Not only is social media the future, writes the Economist’s Tom Standage, it’s also the past. In his clever new book, Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years, Standage argues that today’s prominent social platforms are but the latest iterations of phenomena that have endured since the days of Caesar, and that modern users of Twitter and Pinterest are “the unwitting heirs of a rich tradition with surprisingly deep historical roots.” “What if the ancient Romans had been on Facebook?” sounds like the beginning to an odd comedy routine, or an essay question from a history class at an unaccredited college. But Standage argues that it’s not at all silly to imagine the Julio-Claudians on Facebook, because, in a way, they were on Facebook—and so were Saint Paul of Tarsus, Thomas Paine, Martin Luther, and the inventor of the flush toilet, for good measure.

Writing on the Wall:
Social Media—The
First 2,000 Years
by Tom Standage
Bloomsbury, 278 pp.

I know. I rolled my eyes, too. But this is actually less of a stretch than you might think. Standage defines social media as “an environment in which information was passed from one person to another along social connections, to create a distributed discussion or community.” Those informal networks flourished for centuries as society’s main sources of information and commentary, before mass media emerged to turn news into a one-way conversation. Standage argues that modern mass media was a 200-year aberration: a function of the high production costs associated with large printing presses and broadcast machinery. The rise of the Internet made everyone a potential publisher, and, thus, media reverted to its natural, social state. Everything old is new again.

With that as his thesis, Standage traces the rise of social media systems throughout history, finding interesting parallels hither and yon. The European coffeehouses of the seventeenth century were social networks of a sort, Standage argues, offering spaces for the easy, informal dissemination of news and conversation, and allowing like-minded people to coalesce into interest groups. Sixteenth-century wits like Sir John Harington, widely known as Elizabeth’s “saucy godson,” won fame by composing clever epigrams used for social commentary and self-promotion, much like today’s Twitter users. (Harington is better known today for designing what might have been the world’s first “water closet.”) Martin Luther’s 95 Theses started off tacked to the door of a church, but they soon begat countless responses from Luther’s friends and foes across Christendom—or, as Standage has it, they “went viral.”

Standage argues that the unanticipated groundswell of support for Luther’s points has much in common with how causes can become suddenly popular on modern social media platforms, their points amplified and adopted beyond the original author’s expectations. “Luther,” writes Standage, “had unwittingly revealed the power of a decentralized, person-to-person media system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing, recommendation, and copying.” Martin Luther’s theses, in this sense, were but an early antecedent of the Kony 2012 campaign, and the surprisingly successful Facebook effort to revive Betty White’s career.

Standage, the digital editor of the Economist, has written a stack of entertaining and uncommonly articulate books centered around these sorts of historical analogies. 1998’s The Victorian Internet explored the similarities between the Internet and the telegraph system. In 2002 came The Turk, about the eighteenth century’s preeminent chess-playing robot, which helped contextualize modern anxieties over the rise of artificial intelligence. Then came others. Standage never seems to take his analogies too seriously, which is to his credit, because while the comparisons are always thought-provoking, they are sometimes a bit facile. And, indeed, there are points where Writing on the Wall seems unbearably glib.

For example: Standage is very fond of asserting how ancient phenomena might look to those of us alive today. “To modern eyes, the chaotic and adversarial media environment of the 1640s has much in common with the Internet’s blogging culture,” he writes. “To modern eyes these tablets, with their flat writing surfaces surrounded by a wooden frame, look strikingly similar to tablet computers.” Well, I suppose if you’re looking for similarities between the primitive wax tablets used for correspondence by the Roman elite and the iPad, you can find them. But how similar are they, really, aside from their rectangular shape? The iPad is a commercial product from a multibillion-dollar corporation, marketed to middle-class consumers who use it to send messages, take photos, play games, compose marketing presentations, watch episodes of MasterChef, wake themselves up in the morning, and myriad other purposes. A wax tablet is a wax tablet.

Things that appear similar from a distance gradually reveal their differences on closer examination, and the more you think about some of Standage’s analogies, the keener the differences become. I quite liked the section about how the residents of ancient Rome would scribble messages on city walls—hotel reviews, sexual boasts, political endorsements—but I’m not entirely convinced that those messages actually constitute some sort of antediluvian Facebook wall. It certainly seems that, like today’s social platforms, Roman walls offered relatively unmediated spaces in which residents could interact, with nobody to direct the conversations or guide them toward productive ends. But there is a significant difference between messages that exist in a fixed physical space and those that exist only in digital form. A different format means a different user experience, and Standage’s failure to substantively address these differences makes it hard to actually gauge the value of the comparison.

Similarly, I question whether Martin Luther’s experiences are all that relevant to our understanding of modern viral content. Yes, the speed with which Luther’s arguments spread somewhat resembles the way that modern causes can find huge support in a small amount of time. But isn’t the difference that something actually came of the 95 Theses? Luther fractured Christendom. He sparked the Reformation. Modern social campaigns come and go in days, as flighty Tweeters move on to the next big cause or petition, or simply turn their attention to hot new photos of dogs wearing hats. That’s not to say that Twitter and Facebook and the rest could never be used to galvanize significant social change. It’s just that today’s social media platforms are so much busier and broader than those in Luther’s era that it’s hard to attempt any sort of direct or useful comparison. If Luther had issued the 95 Theses today, they would be forced to compete for attention with lists of 95 Great Places to Eat in Wittenberg; which do you think would be more popular?

