Reflections on Morocco

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Scott

In a recent GOP debate the Republican candidates expressed their support for making English the offical language of the United States, fearing that showing tolerance to other widely spoken languages (namely Spanish) could divide and damage American culture.  I had to laugh, having just returned from a study tour of a nation where a king once declared that “He who speaks only one language is an illiterate.”

Morocco is a middle-income and stable Islamic nation on the northwest tip of Africa, eight miles south of Spain across the Strait of Gibralter.  The climate is Mediterranean–chilly and wet this time of year, but with a hot sun.  Its system of government is parliamentary monarchy, the former toothless and the latter absolute.  And while illiteracy is staggeringly high–almost 50%–almost everyone I met there was fluent in two or more languages, typically French and Darija, a Moroccan dialect that combines elements of French and the indigenous Berber language with Arabic.  Most are familiar with the traditional Arabic of the Quran, and English learning is on the rise.  The ancient Berber language, also known as Tamazight, is still spoken by about 40% of the country, and has been continuously in use in North Africa since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs.

This past January 25 marked the one year anniversary of the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, the most recognizable event of the “Arab Spring” that saw the toppling of dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, and continues to boil in Syria.  Morocco, despite being out on the far western flank of the Arab-Islamic nations, was also impacted by the uprising.  

On February 20, 2011, one of the largest protests in decades formed in the capital city of Rabat, demanding that the king, Mohammed VI, cede some of his powers to the elected parliament through meaningful constitutional reforms.  Of the other countries that had so far been embroiled in the Arab citizens revolt, governments had either been toppled or responded with violent suppression of protests.  Morocco’s king took a middle path, getting out ahead of the protests by quickly proposing significant constitutional changes that would strengthen the parliament and meet some–though not all–of the protestors’ demands.  He also cleverly made these reforms subject to a referendum vote, not only making a gesture toward democracy, but also buying time so that the Febrary 20 Movement wouldn’t snowball into a major crisis for the monarchy.  

So far the strategy appears to have worked.  The protests have diminished (although not disappeared–there are still marches in the streets and “Occupy”-style demonstrations on the rooftops of some buildings near Parliament), the constitutional reforms passed with overwhelming support, and a recent parliamentary election brought on a smooth transition of power to a new leading party, the Party for Justice and Development (PJD).

What are average Moroccans’ views on politics?  On the PJD, opinions are tentative and mixed.  With the Constitutional reforms, citizens really don’t know what to expect until opportunities arise for the legislature to test its new powers against the king’s authority.  And while uncertainty is universal, apathy is also endemic among the populace.  Only 45% of the electorate participated in last November’s election, and many of those ballots were turned in either blank or scribbled with profanity, demonstrating a disillusionment with parliamentary politics.  

This itself, according to a number of critics, is due to the king’s strategy for retaining power: anything that goes right in the country is credited to the monarch, and anything that goes wrong, including increasingly public perceptions of corruption, are blamed on Parliament.  Either way, public support for the king is strong and genuine.  Hassan II, the present king’s father who ruled from 1961 until his death in 1999, was far more brutal, and treated the country more like a police state.  Mohammed VI has distinguished himself as the polar opposite of his father, forwarding liberal social reforms and tolerating dissent.  However clever his techniques may seem for retaining power, it is clear that the country is on a better path for having him.

What about democracy, though?  It’s a tricky subject.  As already seen in Egypt and Tunisia, when dictators have been removed from power and replaced with democratic elections, those with Western sensibilities might not be thrilled with the results.  The PJD, for example, is an Islamist party, but a moderate one that is not seeking, for example, to implement Sharia as the national law.  Other parties, some of which have been more closely aligned with the ongoing February 20 Movement, are more extreme.  Going by popular opinion alone, some political commentators have argued that a Moroccan democracy would be far more conservative than the country has appeared under its Western-educated, more progressive king.  For example, Mohammed VI’s reforms of the family code–a section of law almost entirely based on Quranic doctrine–to grant women more privileges with regards to marriage and divorce was an important step in advancing human rights in the country, and one that arguably would have failed if put to a popular vote.  Thus, while democratization will remain a long-term goal, critics should be aware of the contextual arguments for allowing this process to unfold gradually.

Morocco, in short, is still struggling to define an identity for itself.  Geographically it is closer to Europe than the Arab world, and a significant portion of its population continues to identify itself with the indigenous Berber culture rather than that of the ruling Arabs.  Tellingly, one expert I listened to admitted that Moroccans do not view themselves as an example for other countries.  Multiple citizens I spoke with, from prominent government employees at the powerful Department of the Interior to taxi drivers on the streets of Rabat, made a similar qualifying statement when evaluating their nation: that every country has its good and bad qualities.  Such a true and humble sentiment, but how rare to hear, especially by American ears accustomed to frequent displays of nationalist pride.  For better or wose, certainly not something I expect to hear at upcoming GOP debates.

