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The president's student aid reform plan will save tens of billions over the next decade. We'll use these savings to make college more affordable for the next generation of engineers, teachers, and scientists who will become the backbone of the new economy. The House has passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. This legislation will end bank subsidies and invest in students directly. The Senate is still working on its bill. The House bill will increase Pell Grant scholarships to $5,710 in the next fiscal year. It will guarantee that Pell Grants keep pace with the rate of inflation. It will eliminate unnecessary questions from the financial aid forms, making it faster and easier for students to qualify for federal grants and loans. This legislation also promises an historic investment in community colleges, helping these essential schools take Americans from all backgrounds and equip them to succeed. Finally, it will improve the quality of early learning programs, which are critical to America's educational success. All of this will be possible by eliminating the student loan subsidies. We will end the loans under the Federal Family Education Program and make them directly to students -- just as economist Milton Friedman proposed 50 years ago, and just as the Department of Education has been doing since 1993 through the Direct Loan Program. For future lending, we have hired experienced companies to service all new student loans and collect them for us. We selected these companies through a competitive process. The shift is underway, and it is proving to be a remarkably smooth transition. In the past two years, our Department has issued more than $50 billion in student loans. Over 2,300 colleges and universities participate in the direct lending program -- an increase of 1,300 over the past three years. It's time to do what's right for taxpayers -- move our money from bankers to students.

No silver bullets. This is the simple premise of Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” which is being brought out this week by Basic Books. Written by one of our nation’s most respected scholars, it has been eagerly awaited. But it has also been, at least in some quarters, anticipated with a certain foreboding, because it was likely to debunk much of the conventional — and some not so conventional — wisdom surrounding education reform. Click Image to Enlarge

What of the once-great comprehensive high schools, institutions with history and in some cases a track record of success going back generations? As time moves on, it is fast becoming clear that the new small schools, many with inane themes (how about the School of Peace and Diversity?), can never substitute for a good neighborhood high school, which can become a center of communal life and pride. Ms. Ravitch’s report underscores the fact that the trick is to fix the neighborhood schools beset with problems, not destroy them.

It is not only the foundations that Ms. Ravitch blames for the current crisis: government has also failed in the attempt to reform the schools from above, lacking a clear perspective of how schools work on a day-to-day basis. Thus, the major federal initiative, No Child Left Behind, well intentioned as it may have been, ended up damaging the quality of education, not improving it. While the federal government declares schools as “failing” and prescribes sanctions for schools not meeting its goal of “annual yearly progress,” it is the states that are allowed to write and administer the tests. This has led to a culture of ever easier tests and more test preparation rather than real instruction. More ominously, it led to such scandals as the New York State Education Department lowering the “cut scores” that define the line between passing and failing. Ms. Ravitch suggests that the proper roles of the states and federal government have been reversed under NCLB. Maybe the standards for achievement should be set in Washington, which, after all, administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress , and the solutions found at the local level, using the accurate data provided by Washington. Instead of moving in a different direction from the failed NCLB model of the Bush Administration, the Obama administration has adopted and expanded on them.

During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax. Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe. More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.