You get the picture. I remember a much-loved college professor snidely dismissing the central conceit of The Victorian Internet, because, as he put it, the telegraph wasn’t built for porn. (He claimed that you couldn’t really understand the Internet without understanding exactly how significant pornographic Web sites and other unsavory enterprises have been to its technical development.) That might seem like an odd critique, but his broader point, I think, concerned the limits of historical analogy. The Internet contains multitudes. The telegraph was used for messaging. By contorting a modern paradigm so that it resembles some other, materially different historical paradigm, one risks diluting both concepts such that they actually become harder to understand.

The value of historical analogy lies not in the precision of its comparisons, but in the way it can add perspective to concerns you thought were yours alone. And, indeed, Standage capably demonstrates that hand-wringing over how new technologies are coarsening public discourse is as old as the Parthenon, if not older. Standage wisely notes that “the technology that is demonized today may end up being regarded as wholesome and traditional tomorrow, by which time another apparently dangerous new invention will be causing the same concerns.” In five years or so, all our anxiety over social media will have become anxiety over wearable augmented-reality devices like Google Glass—which, come to think of it, has a lot in common with the telescope. Both involve glass lenses. Both are expensive. Both offer users a new way of seeing the world. Tom, if you end up writing this book, I want a cut.

*Translation, from Horace: “Each desperate blockhead dares to write.”

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But as Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” The unfortunate truth is that however unpopular the cause or circumstance, the United States will encounter war again. It is therefore incumbent on America’s leaders—both civilian and military—to prepare for what that future war might require. Those leaders ought to read David Kilcullen’s new book closely.

Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla is an ambitious effort to describe how twenty-first-century conflict is migrating away from small mountain villages, farming areas, and frontier valleys of places like Afghanistan into sprawling cities like Mumbai or Mogadishu, where ubiquitous technology is enabling groups to establish networks of influence that are eroding the ability of governments to retain and exercise power and defend their citizens. Kilcullen could not have known just how timely and tragically prescient his new book would turn out to be. In the week before it was set for release, more than seventy people lay dead in an upmarket Nairobi mall, while al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Somali insurgent group, claimed responsibility for the attack and tweeted grisly details of the massacre.

Out of the Mountains:
The Coming Age of
the Urban Guerrilla
by David Kilcullen
Oxford University Press, 352 pp.

A former Australian infantry officer with a doctorate in anthropology, Kilcullen has made quite a name for himself in recent years. Having worked for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and also for former General David Petraeus during the height of the Iraq War, and then advising Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal more recently in Afghanistan, Kilcullen now runs a consultancy specializing in understanding conflict in complex urban and rural environments. For those in the business of understanding conflict, Kilcullen is a well-known and influential expert.

The genesis of Kilcullen’s thesis—and the opening of Out of the Mountains—is an ambush in rural Afghanistan on Kilcullen and the U.S. troops with whom he was embedded. Initially, the attackers were thought to be Taliban insurgents. But Kilcullen, no stranger to being ambushed, was unimpressed with the tactical prowess on display and deduced that the assailants might be local villagers resisting the unfair distribution of aid and largess that the corrupt Afghan government was dispersing. Ultimately, Kilcullen came to believe that conventional theories of counterinsurgency fail to adequately explain that particular ambush, as well as so many other aspects of “the non-linear, many-sided, wild and messy world of real conflict.”

There are four trends that Kilcullen believes “driv[e] most aspects of future life on the planet, including conflict”—rapid population growth, accelerating urbanization, littoralization (the tendency for populations to cluster on coastlines), and increasing connectedness (the way technology is driving social networks). These crowded, urban, coastal, and hyper-connected environments act as powerful catalysts enabling non-state actors to wield enormous power that in some cases can topple governments.

Kilcullen takes the reader on his own intellectual journey out of the Afghan mountains and into a series of what he calls “feral cities”—sprawling urban centers like Kingston, Jamaica, San Pedro Sula in Honduras, Mogadishu, and Mumbai—where population growth is straining the capacity of infrastructure and government, allowing alternative licit and illicit networks to compete for influence, power, and sometimes outright control.

Kilcullen uses this framework to explore several case studies on how actors exploit or “nest” within these complex urban environments, leveraging the areas’ fragility and weakness to pursue their own ends—from the way a group of Pakistani terrorists infiltrated and violently shut down large parts of Mumbai in November 2008, to the way Somali militias operate in Mogadishu, to how a transnational criminal network operates out of Kingston, Jamaica, to how protestors in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria are challenging decades of oppression and dictatorship.

The descriptions of the underlying dynamics of the revolutions convulsing the Arab world are particularly compelling. I was working in the Pentagon and later at the White House when what began as protests in Tunisia rapidly developed into full-scale revolutions across North Africa, becoming what is arguably the most significant geopolitical development since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The potential for social revolution was anticipated by academics and intelligence analysts, but the speed and scale of what occurred took everyone by surprise. While these conflicts are still playing out, Kilcullen usefully outlines how the drivers of rapid population growth, urbanization (in most cases coastal), and the extraordinary democratization of both weapons technology and communications technology have enabled long-oppressed populations to change the course of their own history in powerful ways. Had we applied Kilcullen’s framework, we might have been able to better appreciate how fast the Arab uprisings would spread.

