceptionally well. in the area of dropouts, kids drop out of school for a host of reasons. some of which include just being uncomfortable or unsuccessful in the traditional environment that you can create an environment where kids can work and make mistakes in privacy of an online environment, one on one tutoring from a teacher online speech and will leave us now to go live to an elementary school in northern virginia outside of washington, d.c.. president obama just beginning to speak. >> graham road elementary school. one of virginia's finest

schools. and here at graham road, they are using an abode of approach is to provide effective teaching to all their students. and that's something that all of american schools have to do. as i said before, there are any number of actions we can take as a nation to enhance our competitiveness and secure better future for our people, not a few of them will make as much of a difference as improving the way we educate our sons and daughters. offering our children an outstanding education is one of our most fundamental, perhaps our most fundamental, obligation as a country. whether we meet that obligation, not only reflect who we are as americans, it will shape our future as a nation. countries without education today will outcompete us to our. i refuse to let that happen on my watch. it's good at doing the same old thing will not get the job done for our kids. or for america or for our future. so when i took office i asked arne duncan to work with the state and local school districts

to take on business as usual in our education system. and that's how the race to the top competition was born last july. it a national competition among states to improve our schools. over the past few months, we've seen such a positive response that today, i'm announcing our intention to make a major new investment, more than $1.3 billion in this year's budget to continue the race to the top. and this support will not only reaffirm our commitment to states engage in serious reform, it will also expand the race to the top competition to include local school district that also committed to change. so innovative districts like the one in texas whose reform efforts are being stymied by state decision-makers will soon have the chance to earn funding to help them pursue those reforms. after months of planning and preparation, the first round of race to the top applications is coming to today. and it's a sign of how much states and schools believe this initiative will benefit in.

they were expecting significant more asked states to apply and receive a grand. here's how race to the top works. last year we set aside more than $4 billion to improve our schools. one of the largest investment in reforms in our nations history. but we didn't just hand this money out to states that wanted it. we challenge them to compete for it. and it's the competitive nature of this initiative that we believe helps make it so effective that we laid out a few key criteria and said if you meet these tests, we will reward you by helping you reform your schools. hearst, we encourage states to adopt more challenging standards that will actually prepare our kids for college and their careers. would also encourage schools to adopt a better assessment, not just one size fits all approach is, to measure what our kids know and what they are able to do. second, we merged schools and school district to make sure we have excellent principles leading our schools and great

teachers leaving our classes. by promoting rigorous plans to develop and evaluate teachers and principals and by rewarding their success. third, we urge states to use cutting-edge data systems to track a child's progress throughout the academic career. to link that shows progress to their teachers so we know what's working and what's not working in the classroom. fourth, we encourage states to show a stronger commitment to turning around some other lowest performing schools. and even before states have received a single dime of taxpayer money, many of them have committed to instituting important reforms to better position themselves for a race to the top grant. 48 states have now joined a nationwide partnership to develop a common set of rigorous career ready standers in reading and math. wisconsiwisconsin has enacted legislation permit schools to link student achievement to the performance of teachers and principals. in illinois, louisiana, tennessee, california, we've

seen changes in laws where policy to let charter schools expand and 60. these are public schools with more independents that are formed by teachers, parents, and community members. so by rewarding somebody states submitting applications today, by extending the race to the top four states, by launching race to the top among school districts and by applying the principles of race to the top two other federal programs will build on this success. we're going to raise the bar for all our students and take bigger steps towards closing the achievement gap that denies so many students, especially black and latino students, a fair shot at their dreams. we will open up opportunity, evenly and equitably across our education system. we will develop a culture of innovation and excellence in our public schools. and we will reward success that is replicated across the country. these are some of the principles that drive race to the top. these are some of the principles that will drive my forthcoming

budget. these steps will not trestle our education system overnight. not every school is going to be graham demetri. but that will help put us on a path to raise the quality of education to prepare our children to succeed in their lives and their careers and secure america's success for the 21st century. that is a goal my administration will be focused on achieving in the months and years to come. thanks very much, everybody. >> and president obama speaking at an elementary school outside of washington, d.c., calling for an extra 1.35 billion in education grants. money would be in addition to 4.3 billy and competitive set-asides in economic standers program. first of those rewards to be handed out in coming months. this has been live coverage here on c-span2

>> on a recent trip to afghanistan, freelance journalist david ax observe military observation as bagram airfield. >> bagram is about a 45 minute drive from kabul, just outside the city. the former soviet air base that's been converted into the major nato logistical hub for the whole war effort. so pretty much all the supplies and people that come in to afghanistan pass-through bagram. and they either stay there in the kabul area or they get sent out on the ground convoys, or more often to airplanes and helicopters that deliver the stuff to their final destinati destination, either sending them out to the sort of secondary hub of kandahar for dissertation to the south, or feeding them out to the forward operating bases in the northeast.

this is a hub of activity for all the airfreight that comes in. to help develop the region and help bring security to the region and help bring the governance to the region, which is the three key elements we're trying to bring to the afghan people so that they can sustain a future of freedom, free of the taliban. when i take a c-130 and one airdrop, to a village that just got devastated by a flood that took out their crops and took out some of their homes, killed some of the people, when we go out there and bring in goods and services like food and water and material to rebuild, that wins the hearts and minds. they trust us. when they have a child who gets hurt, you know, just the other day a child fell off the road from one of the villages, we took our helicopter and pick up that child and brought into the hospital and healed that jeb.

they will for ever trust us and know that we are here to help. when i take my aircraft in all the fighters here, and we go out to a village that is, you know, being intimidated by the taliban, and by our presence over the air and our folks on the village, those people trust us and we have won their hearts and minds because they are no longer intimidate or coerce by an enemy who is trying to dominate them in a way that is very oppressive and violent. so these are ways that this base wins the hearts and minds of the people, therefore winds accountability. >> you have a fast, some are planes looking round for suspicious activity. you got aircraft that fly close airs support mission. so in ground troops get into a

sticky situation with the taliban, they call those guys in, swooping, drop bombs. so they surveilled and when asked, swooping in and drop a bomb. so why is close air support important to the overall mission in afghanistan? >> overall, gives us a distinctive advantage that it gives us an ins guy that we can use to gain certain vantage points that a lot of the guys on the ground may not be able to do. they are kind of stuck in a valley, they can see on what's on the other side of the valley. we can help provide sometimes that looked. additionally, the firepower if required that would bring to the fight, a lot of times is decisive enough to help our guys be able to disengage. so it's kind of that combination of an increase technology we have it gives us an advantage as well as the firepower that is required again to decisively allow our guys to withdraw. >> the rules of engagement are getting tighter with less risk