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Maryland Redistricting

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Scott

What do Thurmont and Emmitsburg have in common with Rockville and Bethesda?  Not much.  But pretty soon, they’ll be sharing a congressional representative.  And it won’t be Roscoe Bartlett.

On Oct. 20, with little fanfare, Governor Martin O’Malley signed off on a new redistricting plan for Maryland that reflects regional population shifts as reported in the 2010 Census.  It also reflects a transparent effort by O’Malley and the Democratic party to tilt Maryland’s congressional representation even further in their party’s favor than it already is.  (Statewide map [PDF])

Maryland remains a solid blue state, with twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans.  With eight congressional districts we would expect to see a either a 5-3 or 6-2 split between Democratic and Republican districts.  The latter has been the case for the past ten years, but the new plan is clearly intended to produce an unjustifiable 7-1 Democratic majority.  The Republican representative being targeted for removal is our very own Roscoe Bartlett, of the (former) 6th District.

Gerrymandering isn’t new to Maryland.  Baltimore’s overwhelmingly Democratic population is already being divided over three districts to dilute the more conservative surrounding areas.  But the rest of the state didn’t used to look too bad.  The 6th District sensibly included Western Maryland, Frederick County, the rural areas around Westminster, and the northern portions of Baltimore and Harford County.  Considering Maryland’s uniquely shaped borders, the old district lines did a fair job of keeping counties and communities intact.  The same cannot be said for the new 2011 lines.

The rural parts of Frederick County have been reassigned to the bizarrely-shaped new 8th District (Map), which will include a chunk of Carroll County and a suspicious sliver of Montgomery County that extends to include D.C.’s northern suburbs (inherited from the old 8th District, currently represented by Democrat Chris Van Hollen).  Meanwhile, the city of Frederick remains in the 6th District, but will be joined by a sizeable portion of Montgomery County which, like Baltimore, is being sliced up into three different districts to distribute its Democratic votes among more right-leaning regions.

If you think the new 8th District is a mess, it pales in comparison to the 3rd District, which has got to be one of the ugliest cases of gerrymandering in the nation.  Looking like a Sanskrit character, it snakes in and out of four counties and Baltimore City.  Eric Hartley, a staff writer for The Capital in Annapolis, attempted to drive straight through the district, a project that took him nine hours and 168 miles of driving to complete (including multiple departures from the district where its boundaries are not connected by roads, or in some places, even by land).  The 3rd includes some of the poorest areas of Baltimore and a portion of Howard County, the fifth wealthiest county in the nation.  How can such a district be fairly and accurately represented when its constituents are worlds apart, both geographically and socio-economically?

To be fair, redistricting is among the most difficult tasks facing lawmakers.  Beyond the logistical and political obstacles, there’s still no simple formula, nor any clear philosophical guidance for how a district should be designed.  Should homogenous communities be kept intact to ensure direct representation of their interests, or should the district be designed to approximate the state or national demographic balances?  Is democracy better served by grouping the like-minded together, or by exposing people to diverse viewpoints?

The absence of an “ideal,” however, does not justify blatant bad behavior.  As common as gerrymandering may be in other states, and by both parties, whatever marginal political gains there are to be made through the practice should be weighed against the social costs. 

Not only are the quality and accuracy of representation corrupted by tampering with districts in this fashion, but it also breeds cynicism.  How could any citizen look at this Congressional district map and not conclude that whoever created it was thinking only of political objectives and not at all of what was in the best interest of the people?  In the state legislature’s drafting meetings, how could such a map come into being without people openly discussing with one another, “How can we shift this line to really stick it to the Republicans?”

What’s damaging about cynicism is that it leads to apathy.  When I posted “Rorschach” versions (silhouette images, although this is a misnomer, since there’s nothing symmetrical about the shapes!) of the new 8th and 3rd Districts on Facebook, some people thought it was a joke, and others had already heard about the new district lines.    Nobody was surprised or upset about it.  This is business as usual, afterall. 

It’s possible things will change in a few months when the primary elections are held and many people will hear about the redistricting for the first time.  The General Election next year will be interesting to watch as well.  Rep. Bartlett may actually have to run a serious campaign now that he has lost some reliable supporters in northern Frederick County.  And what will Thurmont and Emmitsburg residents think of the current 8th District representative, Chris Van Hollen, the up-and-comer Democrat from Montgomery County?

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A Wasted Decade

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Scott

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will be ten years old this January.  Like the nation’s struggling students, it has been pushed along, year after year, by politicians unwilling to face its glaring flaws until they became impossible to ignore.  Unlike the children, though, this policy never had potential.