In 2004, Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Future of Freedom that globalization was enabling the “democratization of violence” as the spread of information and technology was empowering non-state actors like terrorist groups in ways that could challenge states. Kilcullen picks up on this theme in Out of the Mountains, arguing that the emerging “democratization of connectivity” via social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and Google Maps is playing a key role in world affairs. This resonated with me, as I had closely observed from the White House the way rebel groups in Libya were coordinating and communicating—swarming, really—by using these commonly available tools. Kilcullen describes how Libyan rebels, bypassing in some cases the lack of Internet connectivity by employing “mesh networks” (leveraging Bluetooth connections that eventually crossed borders onto the Internet), were being given real-time advice on targeting and tactics via experts logged in to Skype from Europe and elsewhere around the world. The way technology is sparking global change through the empowerment of populations in peace and in war is breathtaking—and it’s only just beginning.

If Kilcullen is right that what is happening in these hyper-connected, crowded, coastal cities represents a “new normal,” then the implications for America’s role in the world could be profound. Kilcullen argues that security thinkers need “to start treating the city as a unit of analysis in its own right,” taking into account how a city’s “subsystems and sub-districts fit together, as well as how that city nests within, and interacts with, regional and transnational flows and networks.”

In an appendix to the book titled “On War in the Urban, Networked Littoral” (a play on Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 classic, On War), Kilcullen outlines in disturbing detail how military forces engaging in these environments will face challenges on land, along the coastal waterways, in the air, and in cyberspace. Operating in these spaces is something most people in the U.S. military would rather ignore in favor of more classic conventional engagements, but Kilcullen suggests that military leaders adopt a more mobile, improvisational, expeditionary mentality, concluding, “It’s time to drag ourselves—body and mind—out of the mountains.”

Acknowledging that much of his book covers ground that is “complex and confronting,” Kilcullen persuasively argues that these trends do offer opportunities for partnerships and progressive problem-solving approaches. If we can find ways to apply local expertise with outside knowledge drawn from urban planning, geo-social information systems, big data analysis, and industrial systems design, Kilcullen argues that it is possible to “co-design for resilience”—to examine these crowded coastal cities as systems, and to find ways to push them “in a positive, more resilient direction.”

Out of the Mountains will appeal to a broad range of readers—social scientists, security experts and military officers, urban planners and technologists, and a general readership interested in how today’s global trends will shape tomorrow’s world. Readers who enjoy the work of Robert Kaplan or even Paul Theroux—the engaging mix of adventure writing with sophisticated social and political analysis—will find Kilcullen quite appealing.

Out of the Mountains is a challenging read, to be sure, as Kilcullen adventurously weaves personal narrative and scholarly reflection in a globe-hopping and chaotic journey. But for a book that comes close to the author’s aim of developing something akin to a “unified field theory” of how conflict will evolve, the journey is well worth undertaking.

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Obama and His Enemies
by Jonathan Alter
Simon & Schuster, 428 pp.

All three of these books accept the premise that either party or candidate might have won last November, but none of them identifies the moment in which Barack Obama won and Mitt Romney lost. Alter focuses on Obama’s 2012 campaign as well as the post-election struggle with the GOP that ensued the moment he won in 2008 and continues today. Obama, suggests Alter, was saved by a superior campaign strategy and organization that effectively exploited the Romney campaign’s mistakes. Balz, who has written the traditional, balanced, and “granular” account of the campaign cycle from beginning to end, appears to believe that the delusions of the GOP and the Romney campaign lost the party a winnable election. Sides and Vavreck take the provocative but stimulating route of considering every explanation of the outcome other than the “fundamentals” (basically, the power of incumbency and acceptably positive economic trends and conditions) and exploding each with varying quantities of empirical dynamite.

All of these highly competent and readable (yes, even the political scientists) analysts are dealing with the same set of facts. There is Obama’s sizable 2008 victory and the even larger 2010 Republican midterm win; the 2011 fiscal battles that Obama probably “lost” but that also often depicted the GOP as a gang of irresponsible ideologues; an economic backdrop of painfully gradual but relatively steady growth from the slough of 2009, accompanied by stubbornly high unemployment rates; Romney’s navigation of a chaotic nomination process in which Republican enthusiasm for his campaign was never high; and then a general election campaign in which polls themselves became an issue, even as they showed a generally static competition characterized by unprecedented spending on both advertising and field operations, aimed at restive party bases and a vanishing number of swing voters. The books all evaluate what might be called the game-changing status, from Romney’s poor post-nomination positioning to the monthly “jobs” reports, Obama’s early ad blitz, Romney’s choice of a running mate, the conventions, the “47 percent” video, and the debates. To simplify (and perhaps oversimplify), Alter suggests that the 47 percent video should have ended the contest, so perfectly did it confirm the Obama campaign’s carefully constructed image of Mitt Romney, but Obama’s wretched performance in the Denver debate very nearly threw the game away. Balz emphasizes the Obama camp’s digitally driven field campaign and its superior understanding of both demographics and battlefield state dynamics as crucial. And, as noted earlier, Sides and Vavreck argue that the campaign events either didn’t matter or more or less canceled each other out, leaving the fundamentals as the decisive factor.

Collision 2012:
Obama vs. Romney and the
Future of Elections in America
by Dan Balz
Viking, 381 pp.