of civilian tragedies. how does that affect your job? >> it really doesn't affect her job that we are here to support the ground command. if the ground commander decides the situation dictates of the use or not to be used, you know, that is ultimately his call and where passionate we are there to support them. so following the changing it doesn't affect what we do. we bring them onto the flight. we bring our potters will. we bring our eyes in the skies that were there to provide that support that it has an effect is really at all. >> this is the sniper advanced targeting pod. this is a primarily the center that we use in the theater for our weapon systems officers, primarily to look at the grand and be able to get the distinct advantage to the ground commander to be able to see potentially think he cannot see. this allows us to track any and all suspected people that we may need to look at. we have been able to track vehicles, people, look at buildings from a fairly good distance away. this is our primary weapon, if

you will, in this fire right now because it gives us the ability to look at the grand and provide some of that surveillance and reconnaissance to the ground commander that he may not be able to do. additionally, with its advanced targeting pod, we're able to downlink the picture that we're looking at to the air controller on the ground so that all of us in the kilted able to get on the same page and have a common operating picture so that we get into that were either targeting the correct things or that we're looking at the right things to provide the ground commander the information he needs. >> was the event of having two people? >> it allows a division of duties to one person can primarily be focused on flying aircraft and looking outside, meanwhile, the other person is able to focus almost exclusively on the targeting use any other sensors in order to find enemy and support the ground commander. >> the guy in the front lines, the guy in the back uses the

palm? >> basically used all the sensors available to help find things were looking for on the ground and even when it comes time to stop dropping off we both play a role in getting the bombs off airplanes. >> do you speak directly to the troops on the ground or do you do have some sort intermediate? >> usually we have a conduit to the army or marines, the joint air controller, the jtac if that's primary who we as an air force fighter talked to on the ground. >> this is a 500-pound joint direct attack munition it is a gps guided satellite weapon. basically the technology that we have with this weapon of allows us to target it in many different ways. one of the ways we use it in afghanistan is due to a lot of times the build up and makeup of the structures around where we may be targeting the enemy. we're able to set the fuse on the spot to potential explode a little underground. what that allows us to do is minimize damages to the

infrastructure as well as damage to anything around the target area we do not want to damage. ultimately we want to leave as much as possible for the afghan people. so does bob, that technology really allows us to minimize civilian casualties and damage. >> this is the 20-millimeter gun, it is employed more more everyday in afghanistan. what it allows us to do is precisely target with a very local while damage, very small radius of the bolts where the bullets are hitting. it allows us to precisely get into exactly where we want to hit and not worry too much about any collateral damage around the. this is becoming one of the weapons of choice in this the. >> is a tough use this weapon secrets it can be challenging a

special at the airspeed and the angle at the grand. it has about a 2-degree up can so we have to point at the ground very significantly to do this. however, it does allow us to get in close to not only friendly troops if they are in close contact with the enemy, as well as to precisely targeting where we want to with severely minimizing collateral damage. >> carry our 9-millimeter weapon year and a bunch of other items, radios and various things we may need any event we end up isolated on the ground. we have our harness is what we'd hoped up to the aircraft with and hook the parachute had is built into the seat in the event of an ejection this is what's going to attack just to the parachute. finally, we have our jesus here, this is to help us with some of the gravitational forces that we will see in flight when are going pretty fast and try to turn. a lot of what we use a fork in

the cast environment, when we sustained the most g4 sister in the air to ground shooting the gun on the ground like a talked about before. then after we shoot the gun pulling up away from the grant is when we get some of those g. forces. this helps us along with some of the other physical workout stuff and similar anti-g. maneuvers we don't have -- so we don't pass out any air from the g. forces. doesn't happen too much in afghanistan but is more of an air to air combat thing. but we wear them anyway. >> this is the standard fidelity to go see in many of the other air force fighters to include the strike eagle. some additions we have to this one, we have a built-in light to use at night. as well as, i will show you here in the second, but the nitrogen dog is attached to the top of our helmet, that is one of our best weapons that we use here at night to see the ground.

>> for some of our night visions, are actually all of our night missions will take these night visions out. what these allows to amplify the light that is already in theater. the only sort of drawback to these is they can get kind of heavy after four to five hours. so the way this will set is similar to that. on a guys head. and basically looking through those allows us to use any sort of like some grand, any gunfire, any traces, anything like that. a lot of time it'll be our first clue that something is going down on the ground, as helping us to clear for any other airplanes or threats that are out there. >> have you had a chance to interact with the guys you support on a grand? >> absolutely. a lot of time to be here at bagram, we get people who are

redeployed or resting or a lot of times when her mission is complete you'll stop by the squad and, talk to us and usually thank us for the support we have given them. or give us feedback on how maybe we can do better the next time. very rewarding. >> sometimes we go out there and do nothing but search locations and then it's pretty slow pace that there's other times where things really pick up. it's kind of a few hours i'll buy five minutes of here you could say. >> tell me about your most memorable mission? >> i had a couple of. i would say one is there were our guys trying to see a location and they're taking a lot of small arms fire from the hill. so they're trying to get out of this location. there getting shot. so they had me drop a bomb on the hillside to stop the firing. and once the bomb hit, any

activity ceased and they're able to get out of there. so it was definitely a rewarding mission. another one i was watching friendly, just kind of a watch when an ied went off where i was watching. the whole potential of their all on foot were hit by this ied. so we quickly went down there and we did a show of force which is a lot of what we do is let the bad guys know we are here now. we saw what you're doing or we're going to kill you. our showa presence made him stop. lee, and our guys were all able to get out of there and that evening i was able to go visit the guys hit by the ied in hospital. they all told me our show of force was more scary to them because they didn't know we're coming. is hard being allowed in being there. >> do you often get to visit the people you support? >> this is unique because they happen to come to the hospital here. yeah, if i'd been able to, i have deftly done that.

>> nobody in the hearts and minds of afghans hinges on not killing innocent civilians. how do you emphasize protecting the civilian population while you're doing airstrikes? >> that's a very good question. and the answer is, to do everything within our power, to make sure that the enemy who was trying to draw us into this dilemma by using innocent people as human shields, to never allow them to draw us into that dilemma. in other words, the enemy will fight from a village. you know, they will literally bring women and children in to a house or a cloth, the culture, and shoot from that knowing that the women and children will keep them safe. so what we do is we do everything in our power to not engage, to avoid those situations where there could be innocent people involved.