Trade's effect on military conflict is one of the most important issues in international relations. The last decade has seen research and debate into the role of trade intensify; Liberals argue that trade brings peace, neo-realists and neo-Marxists reason that trade brings conflict, and classical realists contend that trade has no impact. This debate is not just academic: some key U.S. policymakers (Senator McCain and former President Clinton for instance) believe that trade brings peace, a view that contributes to their support for free trade. Economists developed bilateral trade models in isolation from models of interstate conflict, which were the work of political scientists. These two types of models handle distance between nations differently. Bilateral trade takes its cue from Isaac Newton's formula for the gravitational attraction between two objects: the larger the objects' masses and the shorter the distance between them, the larger the attraction. So the larger the trade partners' economies and the closer they are to one another, the greater their trade. However, conflict models instead incorporate shared borders by land or close distance over water (contiguity) - stressing the role of border disputes in sparking interstate conflict. Distance is included in conflict equations based on the idea that an army gets weaker the farther it strays from its base, but what point in a nation to pick for the trade and conflict equation is unclear. Often theorists use the distance between capital cities, which is problematic: wars generally happen around borders where armies are often based, and capitals have historically changed without this altering the likelihood of war between the nation and its neighbours. The authors suggest that the trade data set plugged into trade and conflict equations is critical. This type of data often contains gaps - there are a number of reasons why data from a particular nation might be unavailable, inevitably leaving researchers to make assumptions. The majority of trade and conflict studies define conflict to include all types of militarised interstate disputes (MIDs). But Keshk, Reuveny, and Pollins question the results generated when different conflict definitions are chosen. For instance, a conflict such as a threat to use nuclear weapons would not cause fatalities, but may still have some impact on trade and vice versa. In fact, by altering the data treatment and assumptions in the equation, the authors generated a variety of results, which supported several different theoretical viewpoints. The authors suggest that future research should investigate questions of missing bilateral trade data, and attempt a more subtle use of the meaning of "military conflict". Researchers might also develop distance and contiguity measures at a more sophisticated level. "Any signal that trade brings peace remains weak and inconsistent, regardless of the way proximity is modelled in the conflict equation. The signal that conflict reduces trade, in contrast, is strong and consistent," say the authors. "Any study of the effect of trade on conflict that ignores the reverse fact is practically guaranteed to produce estimates that contain simultaneity bias." Studies of the relationship between international trade and military conflict can be traced back many centuries, particularly in the works of luminaries such as de Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, John Hobson, Vladimir Lenin, Henry Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Frederic List, and Albert Hirschman. This latest study emphasises that international politics are affecting trade between nation pairs, while it is far less obvious whether trade systematically affects politics. "To our colleagues from the liberal camp we would like to say that we still believe there are limited circumstances in which more trade may help lead countries to more peaceful resolutions of their differences, particularly if they are already at peace," the authors state. "However, it is past time for academics and policymakers to look beyond the naive claim that the cultivation of trade ties will always and everywhere produce a more peaceful world."

University of Edinburgh law lecturer Andres Guadamuz wrote a blog entry this week highlighting some particularly troubling aspects of the IIPA's 301 recommendations. The organization has condemned Indonesia and several other countries for encouraging government adoption of open source software. According to the IIPA, official government endorsements of open source software create "trade barriers" and restrict "equitable market access" for software companies. The profound absurdity of this accusation is exacerbated by the fact that Indonesia's move towards open source software was almost entirely motivated by a desire to eliminate the use of pirated software within the government IT infrastructure. It's important to understand that Indonesia has not mandated the adoption of open source software or barred government agencies from purchasing proprietary commercial software. The Indonesian government issued a statement in 2009 informing municipal governments that they had to stop using pirated software. The statement said that government agencies must either purchase legally licensed commercial software or switch to free and open source alternatives in order to comply with copyright law. This attempt by Indonesia to promote legal software procurement processes by endorsing the viability of open source software has apparently angered the IIPA. In its 301 recommendations for Indonesia, the IIPA demands that the government rescind its 2009 statement. According to the IIPA, Indonesia's policy "weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness" because open source software "encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations [and] fails to build respect for intellectual property rights." The number of ways in which the IIPA's statements regarding open source software are egregiously misleading and dishonest are too numerous to count. The IIPA seems to have completely missed the fact that there is a very robust ecosystem of commercial software vendors in the open source software market and that open source software is at the heart of some of the most popular consumer electronics products that are sold in the United States. It has clearly become an important part of the US software economy and increasingly serves as an enabler of innovation and technological progress. In light of the profitability of Red Hat and other open source leaders, it seems absurd to contend that open source software adoption will weaken the software industry or reduce its competitiveness. In fact, the emergence of open source software has contributed to creating a more competitive landscape in the software industry by offering alternative business models that enable smaller companies to gain traction against the dominant incumbent players. The IIPA's position is profoundly hypocritical, because many parts of the US government, including the Department of Defense, have issued their own memos endorsing open source software adoption. The IIPA's disingenuous move to equate open source software with piracy reeks of desperation. The BSA and other IIPA members are likely losing sleep over open source software because that development model and approach to licensing will empower developing countries to build their own domestic IT industries, eliminating the need for them to tithe to American software giants. It's another failing of the 301 review, which Big Content wants used to coerce other countries into adopting ever-more-stringent copyright laws.