Some of the most rewarding variations in the three books’ approaches involve the stage of the contest most remote from its conclusion and least amenable to empirical analysis or historical precedent: the GOP nominating process. To Alter, a large part of the problem was the “clown car” of right-wing extremists that handicapped Romney, saddling him with extremist policy positions and pre-testing future Democratic attacks on his background and character. Balz looks at it more clinically and at greater length, declaring that the primaries were a testament to Romney’s superior campaign organization and tactical flexibility but also deprived the GOP front-runner of the time and resources he desperately needed for the main event.

The GOP contest is something of a challenge to Sides and Vavreck, since the main building blocks of their general election analysis—economic indicators, regular and reliable polling, and partisanship indices—are largely irrelevant. They choose to be counterintuitive, not only knocking down the overwrought hypothesis that Romney forced himself on an unwilling right-wing electorate, but also developing a plausible (if hardly dispositive) theory that primary voters conducted a “discovery, scrutiny, decline” analysis of the candidates before happily settling on the front-runner. They do not, however, test the idea that Romney was a weak candidate who prevailed over an even weaker field in a contest that saddled him with an extremist agenda that would have mattered in a Romney presidency, even if general election voters never quite grasped its radicalism (which is Alter’s contention).

While neither Alter nor Balz posits a “game-change” moment, both do consider the election momentous, though for somewhat different reasons. Alter, who is attuned to the broader partisan and ideological struggle that reached new levels of intensity once Obama took office, stresses (as I would) the real-world consequences that would have flowed from a Romney victory, particularly if it had been accompanied by a GOP Senate takeover. This is his compelling explanation for the state of denial that gripped the GOP on election night and immediately afterward: they believed they were on the brink of a historic breakthrough for conservative ideology, perhaps more momentous than Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide, to which they compulsively kept comparing the 2012 cycle. Balz views the entire polarized spectacle of 2012 as more bad news for effective governing, a perspective that has certainly been confirmed, as of this writing, by the events of 2013. Both writers end their books looking, without a great deal of hope, for signs that Republicans, in particular, might break what the president has called “the fever.”

The Gamble:
Choice and Chance
in the 2012 Presidential
Election
by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck
Princeton, 352 pp.

Sides and Vavreck spend a good deal of time arguing that to win in 2016 Republicans need to do little more than run a competent campaign and hope the economy continues to struggle. In denying that there is any positive or negative ideological “mandate” from 2012, they place great emphasis on YouGov.com polling showing that voters perceived Romney as being closer to their own ideology than Obama. (That’s not to say, of course, that these perceptions were accurate.) They also shoot down arguments that GOP positioning on health care, immigration (even among Latinos), or abortion (even among women) had a material net impact on voters. Other social scientists may busily work to undermine these conclusions, along with those that consider Obama’s field operation as having at best a limited impact on the popular vote results (though possibly swinging two very important battleground states, Florida and Ohio). But advocates of any game-change theory must deal with the underlying reality that Obama’s 2012 performance among most demographic groups was very close to his performance in 2008, with a relatively uniform downward swing arguably attributable to fundamentals. If these allegiances hold, the demographic winds are blowing in a direction favorable to Democrats. But they don’t move mountains in four-year intervals.

Unlike Alter, and to a lesser extent Balz, Sides and Vavreck don’t make normative judgments about either party’s agenda, and thus don’t express alarm (as I do!) at their evidence that “moderate” Republicans can strongly support candidates committed to a full-on assault on the social safety net, progressive taxation, voting and collective bargaining rights, and other “consensus” legacies of the recent past. Nor are they worried that swing voters think the two parties are roughly equidistant from some mythical “centrist” norm. If unreflective partisanship and “false equivalence” are indeed the dominant filters through which Americans perceive political events, then we should all pay close attention to the intraparty dynamics that determine whether presidential candidates reflect median-voter versions of their party’s basic point of view, or something dangerously different. If it’s true that in 2012 marginally less robust economic indicators might have elected not only Mitt Romney but also a GOP candidate more openly and firmly extremist, then there’s some reason to think that, if the country experiences the kind of economic conditions congressional Republicans have every intention of producing, they might nominate such a candidate in 2016 and have a decent chance at victory. So when we see grassroots Republican activists in Iowa going wild with joy over Ted Cruz, we may be witnessing not another “clown car,” but a whole new circus coming to town.

Buy these books from Amazon and support Washington Monthly: The Center Holds: Obama and His EnemiesCollision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in AmericaThe Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election

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In Cheney’s view, Libby had been left on the battlefield after taking a bullet for him. Bush’s determination to resist his vice president’s entreaties was the final break in a complicated relationship, evolving from a first term characterized by Cheney serving as the president’s lodestar to a second term increasingly defined by Bush’s defiance of what even Cheney called his dark side.

Days of Fire:
Bush and Cheney
in the White House
by Peter Baker
Doubleday, 816 pp.

In his thoroughly researched chronicle of the Bush-Cheney administration, Days of Fire, Baker covers this iconic team from beginning to end in a fair-minded way, painting a generous, even affectionate portrait of Bush as a man who entered the Oval Office with good basic instincts but was easily manipulated by Cheney and others in a White House that was so dysfunctional and with such confused lines of authority that a Texas friend called it a “clusterfuck.”

Just as the Iraq War consumed much of Bush’s presidency, it fills much of Baker’s 816 pages—the early headiness at what seemed a big victory, the unrequited search for weapons of mass destruction, the disillusionment as the war became unpopular. Bush gave up golf—it didn’t look right during a time of war—and took up mountain biking for exercise and to relieve stress. “The more pressure there was at the White House, the harder he rode,” adviser Mark McKinnon observed. Never one to second-guess or appear anything other than resolute in public, Bush nonetheless confessed to Dan Bartlett, one of his principal aides, “I’m just thinking about what I’m going to do in Iraq, and I’m grinding my teeth.”