>> president obama, rightly so, and general mcchrystal, brought a new way of understanding what's going on here. so that business as usual with american way of fighting a war, changes. and it changes such that we take more care to make sure not one innocent person dies. if it's at all possible. >> i have to ask this. apparently fighter pilots like to grow mustaches. why is that? >> i guess it goes back to like the vietnam era, but used to always grow mustaches and there's the story one guy shaved his mustache and the next day got shot down. so he grew it back again, and he wasn't going to shaded. shady, got shot down a second i. and then from then on he never

cut his mustache. >> what if a guy can't go a mustache to? that's like me. >> i actually saw a c-130 crew this morning wearing fake mustaches. it was a woman. [laughter] >> freelance journalist david axe was in afghanistan in october and november. he produced several programs with his and. in the search box the upper right hand corner of our homepage type axp. >> look at the capitol this morning here in washington, d.c.. we will go to the floor of the u.s. senate for what's expected to be a quick pro forma session at the top of the hour. in the meantime, yesterday was the martin luther king holiday and former secretary of state colin powell spoke at a citizenship ceremony here i following his remarks, 81 people took the citizenship oath, also

known as the oath of allegiance. this is 10 minutes. >> good afternoon. my name is sure i'm the director of united states citizenship and immigration services. and i represent the women and men who are here today and around the world who have worked so hard to help make this day possible. in a minute, a unique individual will stand before you to share his thoughts about this special day in your lives and in the lives of our country. he was our nation's 65th secretary of state, the 12th chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the national security adviser to president ronald reagan, and the recipient of numerous military and civilian awards, including two presidential medals of freedom, the president's citizens medal, and the congressional gold medal. in his 35 years of service in the united states army, he rose to the rank of four-star

general. general colin powell's brief walk from the seat on our stage to this lectern represents a great journey, one that stretches far back in time and also reaches into a better tomorrow that he helped make possible. it is a journey that speaks of the power of character and hard work, and of our nation's promise of opportunity. it is a journey that in this country began decades ago when his parents arrived as immigrants, like you and me. it is my privilege to welcome general colin powell, who offers us today with his presence. [applause] >> thank you very much for your very kind words, and i wish you all the best as you continue with the important work that you will be doing for those trying

to reach our shores, and especially for those in haiti who are suffering today. it's a great pleasure to be with you all today, and especially pleased to be here to celebrate the 81st birthday of dr. martin luther king jr., as we fittingly refresh our nation with 81 new citizens. not only citizens of the united states, that as a citizen of the state that i happen to live in now, and is my home, the state of virginia. i know that we all have on our minds this afternoon the tragedy that occurred in haiti last week, and our hearts and our prayers go out to those who have suffered terrible losses, and who are now in need of our help. i am proud of the response that the american government and international community has extended to the people of haiti. but much more needs to be done. it will take a long time to restore stability and to get

haiti act up on its feet. all of us have an opportunity to help in this regard. by donating money to the many relief efforts that are at work, all of these efforts working so hard to help the haitian people. our new citizens, i know, will do what they can to help those in need. dr. martin luther king jr. was the leader of the forces for freedom and equality in america's second civil war. racism, segregation and the oppression of african-americans did not end with the end of the first civil war in 1865, and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. in the decades that followed segregation, conducts lavery, and the separation of races was forced by law and by practice. slowly over the long years after the civil war, the inconsistency of these policies with the

sacrifices made in the civil war, and a clear mandate in our declaration of independence, that all men are created equal forced america to look into a mirror to see that the ugly image of america that was in that mirror did not reflect the america we wanted. did not live up to the dreams that our founding fathers had. we needed another civil war, this time not a violent one on the battlefields of virginia, but a war of ideas, a war of values, a war of protest to shadow that mirror, to shatter the image and to create a new reflection of our hopes for a more perfect union. revolutions need leaders. leaders prepared as our founding fathers were. to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to achieve a goal. there were many such leaders in our second civil war, but none were greater than dr. martin luther king jr.

dr. king was a man for all seasons. and man for all people. the dream he had for america was a dream he had for the entire world. in the shadows of the oppressed people of the world, anywhere his name was spoken, light was shining. anywhere his words were repeated, a prayer was answered. anywhere his beliefs were studied, hope began to grow. he was a hero for the ages. few men, few women, have ever had such power for good. a national holiday that we're celebrating today is a great tribute to dr. king. but he would be prouder, still, to know that this holiday has become a day of service as we can see in the activities that are taking place outside this library in the streets of washington, d.c.. under his leadership, the second civil war was one. americas is a so much better place, a place of tolerance, a place of diversity, that in a

few minutes we welcome all of you. were he hears today, however, he would tell us there was still more to do. we must continue to struggle until every american has the potential to live his or her own dream. the 81 candidates before us today are marching to their dream. they are about to participate in a remarkable ceremony that is remarkable because there is no other country on the face of the earth where such a diverse group of men and women, natives of faraway lands, could come together to swear their allegiance to a new nation that will become their home forever. we see before us three dozen such individuals, all of whom in a few moments will become american citizens. there is no other country in the world that is so opened its arms to embrace the dreams and aspirations of humankind.

america is a nation of nations. we touch every nation and every nation touches us in return. this is our history. this is our tradition. this is the source of our strength. this is what makes us such a vibrant country and a leader of the world that wants to be freed. americas greatness has been achieved by waves of immigrants who have come to this land over the past 400 years. and america has been enriched by that house, the coulters, the skills, the languages and the values that came here over the centuries in the person of our immigrant citizens. it is this joining together of diverse people that has also made is so durable and resilient as a society. just as a bridge cable gets its strength from its many strands of wire woven together for a common purpose. and in pursuit of our common purpose, you were not asked to abandon your origin nor ignore the ties of affinity that you

have to your native land. you will keep your roots, and from them, give nourishment to this new land of yours. nowhere else on earth can this miracle of assimilation earwitness with such vibrancy and profusion. almost 90 years ago, a short little man stepped off a banana boat in the port of philadelphia. he was a labor, and he hadn't even finished high school. his name was luther powell. a few years later, a short beautiful lady named mod kept off a somewhat nicer ship and she stepped off at ellis island. she was also a jamaican. and she had a high school degree. luther and maude came to america because it was a place of hope. a place of opportunity, a place where your dreams and your willingness to work hard, were

your only limitations. it wasn't a perfect place then, as we all know, but it was so much better than the place they had to leave, not that they didn't love it, but they needed economic opportunity. and they found it here. luther and maude met each other, and they got married in new york city. and they had a wonderful marriage, until they both met their fates and went on to live with god. it was fun to watch them, as i grew up, this immigrant family of mind. and it was fun when they got into arguments with each other. and i would watch and smile as my mother would end the argument by whispering under her breath, him who never finished high school. [laughter] spirit that was her ultimate putdown of my father. and it was amusing to me and my sister and all of my cousins. they had two children. one who became very, very successful as a teacher, and one who went on to be a soldier.

