I received news yesterday that we were awarded $106,230 by the National Geographic Foundation. The project involves working with high school students to make computerized maps of safe and walkable streets, parks,?and?nutritious food sources (stores and restaurants) in their city. Kids will walk around the community with Palm Pilots, entering data. We will also collect data on adolescents’ “healthy living” behavior (nutritious eating and exercise). Using these data, we will be able to create maps showing safe streets and good food sources, for public display on our website (www.princegeorges.org). Such maps are an example of the kind of relatively sophisticated public good that I find most valuable in the Internet “commons.” We will also try to generate?a statistical model showing the impact of highly varied local geography on residents’ health-related behavior. This model will address the question: “Can we reduce obesity through urban planning?” Finally, we will keep track of the students’ civic engagement, on the theory that community-based research is a good form of civic education.

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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e.thePeople : Article : Under 25 voters need a reason to believe Over at E-The People, there’s a lively discussion about why young Americans don’t vote. Many perspectives are represented, and it’s hard to generalize. However, I am uncomfortable with the idea (expressed by several participants) that young voters are especially skillful at detecting hypocrisy and thus turned off by politicians, with the exception of John McCain and possibly Howard Dean. I would reply that: 1) No one can tell who’s phony through the filter of the mass media. Thus young people are deluding themselves if they think they’re excellent judges of character. 2) A cynical press corps makes us think that our politicians are generally more hypocritical than they actually are. If this impression causes us not to vote, we’re the ones who lose power as a result. And 3) you can be a phony with good ideas, or a highly principled and consistent person who’s a complete nut. Therefore, I don’t think there’s any substitute for forming opinions about issues and then voting accordingly. The low level of knowledge among 18-25s is thus a bigger problem than their intolerance for phoniness.