Baker gives Bush full credit for pushing the surge of troops into Iraq that most analysts believe saved the United States from a full-scale defeat and allowed a more face-saving end to the war. The military had balked, telling Bush the deployment would break the Army. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, initially opposing the surge, tempered her support, telling Bush, “This is your last card. It had better work.” Under pressure from friend and foe alike for being out of touch, trapped in a presidential bubble of his own making, Bush pushed back, saying after six years as president, “I see the world as it is, maybe better than most.” Brett McGurk, special adviser on Iraq, remembers Bush saying, “The world needs America to lead. You know why? Because nothing happens if we don’t lead.” Baker writes, “For Bush, the decider, there is no greater sin than giving into nothing happens.”

Reading Days of Fire as President Barack Obama was making his case for using military force in Syria to punish the regime for using chemical weapons, Bush’s words sound prescient. Obama opposed Bush’s mostly go-it-alone approach in Iraq, but mustering international and congressional support for strikes in the Middle East proved so daunting that Obama backed down, while leaving open the possibility that he, like Bush, could act unilaterally if diplomacy failed.

Bush spent more time away from the White House than even Ronald Reagan, but nobody could accuse him of not being engaged on Iraq. He made four secret trips to the country; on the last one, after the 2008 election, he told Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki that Texas is just like Iraq. “We got desert, oil, tough folks, lots of guns.” Maliki disagreed, saying there is “no place like Iraq, believe me.”

Bush did not agree to an interview after leaving the White House, and his office sent an e-mail to friends and associates explaining that he didn’t think a New York Times reporter could write fairly about his presidency. The ban relaxed over time, and the depth of reporting in this book suggests cooperation from all the major players, including Cheney, who sat down with Baker to offer his post-White House reflections.

Never one to sugarcoat anything, Cheney recognizes that to a great extent he was sidelined during Bush’s second term. He attributes it more to Bush’s evolution as president than to anything Machiavellian, and the Cheney that emerges in Baker’s epilogue seems more interested in talking about the dream retirement home he and his wife Lynne custom-built in McLean, Virginia, just down the street from Hickory Hill, where Ethel Kennedy lived, the elevator they had installed, and an apartment over the garage where a caretaker could eventually live. He expresses no regrets for the heavy-handed national security apparatus he helped usher in, saying it was “the right thing to do. It worked. We haven’t been hit for seven and a half years, longer than that now.”

Reflecting Cheney’s enormous influence during Bush’s first term, Baker titles one chapter “I’m Going to Call Dick,” which was Bush’s default position on everything. Cheney, for his part, was dutifully respectful to Bush at all times, never taking a commanding role in meetings, and often remaining so silent that aides were left to guess what he might be saying to the president in private. “Cheney’s role was like watching iron filings move across a tabletop,” says speechwriter David Frum. “You know there is a magnet down there. You know the magnet is moving. You never see the magnet.”

Everyone seems to agree that while Cheney’s hidden hand guided the first term, Bush was a willing copilot, playing the brash “Don’t mess with Texas” front man to Cheney’s behind-the-scenes hard-edged and assertive policies. Their friendship began to fray as Bush’s dependence on Cheney began to wane, and among the markers along the way was how Cheney and his loyalists handled the vice president’s accidental shooting on a hunting trip of his friend Harry Whittington, a seventy-eight-year-old lawyer. On the advice of longtime adviser Mary Matalin, they leaked the story to a Texas newspaper, keeping the White House and the Washington press corps in the dark. When the strategy backfired and Bush aide Nicolle Wallace urged Cheney to come clean and do an interview with Brit Hume on Fox, Matalin lit into her: “You are a fucking press lover.” Bush was pulled into the fray, and Cheney did the interview.

The episode had a lasting impact, transforming the way Cheney was regarded in the White House from all-knowing guru to something of a joke. The elevation of Rice to secretary of state, and then, after the 2006 midterms, the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—about which Cheney was informed, not consulted, despite his close friendship with Rumsfeld—signaled the emergence of a more confident Bush, less reliant on Cheney’s singularly dark view of the world. Bush’s second-term “freedom agenda,” with the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” was just as unrealistic, though less bloody than the regime change of his first term.

The New York Times is the paper of record, and Baker writes in that tradition. Most of the book is drawn from his reporting, and the rest he documents in detailed footnotes. The access he gets to White House officials rivals that granted to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward for his books, but unlike Woodward, Baker doesn’t rely on anonymous sourcing. Just about everything is attributed, a feat in itself when reporting on the White House.

Now that Baker is covering the Obama White House, the giblets in Days of Fire about Russian President Vladimir Putin are especially illuminating. Remember, Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul. They bonded over their shared Christianity, but then in a trade dispute, Russia cut off imports of American chicken drumsticks; Putin accused the U.S. of having separate and unequal plants for the “Bush legs” sent to Russia. Bush was astounded by his Cold War paranoia, telling a visitor to Camp David that negotiating with Putin was “like arguing with an eighth grader with his facts wrong.” When the Russian president began closing down media outlets, Bush would confide that he didn’t think Putin was a democrat anymore: “He’s a tsar. I think we’ve lost him.”