in one generation, the fondest hopes and dreams of my immigrant parents were met and surpassed, and so it has been over 200 years and glorious cycles, another of which begins this afternoon here in this library, named for a man, who is smiling down on the affirmation, this affirmation of america's purpose. the oath you are about to take will require you to assume the responsibilities of citizenship here you will be asked to support and defend the constitution of the united states and to renounce your allegiance to your native land. beyond these requirements of the oath, there are other obligations that come with citizenship. to raise strong families and children who will become our next citizens leaders, builders and keepers of the flame of liberty. to work hard to support -- >> we leave the last minute of colin powell to go live now to the floor of the u.s. senate for a pro forma session.

the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the presiding officer: the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c, january 19, 2010. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby air.int the honorable benjamin . ca signed: robert c. byrd, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 10:00 a.m. january 20, store.

>> "washington journal"store. continues. host: peter deshazo is at >> host: peter is the director for the americas program at the center for strategic a this is a headline from monday's "new york times." u.s. role in haiti after the crisis. and it >> host: how do you strike the right balance? >> guest: the right balance is giving enough support to one the haitian people and two the

haitian government that they can eventually handle the affairs of their country on their own without being overbearing. it's a difficult challenge. you're standing up basically a country that has started over and over again to try to build the most basic institutions in government. and to build an economy that's able to employ people and to produce the very high levels of poverty. it needs a lot of help but at the same time the haitians are a proud people. and want to be in charge of their own destiny to the extent that that is possibility. -- possible. >> host: how does the united states go about not being seen as occupying that country? >> guest: i think it's a matter -- it's a matter of partnership not only with the haitian government but also with the international community. in this ' the united nations stabilization mission on the ground has been playing an important role in helping to

develop the institutions of haiti, to provide security, to get the economy jump-started since 2004. no country alone is going to be able to shoulder all of the international burden or responsibility of helping haiti. it needs to be a communal effort. so it's the u.s. and other countries in partnership with the haitian government. >> host: who should take the role, though? should it be one country or should it be the u.n.? >> guest: i think the u.n. -- the u.n. is on the ground. and they are the key institution in terms of providing the stability and the basis for reconstructing for developing haiti's institutions. the united states plays a big role. it's the largest bilateral donor. it's traditionally been. so the u.s. role is very important. but again it's one player in an international effort. >> host: why has the united

states been by large the largest donor to haiti? >> guest: it's been historically the case. the united states has been for better or worse very strongly involved in haitian affairs. since the -- well, the 19th, early 20th century. obviously, it's a country that's very close to us. it's part of the caribbean community. and there's a very large haitian diaspora living in the united states which is a very important factn here's a piece this morning by duane hickman in "usa today." haitians suffer through a troubled past and an uncertain future.

>> guest: well, there are a lot of unfortunate stories in terms of the relationship of united states and haiti in those days. and u.s. policy in the caribbean, latin america in general at that time. it's highly ironic because the slave uprising that brought haiti into being in 1804 was one of the causes of the louisiana purchase. when napoleon had exhausted his funds and needed more money he sold louisiana to the united states to raise money for his

armies to be able to hold on to the colony in haiti. >> host: our guest before serving in the americas program for the strategic and international studies was a member of the career u.s. foreign service serving as deputy assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs. and deputy u.s. permanent representative to the organization of american states. what was the -- how long were you at the state department? >> guest: i was at the state department for many years. i'm a career officer. i was in the foreign service for 24 years. >> host: and how has the policy toward haiti specifically evolved during your time at the state department? >> guest: well, the policy evolved towards latin america in general from the time of the cold war framework and concern soviet encroachment in latin america. to a situation now to where

support for democracy and support for development poverty reduction are the key factors in u.s. policy in the region. as well as security concerns. >> host: how in your role as state department deputy secretary for western hemisphere, if you were in that role today, how would you get the attention of the president and the administration when as the "new york times" notes that in 2009 much of the administration's energy was focused on afghanistan, pakistan and iran. with little time on the western hemisphere? >> guest: well, this is something that throughout the americas is a constant topic that the united states especially at the beginning of administrations underscores the importance of the western hemisphere to u.s. policy. and then gets distracted in other areas where there are very overwhelming policy interests and where we have large numbers of troops stationed. or where there's an enormous

investment in terms of u.s., u.s. resources. but in the case of haiti, the u.s. support for haiti has been gradually increasing in past years. partly as a reflection of the success, however, limited but notable success that the haitian government and the u.n. mission is having ird.n >> host: this is a figure on the front page of the globe in mail this morning. 10 billion is the estimate projected, the cost to rebuild that country. what do you make of that figure? >> guest: it's difficult to throw out a figure, a figure that large. clearly, the human tragedy is of a very large dimension. and the physical destruction is very great. however, you're starting from a point that was not particularly highly developed to begin with.

but in very much in a sense you're starting over in many areas of port-au-prince. it's hard to put a figure on the overall needs. but clearly needs are great. >> host: what will be the impact of 1.5 million left homeless? and how does the united states and other countries grapple with that? >> guest: if that's the figure, it's going to be an enormous challenge. housing in haiti in general is not of good quality. there are people leaving port-au-prince for other areas of the country that have been unaffected. perhaps that will add to -- a new dimension to the development needs. indeed, a lot of people are in port-au-prince because of the inability to make a living outside the country because of the very difficult environmental situation. with erosion. with unproductive soil. there needs to be particular

attention to employment and improvements in agriculture try to move people out of the capital city if possible. but within the city housing is going to be a key element. >> host: how median age of hait0 years old. and the 54% of haitians live on less than a dollar a day and illiteracy is at 44%. >> guest: you can look at any of the key areas and find a glaring need for improvement. be it security. be it education. health. housing. infrastructure. governance. all of these are areas that require considerable inputs. and they basically have to be dealt with almost at the same time. you can't do just one of them. you can't put all of your eggs in one basket. you've got to take a broad approach.