The basic goals of NCLB sounded reasonable enough, at least to those outside of the teaching profession: higher performance standards and greater accountability for improvements.  Schools that fall short of achieving “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) for two or more consecutive years face a variety of penalties, including funding cuts, staff shake-ups, and having to provide students with after-school tutoring or transportation to a better school nearby.  The program’s ultimate goal: 100% of students on grade level in reading and math by 2014.

In practice the program suffered from poor implementation and a number of predictable consequences.  Let’s start at the end.  After ten years and many billions of dollars in NCLB investment, America continues to spend more money per pupil on education than any other country, but is lagging far behind in results.  According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), in 2009 the US ranked 17th in reading scores, 23rd in science, and 31st in mathematics.

Shanghai, China, holds first place in all three, and the majority of the other top ranking countries are in the Eastern hemisphere.  Why does this matter?  With US job growth lagging since the 2008 recession, we’ve been struggling to define our role among global markets.  While manufacturing and other low-wage jobs have moved overseas, economists keep predicting that America’s comparative advantage will be in producing advanced technology and high-end services.  But if workers in China and other developing nations are not only working for far lower wages, but are also exceeding US education achievements, it’s going to be that much harder getting our economy back on solid footing.

Where did things go wrong with NCLB?  I’ll focus on two issues here: 1) the misapplication of a business model to schools, and 2) the program’s poor understanding of incentives, which resulted in unintended, but predictable consequences, particularly cheating.

No Child Left Behind was a business-style program developed by the businesslike Bush administration.  Its methods were intended to be pragmatic: set high standards, reward what works, and eliminate what doesn’t.  However, whereas a business is a straight-down hierarchy with a single set of quality standards for its products (outputs), no such unified set of standards was implemented nationwide for schools.  Each state designed its own standards, including its own methods of assessment.  Maryland has the Maryland School Assessment (MSA), Virginia has the Standards of Learning (SOL), and so on.  Since economics and business are concerned with the effects of “incentives,” shouldn’t we question what incentive one state would have for setting tougher standards of achievement than its neighbor?  What incentive would a state have for continuing to administer an exam that fails to get the desired number of proficient students?

The idea of rewarding what works continues to be popular even into the Obama administration.  The Race to the Top Fund, a $4 billion program to get states to compete for extra federal dollars, ended up rewarding states that implemented performance-based pay, among other things.  Linking a teacher’s benefits to his or her students’ standardized test scores is another idea that makes sense from a business perspective, but there’s a classic dilemma when trying to balance objective assessment with subjective observations.  Anyone who has spent time in a classroom knows there is far from a 1:1 correspondance between teacher skill and student performance.  Unlike businesses, schools and teachers have no control over the quality of their inputs.  If a teacher is assigned to a poor quality group of students, she does not have the option to trade them in for a better crop with greater potential for growth.  It may be possible to subjectively identify those teachers who do a relatively outstanding job with the students they are given, but how to capture such things objectively through standardized tests remains elusive.

This takes us to the second point.  When schools are put under intense pressure to show continuous improvement, but are not fully in control over whether such improvement is possible, what is the expected consequence?  Think steroid abuse.  The tragically underreported bombshell story of the summer was a massive cheating scandal uncovered in Georgia’s Atlanta Public School system.  According to a major report, 44 of 56 schools that were investigated were found to have committed various kinds of cheating, including “changing parties,” where teachers would get together on weekends to erase students’ incorrect answers on tests.  Some reportedley opened plastic-wrapped exams, made corrections, then resealed them using cigarrete lighters.  The report named 178 educators, including 38 principals, who participated in the cheating, and as of July, more than 80 had confessed.  Even the school system’s superintendant, Beverly Hall, was implicated in the scandal for supressing whistleblowers and rewarding those who produced favorable results, however suspicious.  Hall won the 2009 National Superintendent of the Year award from the American Association of School Administrators for accomplishing “significant gains in student achievement.”  Please step forward to receive your asterisk.

Cheating is likely far more widespread than the public will ever know.  It’s not nearly as overt in most places, but school systems are undoubtedly gaming the system in all kinds of ways to squeak by the unattainable standards they are required to meet.  We’ve given ourselves an education system where achieving “success” and “improvement” in the data sets all too often indicates just the opposite reality for students.

Before we can find real solutions, we have to fully acknowledge that everything we’ve tried is failing.  The Obama aministration has recently begun to grant waivers to states that are unable to meet AYP, on the condition that they implement various other accountability measures.  Unfortunately, this only shows that NCLB is finally collapsing under its own weight, not that anyone has grasped why it was doomed from the start and come up with a better alternative.