Days of Fire is less about bold-faced headlines and more about a nuanced portrait of the series of events and personal interactions that go into the scoreboard of a consequential presidency. Baker gives it his all in this book, with color detail worthy of a play-by-play account. A sampling: Bush once showed up in a purple Gremlin at the Richard Nixon White House for a date with the first daughter, Tricia. He was more confident than his advisers that he would win reelection, “because John Kerry is an asshole.” And for aides who accompanied Bush to his Texas ranch, there was a hierarchy for clearing brush, according to Bush’s trip director:

When you start, your job is basically, after someone cuts down a tree, to drag it out of there and put it wherever it is going to go. Then, if you really did good at that, the next level up was you could be in charge of making a pile of all the things that had been dragged over so that it burned well when you lit it on fire. If you were really good at that, you might be able to, one day, get to use a chain saw.

If there’s an analogy there, Baker wisely leaves it up to the reader to find it.

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A selection of political cartoons from the past few weeks.

The post Talk of the Toons appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Date: October 21, 2013
From: Senate staff speechwriters
Subject: Multiple-Choice Eulogy

Words can’t express how much I’ll miss my good friend, the distinguished senator.

You have never met a [man/woman] more faithful to [his/her] [spouse/lover/dog/constituents].

He may have made a career in Washington, but his heart never left [his home state/his alma mater/defibrillation].

In part that’s because of his upbringing, as the son of a [millworker/dockworker/worker in a factory that made blue collars].

Before he entered the Senate, he served [in uniform/his white-shoe clients/his own self-interest].

A stalwart supporter of [unions/civil unions/Union Carbide] he didn’t need to put his finger to the wind to know [right from wrong/which way to vote/where his campaign contributions came from].

This was a man who always took a [principled/wide] stance.

And so it is right and fitting that generations hence will find his name gracing [a train station/a post office/a deposition].

On a personal note, I will always cherish the memories of our time together [on the Senate floor/
golfing/swimming naked in the Sea of Galilee].

Quite simply, he was a great [friend/mentor/alibi].

Our thoughts and prayers are with his [family/unacknowledged second family] at this difficult time.

Let me leave you with the words he loved, the words of [the poet/an Irish ballad/a bawdy limerick].
[Insert poem/ballad/limerick here.]

My friend, I will miss you terribly. But I’ll always feel close to you, especially as I move into your
hideaway office.

God rest your soul.

By the staff of West Wing Writers, a speechwriting and strategy firm.

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One might expect the general public to embrace Kennedy’s opinion. After all, affirmative action, like many other race-conscious policies, is quite unpopular. Academic studies show that many people see a personal or group interest at stake in these policies—or what’s perceived as a zero-sum trade-off. This in turn activates what social scientists call a “group conflict” mentality, where issues are viewed through the lens of fixed pie sizes and group competition. From this perspective, whites and Asians might oppose race-conscious admissions preferences because when more seats are allocated to blacks and Hispanics, it means that fewer seats will go to “people like us.”

But what would public support look like if colleges and universities diversified their classes in a “race-neutral” way? Is “race neutrality” merely a rationalization for whites to use in protecting their share of the pie, or is there a genuine concern for the fairness of the process? If a racially neutral policy were to create more seats for blacks and Hispanics, would the public be more supportive—even if the increase came at the expense of whites and Asians? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes.

We gauged the authenticity of the public’s commitment to the principle of “race neutrality” with an experiment conducted in California just as that state was adopting a race-neutral approach to diversifying its premier state universities. The University of California system had gone from using race as an explicit “plus factor” to a process whereby the top 4 percent of students at each high school in the state would be guaranteed admission to a UC campus. The beauty of this approach is that it is racially neutral on its face, and yet it assures that a racially and socioeconomically diverse set of students would be admitted into the first-tier state universities. The downside of this “4 percent solution” is that racial diversity at the university level is only achieved when high schools are racially segregated, as in many cases they are.

Our project started with a baseline question about support for racial quotas. Responding to this question, only one-third of non-Hispanic whites approve of racial quotas, while almost 60 percent oppose them. Focusing on these opponents, we decided to test whether any diversity policy could win their approval—either a race-neutral one or one that ensured that whites did not have to give up any seats.

Our experiment randomly split our quota opponents into two groups. The first group was asked whether they would approve of simply adding new seats to an entering university class and then allocating these seats to blacks and Hispanics so that whites and Asians would not lose out. In other words, we proposed a race-conscious process to diversify a student body, but one that does not damage the personal or group interests of these white opponents. The second group was asked whether they would approve of a race-neutral effort—one focused on socioeconomic background, rather than race—to diversify the university. Unlike the proposal considered by the first group, this proposal did not offer respondents any assurance that whites and Asians would keep the same number of seats in the new process as in the old—but it would be race-blind.

What we found was that the white opponents of racial quotas consider the race-neutral option to be significantly more appealing than the “larger pie” option. Only 24 percent of whites who reject quotas in the opening question came to accept the racially conscious option, even though it would not hurt whites and Asians. In contrast, 36 percent of the white opponents of racial quotas presented with the race-neutral option changed their mind, saying they approved of the race-neutral approach. This difference is modest, but meaningful. While some might argue that whites’ commitment to racial neutrality is surface deep—a convenient rationale to maintain self-serving preferences—our results suggest something different: that this commitment is, for many, real and authentic. Many respondents exhibit a willingness to entertain racially neutral ways to increase black and Hispanic representation, even if it may cost their group and possibly their own personal interests.