starting perhaps with security and dealing with the immediate crisis. but quickly improving government and the ability of the haitian government to deliver services and then across-the-board looking at all of these important health and social indicators. which need to be dealt with. >> host: we're talking about the u.s. role in rebuilding haiti. tupelo, mississippi, helena, a republican, you're the first phone call. >> caller: good morning. i watch every morning. one time trying to figure out how the united states is going to pay for this when this country is broke. it doesn't seem -- there's nothing wrong with giving your money to the red cross. donations going to the red cross. but i don't think billions should be sent to that country because who is going to be taking care of that.

watching over that money and making sure that it's going to the infrastructure and rebuilding. i know it's devastating there. i've seen pictures of it. [inaudible] >> caller: before george bush did and with katrina. however, i have one more thing that has nothing to do with haiti. george bush is not president anymore. so why does obama keep trying to outdo so to speak what george bush should have supposedly have done? he did not cause katrina. but if george bush had been president, he would have caused this earthquake. >> host: we'll leave it there. and touch on the budget issue she brought up. how can the united states pay for this?

how much when you were at the state department -- how much of the state department's budget went to the western hemisphere in general? can you give us a ballpark figure? >> guest: it's not so much of the budget of the united states. but it's looking overall at the u.s. budget. last year the u.s. bilateral support to haiti was in the range of about $250, $275 million. that will probably -- certainly go up because of the cost of the -- of the immediate emergency support the united states is giving. but more importantly, when in 2004, aristide left the country and there was a change in government. there was a big effort to enlist the international community through the coordination of the world bank through a major donor's meeting. to pledge more than a billion

dollars in additional short-term support for haiti. and this is probably what's going to be needed here. in terms of the united states, the u.s. will be an important contributor. but it won't be the only one. it's not going to do this alone. it can't do this alone. there has to be an important effort by the development banks, by the europeans, by the private sector in helping to bring haiti back. soinat and international effort. >> host: front page of the "philadelphia enquirer" sourced by the associated press it says haiti at a glance. >> host: >> host: bill on the independent line, you're next. >> caller: yeah, good morning.

i hope your guest would spend a little bit of time talking about the bush policy of supporting a coup in haiti in 2004. my thought is that haiti is not the poorest and the least-developed country in the western hemisphere. by accident. in fact, it's by design. and the design is american policy there. after we got finished sending in the marines, we sent in the dictators. papa doc and so-called baby doc. we supported the ruling of classes. the really wealthy in haiti against the poor. and then when aristide came in, a truly democratically elected leader, he was overthrown. and he was overthrown with cia involvement.

and cia is the american governmental involvement. and so that cycle of continuing to oppress really the poor people of haiti goes on and on and on. and i don't really understand why so-called experts don't address that really directly. >> host: bill, going forward in haiti, what do you think the u.s. role should be? >> caller: well, i don't know. i mean, it's really such a mess. you know, you're thrg you're throwing an earthquake at that country. after decades and decades of abuse and the problem is -- you know, it's so sad to say it, but it has been american abuse. it's a client state. the sweat shops were open under the clinton administration. i mean, there's no administration that has clean hands on this. >> host: okay, bill, peter

deshazo. >> guest: i agree with your statement that the governments of haiti have not been of the highest quality. part of the problem has been lack of effective governance in haiti. and that's been a factor for many years. i disagree with your point of view that the united states is the -- is the responsible element for haiti's ills. there have been episodes in which u.s. policy especially -- especially in years back, decades back was not helpful. and certainly not helpful to the cause of democracy in haiti. but that, i think, changed substantially -- the clinton administration the supported aristide strongly in a return to democracy. aristide had a very mixed record when he was basically forced out

or left the country in 2004 as a result of civil conflict that was brewing. the united states supported the interim government and the newly elected government of the president as well as with the united nations. that support has brought about some improvements in haiti especially in the past three or four years. the economy has begun to grow again. the haitian national police was beginning to be stood up. these don't sound like great achievements, but in the haitian context, they are. and they were very positive. and there was a sense of very guarded optimism that haiti was beginning to move forward finally. but what's needed clearly is a government in haiti that's able to function. that is democratic. and to the extent that it can be.

it's important that the haitian people have the wherewithal to be able to elect their own officials. but that these officials be held accountable. that governance be of higher quality. and the international community can help in that regard. >> host: west palm beach, florida, kathleen on our line for democrats. kathleen, are you there? >> caller: yes, i am. >> host: good morning. >> caller: my question is -- my question is, what is the government going to do about the infrastructure? >> host: what is the government going to do about infrastructure in haiti. >> guest: the haitian government, the u.s. government -- it's a problem that everybody really has to deal with. and it's a problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. part of the problem with the relief effort is the lack of infrastructure, the fact that the port in port-au-prince is not able to receive the aid. the airport has been damaged.

and also the general infrastructure of roads -- the infrastructure of sewage, electricity -- all of that has been gravely damaged. and it wasn't all that strong to begin with. these are areas that require a lot of investment moving forward. they're important for health. they're important for the economy. they're important for development. and they're important for showing that the haitian government in the end is able to deliver for the people of haiti. so all around it's going to have to be an important goal for the international community and for the haitian government. >> host: what is your reaction to the pictures that we're seeing in the front page of the new yorkers, specifically. fleeing the did he have administration of mass graves being filled. a packed bus leaving port-au-prince. >> guest: people are trying to

leave the city for a number of reasons. i think housing is certainly going to be one of the -- one of the issues. they may have relatives in other areas where they can be taken in. i think as the -- as the levels of assistance begin to ramp up, as more food is available, as more temporary housing is in place, there won't be such a pressure for people to leave the city. but again the development of haiti is more than the development of port-au-prince. and the need for a strengthened agricultural sector is very essential. and so there have been to be investments around the country. and not just in the capital city. >> host: sebring, florida, john on the republican line. >> caller: yeah. hold on to me until i get done, okay? >> host: all right. >> caller: there's 200 and 300

million people in the united states and millions are illegal and 270 million are trying on support them. the schools and the infrastructure in this country are broke. the whole country is broke. they're going to borrow money -- they already borrowed $100 million from china to pay them down there. and plus, all the ships and everything else is being sent in there by the government. and what about all these people -- i've heard they started sending planes in and those people got the aid and this is half price medical we'll have to take care of. >> host: john, let me read a headline to you and others from the "new york times" this morning.