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On Pragmatism

Posted on August 28, 2011 by Scott

Last October, as we were about to witness a strong showing by the Tea Party in the mid-term elections, I wrote a column about ideals.  While the Tea Partiers had established themselves as a principled protest movement, they had not yet had the chance to govern directly, but rather only through the proxy of establishment Republicans who were courting or co-opting the movement for their own purposes.  At the time, I predicted that the freshman Congressmen would quickly take a hardline stance on libertarian principles and make some highly public gestures before being pulled back closer in line with mainstream Republicans.  But I was wrong.  Instead, the storyline of the debt ceiling debate that dominated the summer news cycle was that the Republican party, suffering from severe internal fracturing, bowed to the Tea Party at a crucial time, dug in its heels, and refused to compromise with Democrats even after securing numerous significant concessions from them.

Republican presidential candidates took the occassion as a cue to campaign on their unwillingness to compromise.  At one debate, when asked whether they would accept a deficit-reduction deal consisting of one dollar of tax increases to every ten dollars of government spending cuts—a virtually unimaginable slam-dunk of deal for any Republican—every candidate indicated they would turn it down.  As several political commentators have noted, it’s highly unlikely that any rational candidate would follow through with such a threat once elected, but the fact that the entire slate has resigned itself to a no-compromise campaign platform (and that almost all of them have been coerced into signing hand-tieing pledges to this effect) suggest that ideals are getting their moment in the sun.

Let’s hope it doesn’t last long.

It is difficult to make a compelling argument against staying true to one’s ideals, and for good reasons.  Among the advantages of unwavering, principled behavior are predictability, consistency and accountability.  When a leader’s actions are predicatable, followers can develop a sense of trust and choose their own future actions based on reasonable expectations for what the leader will do or say.  Consistency is the best way to avoid self-contradiction over the long term, which is important for maintaining credibility.  And accountability is best established when the motivations behind a leader’s actions are well-known, consistent, and able to paint a coherent picture of a “worldview.”  When something goes wrong, then, it’s easier to identify who caused the problem and to pose the question, “Is there something flawed in this worldview that would be cause for discarding it (And the leader who follows it)?”

However, while these advantages are likely implied by those who believe in uncompromising, principled leadership, it is more common for the holding of rigid principles and ideals to be valued directly as a personal virtue.  Similar to the sentiment that having faith in general is as or more important than what one has faith in specifically, there are those who believe that having set principles is more important than what those principles are, what consequences they result in when put into action, or how dogmatic they turn out to be when challenged by opposing views. 

And while it’s difficult to argue against the idea that people should explore and develop their principles and then stick rigidly to them in their actions, I would argue that pragmatism is itself one such principle that is worth adopting.

Staunch idealogues view pragmatism as antithetical to being principled in one’s actions.  A pragmatist, in their eyes, is one who has no higher ideals and no consistency in action, and who thus degrades into seeking personal advantage above all else.  It’s similar to the view that some religious individuals have toward atheists: without a belief in a transcendent concept of justice, one could have no concept of right or wrong, and thus would turn to immoral, self-serving behavior.  Neither belief is true, although there are always enough anecdotes on hand to keep them alive. 

For the anti-pragmatists, all the proof they require resides in the US Congress, where self-interest does indeed drive many politicians to value reelection above more noble goals like serving the public interest honestly and directly.  The Tea Party is understandably frustrated by representatives who claim to adhere to a certain set of values, but whose actions contradict them and are designed primarily with regard to political strategy.  Still, it is a mistake to take such examples as proof of a defect in pragmatism, which is something very different from a total lack of scruples or guiding ideals.  The word “compromise” is similarly vilified by Tea Partiers.  To them, there is no difference between “one who compromises” and “one who has compromised his or her values.”

What are the proper roles of pragmatism and compromise in politics?  To me, the pragmatic virtue is demonstrated by those who come to the negotiation table realizing that the problem being addressed is a shared one, and that choosing from among a variety of proposed solutions is not a zero-sum prospect—winner taking all.  Compromise doesn’t mean that one side is consenting to the wisdom of the other side’s views, but rather just recognizing that there is another side with enough support that it deserves input.

Ideals have an important role to play in shaping public opinion, giving new life to aging but still important ideas, and energizing citizens who have fallen into political apathy.  The Tea Party movement, I still believe, was a positive development for American civic engagement, and has successfully influenced political discourse.  The process of governing, however, requires an amount of cooperation and compromise that respects plurality in a large, dynamic society.  As long as unflinching adherance to set ideals and unwillingness to compromise remain its trademark characteristics, the Tea Party will be unfit to govern directly.  The movement’s plummeting popularity following the debt ceiling debacle is the latest evidence of what Americans have always implicitly understood:  you campaign on principles, but govern through pragmatism.

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