It is easy to see why race neutrality is such an attractive concept. For liberals and conservatives alike, it is part of the American ethos, sounding in the founding documents and reverberating throughout our shared history. The liberal touchstone is Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” As historian Taylor Branch writes, that speech “projected [King] across the racial divide and planted him as a new founding father.”

When it comes to affirmative action, conservative leaders also find race neutrality attractive, and the concept provides the basis for their opposition to racial preferences. Without race neutrality, affirmative action could be construed as a clash of interests, with whites and minorities on different sides. But viewed through a race-neutral lens, the opposition to racial preferences emanates from principle. It becomes about rewarding merit and talent in a color-blind fashion—a point much in line with a general conservative attachment to individualism, competition, and “just deserts.”

It is thus worth noting that self-described conservatives did not respond to the experiment as others did. Given the zeal with which conservative leaders have embraced race neutrality as a core principle, one might expect the race-neutral treatment to resonate more powerfully with rank-and-file conservatives than with liberals or moderates. That, however, is not the case. We find that when we compare the effectiveness of the race-neutral and race-conscious frames within ideological subgroups, the gap between them is smallest among conservatives—just where it might have been largest. In fact, the race-neutral frame appears to be about twice as effective at winning over nonconservatives as conservatives: it persuades 48 percent of liberals, moderates, and people who do not report their ideology, but only 23 percent of conservatives. In the end, conservatives make up only about 10 percent of the affirmative action converts.

Where does this leave us with respect to Justice Kennedy’s remedies? With regard to affirmative action, a significant number of Americans, like Kennedy, can be persuaded to approve of race-neutral mechanisms for expanding diversity. Indeed, together with proponents of racial preferences, there is clear majority support for allowing universities to serve as vehicles for social mobility and racial change. More generally, we argue that advocates of diversity policies can attract new sources of popular support—necessary support, if diversity-increasing polices are to survive—by changing the ways people habitually think about issues of race.

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Encouraged by his mother, he applied to Per Scholas, a nonprofit job training program providing free technology training and career development in low-income communities. Lewis attended intensive, hands-on classes five days a week, seven hours a day. But just as important, Per Scholas offered the mentoring, life skills, and basic necessities—a Metro transit card, a new business suit—essential to boosting Lewis’s self-esteem and preparing him for job interviews. He graduated last year, and quickly landed a paid IT/desktop support internship with Neuberger Berman, a leading global asset management firm, as the result of a partnership between Per Scholas and the firm. Today, Lewis holds a full-time IT position in the firm’s New Jersey office—at a salary he admits he never dreamed of making. He owns a car, leases an apartment, and has enough to give back to his close-knit family. “My life has changed, and I’m never going to stop working hard. It’s what got me here,” he says.

Lewis is one of the lucky ones. As many as 5.8 million young Americans—one in seven young adults aged sixteen to twenty-four—are neither working nor in school. Millions more, like Servon Lewis once was, are trapped in jobs that make it tough for them to get ahead. According to a study by Civic Enterprises and America’s Promise Alliance, two-fifths of these struggling young people come from families who are middle class or better.

As Richard Florida chronicles (“The Living-in-the-Basement Generation”), the inability of many young adults to pursue economic independence comes with enormous and long-lasting costs. While part of this phenomenon is the result of the Great Recession, many young people are struggling because they’re simply not equipped to succeed. In central Iowa, for example, 17 percent of young people are “disconnected” from school and steady work. At the same time, “there are more jobs—good jobs—in Iowa than we have Iowans to fill,” laments Rob Denson, president of the Des Moines Area Community College and chair of Opportunity Iowa.

The good news in this otherwise dismal landscape is that many efforts now under way in communities across the country are effectively helping young adults succeed in school, job training, and, ultimately, a meaningful career.

The five case studies below highlight some of the most effective programs that could serve as national models for creating new opportunities for young adults to succeed.

1. PENCIL:Pairing School and Business Leaders

PENCIL’s founders understood early that business leaders have a critical role to play in improving public education. Founded in 1995 in New York City, PENCIL pairs prominent business leaders with public school principals in an effort to help students from elementary school to high school—more than 215,000 youngsters this year—to learn in the classroom and to excel in the workplace.

PENCIL’s model targets five key “focus areas” that impact student achievement: school leadership, family engagement, student engagement, college and career readiness, and school infrastructure. And PENCIL’s Fellows Program, a career development model for promising juniors and seniors that culminates with a paid, full-time summer internship at leading businesses across New York City, is an important component of its college- and career-readiness work.

In surveys of principals and executives participating in the program, both educators and employers say they’ve observed marked benefits from the program, including better attendance at parent-teacher conferences and improved academic performance among students who regularly attend PENCIL activities.

On the strength of its success, PENCIL has expanded to other cities, and now operates affiliate programs in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Rochester, New York.

2. Gateway to College:Second Chances for High School Dropouts

Gateway to College is a national network of colleges that offers dropouts (and students on the verge of dropping out) a chance to earn both a high school diploma and college credit. Since its launch at Oregon’s Portland Community College in 2000, Gateway to College has been replicated at forty-three colleges in twenty-three states—its rapid growth fueled by keen interest and funding from some of the nation’s top education foundations. In 2012, Gateway reached about 3,000 students across the country.