>> caller: and another thing is what they need to do is 80% of them don't have jobs over there. so they need to send birth control pills instead of rebuilding their whole country. and make them stop having them babies because all they expect the government to feed them. >> host: what about the haitians coming to the united states in this effort here by the u.s. government? is that a typical thing for the u.s. government to do? is to have this radio transmitter flying over haiti

and telling people -- asking people not to come to the united states? >> guest: in the past when there had been political crises there's been out-migration to haiti to the united states and elsewhere. and this had resulted in very perilous situation for the migrants. lots of loss of life at sea. very dangerous journey. and for those reasons, the united states is urging people to stay -- to stay at home. not to try to leave the country. and abandon, you know, in a perilous sea journey. and at the same time, of course, there has to be deliver of the kind of aid and relief effort from the international community that will convince haitians that things are going to get better and that they should -- they should -- they should stay put. but in terms of the u.s. contribution to the reconstruction of haiti and to -- and to foreign aid in

general, this is -- u.s. gives aid to other countries because it's in the best interest of the united states. there's a certain amount of altruism. there's certainly considerable concern about the human dimension, the terrible tragedy in haiti. but foreign aid and foreign assistance is meant to advance the interests of the united states. and to have a very poor and unstable neighbor like haiti is not in the best u.s. interest. and so a long-term goal should be to help haiti to recover from this terrible tragedy and then to move forward to achieve greater levels of stability, democracy, and economic development. so that haitians are able to have jobs and live in their own country. >> host: haiti is around 700 miles away from the united states. is that why it's in our best interest to have a secure country? is it because of its proximity?

why is it? >> guest: it's partly proximity. but we've seen from other places in the world. if there are areas in extreme turmoil where governments are not effective, then there are other kinds of threats that can in the end affect the united states. international crime. drug trafficking. instability. and in this case the terrible human dimension, the terrible human tragedy generally in the americas, the threat of famine or of upheaval is not that great. but in the case of haiti right now, the human dimension is extraordinarily important. >> host: wichita falls, texas, aaron on the independent line. good morning. >> caller: good morning. good morning, everybody. >> host: good morning. >> guest: good morning. >> caller: well, it's absolutely a dimension of our responsibility to be a part of this. you know, i think it's great that you emphasize on the fact that it is a coalition. and we are kind of digging with

a shovel right now as far as, you know, the history of why we're involved with this country. and what happened in the past. and our interests there. and it's really kind of selfish and look, hey, it's in america's best interest to do this or that. it's actually an opportunity to finally get a chance to be a leader in the world. and be the forefront of what america really stands for. is helping other people, you know? and let's do that. send medical teams in there. let's get people help. you know, i see this every day in the emergency room. people that are poor. people that are this. they have their stories. after 11 years you begin to realize the bigger picture here. >> host: peter, you're shaking your head? >> guest: no i agree. i agree. the image of the united states as a country that's concerned about people. that's concerned about democracy is crucial. it is absolutely essential. it's part of our -- it's part of the way we are.

and so an important element of our foreign policy is to underscore those basic values outside of the united states. in this case, again, we're responding to a very grave human need. a very large human tragedy. i think the american people have come across with an extraordinary amount of support. it's unbelievable -- i don't go anywhere without seeing someone who seems to be collecting money for haiti in lots of different venues. all of the different ngos. international organizations. i think the outpouring of support from the american people has been quite extraordinary. >> host: the newspapers this morning are reporting that red cross has collected around $103 million. about $22 million of it through their texting -- people can text the donations. >> and we'll leave this portion of "washington journal" from this morning now to go live to

an event with conservative syndicated columnist charles krauthammer. he's just come up to the podium there and he will be talking about the first year of the obama administration. this is taking place at the heritage foundation here in washington, d.c. you're watching live coverage on c-span2. the introduction is just being made. >> but also to bring greater clarity and attention that undergird freedom itself. not only in the united states but around the world. for the first lecture we asked former soviet dissident is freedom for everyone. we have heard from de soto on economic freedom. michael novak on religious freedom. john bolton on whether the united nations advances the cause of freedom. and victor david hanson on the importance of security and freedom.

advancing freedom is a major goal of the heritage foundation and an important element of all the work that we do here. in fact, tomorrow we will release in hong kong and in washington the 16th edition of the index of economic freedom. you will want to stay tuned because there is a bit of big and i'm afraid bad news in the index score for freedom in the united states. our speaker today is dr. charles krauthammer, whose remarks today may seem prescient tomorrow at our release of the index. on december 25th, he described president obama's first year in office and as i quote, the year of living fecklessly. today he will share his views on the age of obama -- most of us know dr. krauthhammer writes an internationally syndicated column for the "washington post." less known is that he's also a harvard-educated doctor who was

a chief resident psychiatry at massacumtp& hospital. in 1978, he decided to leave medical practice and he came to washington to write for the new republic. in 1980 he became a speechwriter for vice president walter mondale. and in 1985, he began writing a column for the "washington post," which we have enjoyed every week ever since. in addition to this weekly column he pens a magazine and a popular public speaker. over the years his commentary has received many honors including a pulitzer prize in 1987. his awards include the national magazine awaor essays and criticism. the first bradley prize and the award of excellence in opinion journalism.lqjdtqi p'd in 2006,s named him the most influential commentator in america. and they were definitely on to

something. it is remarkable how much charles krauthammer has contributed to the lexicon of liberty. he coined important concepts and phrases like the reagan doctrine, the unipolar moment after the fall of the berlin wall after u.s.'-+ influence an dominance and democratic realism to sum up his view of international relations since september 11th. many of us hav read his columns and found ourselves saying, yes, that's exactly right. that's because his writings is incisive. and his thinking so clear that ittist -- crystallizes his own thoughts. he's the thinker of the a-, when a moments because he gives voice of what so many of us believe. without his commitment to the truth i believe we would all be poor in thought. and also less free. thank you, charles, for honoring

