According to today’s New York Times, the Houston school “miracle” was illusory. After the state imposed a strict regime of standards and high-stakes assessment, students in Houston dramatically improved their performance on a specific Texas test. However, scores on the national Stanford Achievement Test did not rise much (no faster than in other cities) and actually fell in 9th-11th grade. Moreover, gaps by race disappeared on the Texas exam but remained unchanged on the Stanford Achievement Test.

The argument for standards-and-accountability runs like this: Students’ general aptitude can be measured with standardized tests. The higher their scores, the better prepared they are for college or work. Any responsible test should generate roughly the same results. Forcing students and schools to score well on tests will spur them to improve their aptitude. Instead, we find that raising the stakes can cause students to do much better on one test while not budging their results on another exam. In principle, the reason could be that either the Texas exam or the Stanford test was flawed. More likely, teachers learned to prepare their students for the particular instrument that would determine their fates: in this case, the state test. Scores on that instrument rose. But students’ “aptitude” or general educational preparation (if such a thing can be measured at all) did not rise significantly.

This finding will not surprise the many critics of No Child Left Behind, the federal law passed in 2002 that is transforming American education. But for friends of NCLB, the Houston results should be deeply troubling.

I’m a big fan of the Hope Street Group, an organization of young businesspeople who are committed to expanding real economic opportunities for all. “Equality of opportunity in a high-growth economy” is their slogan; it draws nicely from the right (“high-growth”) and the left (“equality”), while subtly disparaging the Green idea that growth itself is bad. “Opportunity” here means a chance to create wealth, to build a business, to develop an idea. There has been a lot of such opportunity in the United States, but we’ve always left a large segment of our population with little chance to be creative and entrepreneurial, because they’ve lacked access to capital and education. People like Jack Kemp have talked about expanding opportunity even in the poorest urban and rural areas. I’m sure Mr. Kemp is sincere, but his ideas never seem to go beyond low-tax zones, and his constituency is small. Indeed, it’s hard to find really effective ways to expand opportunity for everyone. Usually it’s easier just to reduce suffering with cash transfers. However, the Hope Street Group has both the talent and the commitment to make progress. They recommend, for example, subsidies for low-income home-buyers and transferability of pensions from one job to another.

Now the Hope Street Group is offering a $5,000 prize for the best short essay that proposes a policy to build an opportunity society–specifically in the state of California.

Why do the international lending institutions (the IMF and World Bank) draw such ire? Protestors picket at their doors, not outside Citigroup (US), Mizuho Holdings (Japan) or UBS (Switzerland), which are currently the world?s three biggest banks. Yet the IMF and World Bank exist to make subsidized loans to needy countries. Their loan agreements are intensively negotiated; no potential borrower is required to accept their offer.

On the other hand, the World Bank and IMF make their loans contingent on changes in the borrowers? behavior, and the changes they demand are based on current mainstream economic theory. Thus, for instance, they tell borrowing countries to privatize their large state-owned enterprises and to cut spending, in return for loans (when there are no other sources of capital). I see four plausible interpretations of these demands:

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