us today with your thoughts for the sixth margaret thatcher freedom launch. please welcome charles krauthammer. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much. thank you for that kind introduction. i feel when i hear my checkered past recalled, i really should respond. especially the mondale bit. [laughter] >> people ask me how do you do from walter mondale to fox news. the answer is easy, i was young once. [laughter] >> a long time ago. perhaps i should have subtitled my address how do you celebrate the first anniversary of the second coming. [laughter] >> yeah, that was on a slow

fuse, actually. theological conundrum that has confounded theolans for centuries. six months ago when i was thinking of my subject for this address, obama was halfway on his trajectory from divinity to morality. but now that we've arrived at the last day of his first year, arrived at precisely the point where the magic has worn off and the charisma has gone cold, where massachusetts the bluest of the blue states is even thinking of electing an obscure republican to a u.s. senate seat traditionally referred for the kennedy family and its functionaries. where the obama approval rating is at 46%. and where his disapproval rating is the highest ever a year after a president's election. there's no real need for me to

trace and explain his remarkable decline. so instead of talking about where obama's domestic agenda has brought him, i propose to speak about where his foreign policy agenda has brought us. after a year of fairly steady criticism from the right, the obama foreign policy received a second look. a wave of rather favorable consideration. after his speech in oslo accepting the nobel prize. in which he acknowledged the existence of evil, the importance of america in sustaining the peace. and the occasional necessity of waging war. this led to some enthusiastic talk about a new obama doctrine. variously described as a kind of christian realism. the tragic mindedness or a fusion of realism and idealism.

i hate to rain on this parade. but i find it hard to join in the general swooning over this newly found foreign policy sophistication. yes, it's good that we have a president who says that gandhi would not have done well against hitler. but is this really a great sort of cal advance? -- philosophical advance for a president of the united states. this is the kind of issue that you dispose of. in you're first evening session in the freshman dorm. pacifism is a serious subject for sweet adolescence or a way of life for certain eccentric sects who it must be noted survive because they live among non eccentreccentric sects and t

to keep the little sects free. and yes obama did offer a defensive war. but remember, he had just announced a 30,000-troop deployment in afghanistan. a war that was a legacy obligation he had inherited. and that he himself had declared a vital national interest. and nonetheless he so agonized with broiling his generals with adequate troop levels that it took three months of public wrestling with both his conscience and his vice president before he came to that decision. what else can the leader of any serious nation do? but defend the necessity of war. how can a man who ran as commander in chief do otherwise+ what leader of a serious nation even raises pacifism as a

serious foreign policy issue? is indeed, when a president's recognition of evil or recognition of pacifism jumps out at us as something startling and novel, that tell us much, none of it good, about the baseline from which he is operating. the woolly internationalism obama has been operating under during his first year in office. and remember, after this brief foray into the obvious, defending the necessity of war and affirming america's role in protecting the peace, obama felt compelled nonetheless to spend the second half of his nobel address returning to the liberal internationalist themes that had garnered him the fatuous prize in the first place from that underemployed jury who gave him the prize. what is the baseline?

what is the essence of the obama foreign policy? there are many places it can be found in the cairo speech. in other legs of the apology tour. but the essence was you succinctly expressed by him in his address to the u.n. general assembly. in which he laid out his understanding of what animates the international system. quote, in an era where our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum gain. no one nation can and should try to dominate another nation. no world order that elevates one nation or group above another will succeed. and alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone cold war make no sense in an interconnected world. where does one begin? [laughter] >> power is no longer a zero-sum

game. tell that to the demonstrators in the streets of tehran. to tell that to the tigers or the newly liberated nations of the baltic states. no nation should try to dominate another. well, perhaps. but that's merely adolescent utopianism. the world is a state of nature which is the struggle of domination is the very essence of international life. no nation can dominate another. this is simple nonsense. how can a man of such high intelligence, the president of the united states, even allow himself to utter these words? but most disturbing is the notion of what he called the cleavages of the long gone cold war. being obsolete and senseless. now, these cleavages were actually the dividing line between the free and the unfree. between democratic and

communists. between the west and an evil empire that had stomped out the face of freedom in half of europe and in archipelago, of colonies from cuba to vietnam to nicaragua. this was no accidental dividing line. yet in place of this so-called cleavage obama wants to bring about a new 21st century world of universal understanding and accommodation. and for that the u.s. is to be the facilitator of the healer of the interlocutor, the moral example led, of course, by a man floating above it all, a fellow citizen of the world as obama called himself in berlin. indeed, it was in berlin in that remarkable bizarre setting in which candidate obama offered the best insight into how he sees the world. when he asserted the berlin came

down because there's no challenge too great for a world that a stands as one. as one? if anything the world stood as two. those who for a decade strove relentlessly to bring the wall down and those for the same decade strove to maintain it. indeed the ones who put it up in the first place. the wall came down not because of a kum-ba-ya coming together of nations. but because the united states acting off and alone but certainly with only a few allies at very high costs into hot wars, korea and vietnam, and one cold war that carried the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. it persisted in maintaining the fighting relentlessly to contain and ultimately to destroy the

soviet empire. only someone who could actually think that the cold war was won by some common exertion of common humanity in the service of common universal norms could actually believe that these fictional forces hold the key to security and peace in the world today. but obama apparently does. at the heart of this internationalist fantasy is the very notion that a community of nations with its common norms ultimately determines the course of history. common norms? the taliban and us have very different visions of the good. so do, for example, the arabs of the northern sudan. and the christian sudanese who live in the south and have been

in near perpetual civil war over the last few decades. to say nothing of the north and south in this country in the 1860s. even if people share the same aspirations, harmony does not necessarily ensure. -- ensue. riches, land and power are not infinite. people strain to get what other people have. this is all totally elementary. clashes of values. and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history. and they account for the other constant. conflict and war. and yet against all this, the center of obama's world is what he incessantly calls the international community. he calls on it to, quote, stand up to north korea. to restrain iran's nuclear ambitions. to bring about his ultimate dream of universal nuclear disarmament.

and it is to this fancied entity to earn our approbation and our support that obama offers such demonstrations of national virtue as he sees it. as closing guantanamo and enduring harsh interrogation for terror masterminds. the international community, the idea of the international community, lies at the center of the obama foreign policy. unfortunately, it is a fiction. there is no such thing. different countries have different histories. geographies, necessities, interest. they may occasionally awhy themselves in ad hoc coalitions as occurred in the second world war or the first gulf war. but there is no natural inherent or enduring international community. what community of interest actually exists between, say,

the united states, iran, burma and zimbabwe. the international community is a state of nature with no universally recognized norms. anarchy is kept in check not by a bureaucracy on the east river. not by some incohate expression or world opinion. not by parchment promises adorned with disingenuous signatures. but by the will and the power of the great powers. and most importantly, in our time. by the one superpower, namely the united states. one highly revealing analysis of obama foreign policy relying on leaks from inside the white house spoke about how obama's approach to foreign policy owed much to his experience as a community organizer. the idea of listening. of understanding. and working cooperatively and seeking common ends.

this is all well and good but a community organizer in chicago operates within the rubric and the protection of a very elaborate, very secure, highly regulated and consensual domestic civic society. what holds civil society together is a supreme central authority. the sanctity of contracts. and the good will, civility, and decency of its individual members. the international arena lacks all of these things. what keeps it from degenerating into a war against all against all. it's not central authority. not the phony security of treaties. not the best of good will among the more civilized nations. what stability we do have is owed to the overwhelming power and deterrent threat of a superpower like the united states. that defines international stability as a national interest.

nonetheless, we seem almost devoted to the, quote, international community. making a ritual abatements to its many manifestations. the united nations, of course, to various bodies such as the u.n. human rights council. and most recently the copenhagen climate change conference. which demonstrated spectacularly the factualist of structures, the lack of common purpose, common interest and governance. the internationalist institutions and paper agreements seems to leave no lasting impression. did we really learn nothing from the early 20th century experience with its repeated and doomed attempts to regulate the capital ships of the great powers through naval conferences?

did we really learn nothing from the kellogg pact who's signatories incidentally included germany and japan? that abolished war forever. an absurdity that won the u.s. secretary of state frank kellogg the nobel peace prize of 1929. sound familiar? but at least kellogg got it for an actually signed useless treaty. [laughter] >> obama got it for the merely imagined useless treaties. most notably the one he has been insisting on from prague to new york on universal nuclear disarmament. the depth of obama's naive internationalism can be seen in his pursuit of this deeply unserious goal. the most dramatic instance of which as the president of france

will not easily forget occurred on september 24th, one day after obama's speech to the general assembly. when he presided over the security council. the first time an american president has ever done so. at the time unknown to the world, obama had knowledge that iran had constructed a secret uranium facility. the french and the british were urging him to use that dramatic setting at the security council to stun the world with that revolution. and thus to be in a position to call for immediate powerful action. not only did obama refuse but president sarkozy was forced to scrap any mention of the place from his speech. obama only revealed the news a day later in pittsburgh.

why did he forego the opportunity? because explained the white house, obama did not want anything at the security council meeting to get in the way of his dream of a nuclear free he free world. -- nuclear-free world. he did not want to dilute it with a diversion to iran. iran as a diversion? it's the most important security issue on the planet. a diversion from the fantasy of universal nuclear disarmament? sarkozy was sitting at the same council table watching all this. and could hardly contain himself. with obama at the chair, he pointedly observed, quote president obama has even said our dream a world without nuclear weapons, yet, before our eyes two countries are currently doing the exact opposite.

then he informed the president he that we live in a real world, quote, not a virtual world. now, this critique of liberal internationalism does not mean that we reject all treaties or all notions of communities of nations. you can, of course, have transnational agreements between like-minded notions that do share norms and for whom these agreements are real. a commercial treaty between rule of law states such as united states and canada, for example. or the various agreements underlying the european union. it has near the power of domestic law. as does a common defense pact such as that which holds nato together. but universal treaties necessarily include all states, democratic and tyrannical,

compliant and congenitally noncompliant. such agreements will not be adhered to by rogue states who will cheetahs suits their purposes. rendering the treaty not only useless but worse than useless. for example, alleged violations of the nonproliferation treaties are referred to the iaea a procedure that invariably leads to complasently to say nothing of endless delay. because it gives the illusion of enforcement. these kinds of agreements are almost always never enforced. indeed, the one act of enforcement in recent times, the removal of the rogue regime of saddam hussein after a decade of serial violations of security council resolutions demanding disarmament has been so widely

and universally denounced around the world that obama has spent much of the last year apologizing for it. as for this community of nations, this does not mean that there are no such communities. margaret thatcher and ronald reagan did not lack for a sense of community. and that was the community of free nations. these communities have a reality. they have their own norms. and ideals in policies. and some like nato even a security apparatus to back it up. it is precisely this kind of community of democratic nations that the margaret thatcher center for freedoms so courageously and effectively defends and supports. which makes obama's internationalism particularly troubling. because as he stated at the

u.n., true universality involves denigrating these ideological subcommittees as mere, quote, cleavages based archaic divisions that created the cold war. he said so rather directly in his u.s. address when he said no world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. but isn't that what nato, for example, is about? isn't that a group of nations claiming exclusivity to themselves and intent on enforcing the norms in which they believe? what was the u.n.'s rescue of the bosnia and kosovo if not nato elevating itself above other nations and groups of people to declare that genocide

would not be categorized in the balkans and without the assent of the, quote-unquote, international community as expressed through the united nations or the security council. this homage to internationalism and denigration not only of nationalism and individual sovereignty but of the commonality and special relations among the community of free nations has very practical impact on america's actions in the world. and that impact is already being felt by friend and foe, ally and adversary. if our ultimate aim is to earn a place as a good international citizen, we must abandon any signs of arrogance, any act of prideful self-assertion. and begin to constrict and constrain our often irresponsible power and act as one among many. to do that we must undertake two things.

first, the past sins and then outreach and accommodation. it has been engaged in relentlessly throughout the last year. that's the apology tour from president eisenhower's role in the 1953 coup in iran for the first use of the atomic bomb. for our own racism and mistreatment of native americans. for allegedly a disparaging and disrespecting europe by not respecting its, quote, leading role in the world. might that be because it has lived parasitically under american protection for 60 years? but i digress. [laughter] >> but above all we must apologize apparently for showing insufficient respect and understanding of the muslim world. this from the leader of a nation

that has conducted five military campaigns in the last 20 years, which each of which was intended to defend defenseless muslims against -- and to deliver them from their oppressors. in bosnia, kosovo, kuwait, afghanistan, and iraq under sudan. and then after the atonement, after the catharsis of confession comes reconciliation, the extended hand to the clenched fist. we have now had a year of this as well. what is clear is that reconciliation, the resetting of relations starting from scratch with adversaries has its consequences. why? because these conflicts did not come out of nowhere. they did not arise capriciously. they have their roots in a crash of interest and values.