The typical Gateway student enrolls at age seventeen, having left high school with a GPA of just 1.4 and fewer than half the credits needed to graduate. Since most students require more than just academic instruction, Gateway’s model combines classroom teaching with a range of wraparound social and emotional supports needed by many at-risk students trying to finish high school and transition into college. Those who excel in the first year rejoin the general student population in year two.

Gateway has shown far better than average rates of success in helping dropouts achieve their GED. On average, graduates also earn thirty-two college credits, well on the way to an associate’s degree.

3. LaGuardia Community College: Going Beyond the GED

Many young people find that a traditional “youth” program is no longer relevant to their needs. Older young adults in particular aren’t likely to enroll in programs for teenagers. In New York, some are finding great success with the GED Bridge to Health and Business program (GED Bridge), which takes a new approach to adult education. GED Bridge’s “contextualized curriculum” prepares lower-skilled individuals to pass their equivalency exam and continue on to specialized college and career training programs. Students receive added help with career advisement, financial aid, and social supports.

According to an initial evaluation by the nonprofit education and social policy research organization MDRC, one year after enrollment, GED Bridge students were more than twice as likely to have completed the course and passed the GED exam than students in a traditional GED prep class, and more than three times as likely to have enrolled in college.

As Dan Bloom, a longtime MDRC poverty researcher, notes, programs like GED Bridge can provide a missing link in the current range of solutions for older high school dropouts. In today’s competitive labor market, those with a GED alone face tough odds. The need for stronger pathways to post-secondary education has never been greater—and the urgency will only increase in 2014, with a new national GED exam that puts a high premium on college readiness.

4. Roca:“Truth, Trust & Transformation”

Guided by a motto of “Truth, Trust & Transformation,” Roca has worked in the Boston area for twenty-five years to salvage one young life at a time. The program seeks out the most difficult, challenging young men for whom other programs have failed, and pushes them to identify, confront, and overcome destructive behaviors and learn the skills they need to reengage in society, education, and the economy. Participants—aged seventeen to twenty-four—include convicted felons and gang members, refugees and immigrants, youth in the foster care system, and single parents. To date, Roca has helped more than 25,000 of these young men make positive, sometimes profound, changes.

Roca accomplishes this feat through a unique intervention model. For two intensive years, clients move through a “stage-based program” of activities and case management, starting with relationship building and life skills and progressing through education and eventual employment. Two more years are devoted to individualized follow-up.

Roca’s intervention model has shown significant results. In 2012, Roca served 409 very high-risk young men, retaining 78 percent through the year in educational and prevocational efforts or transitional employment. Of those who completed the intensive component of the model last year, 90 percent have had no new arrests, 100 percent have had no new technical violations, 79 percent were on track to retain employment for at least six months, and 70 percent demonstrated education gains.

Over time, the dividends are more dramatic: participation in Roca’s model resulted in a 67 percent drop in repeat arrests after five years and a 100 percent increase in employment compared to other high-risk groups.

Now acclaimed as a national model, Roca has expanded to Springfield, Massachusetts, and last year was chosen to help lead a “pay for success” experiment in the state, which rewards organizations only if they deliver proven results. Roca’s model will be carefully studied by Harvard University researchers, and the organization will be rewarded for delivering better social outcomes and cost savings—a virtual guarantee, given its track record to date.

5. Year Up:Nonprofits Building Key Skills

With supporters from Wall Street to Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill, Year Up has quickly become one of the most promising models empowering disadvantaged youth to reach their potential. During its intensive one-year training and education program, participants spend six months building core professional and technical skills—IT/help desk support, network support, and so on—in a classroom. The second six months focus on applying these skills through an internship with one of Year Up’s 250-plus corporate and government partners, which include companies such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and LinkedIn.

The program stresses academic and professional rigor, setting high expectations for quality of work and professional behavior, and relies on a wide network of staff mentors, social workers, and community-based partners to guide young people along the way.

Significantly, Year Up focuses on higher-achieving and motivated disconnected young adults, specifically low-income urban youth, aged eighteen to twenty-four, who already have a high school diploma or GED. Through the program, they can earn up to twenty-three college credits and a weekly stipend. Some 1,900 students participate annually at Year Up sites in ten metro areas across the U.S.

The outcomes are impressive. Short-term studies show that 84 percent of graduates are employed or attending college full-time within four months of completing the program, employed Year Up grads earn an average of $15 an hour (equal to $30,000 a year), more than 95 percent of interns meet or exceed employers’ expectations, and nine out of ten corporate partners would recommend the program to peers.

Year Up is committed to building more robust evidence about what’s working—and refining what’s not. The program was recently selected to participate in a flagship ten-year federal evaluation—the Innovative Strategies for Increasing Self-Sufficiency study—sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Not surprisingly, expansion plans for the program are under way. Year Up aims to serve 2,500 young adults yearly by 2016 and open at least three more sites to bring its successful model to more needy youth.

“The common belief system in this country was that if you got to the age of eighteen and hadn’t made it, you were basically a lost cause,” said Year Up CEO Gerald Chertavian, who founded the program in 2000 after a career as a tech entrepreneur. Too many inner-city kids, including the ones he befriended and mentored in New York and Boston, were seen as economic and social liabilities. A dozen years into the Year Up model, Chertavian says he is proud that the program “has started to change the perception of those young people as economic assets rather than liabilities” with employers and policymakers alike.

To ensure that more young people have access to successful programs like these, policymakers should support a dramatic infusion of federal funding to support these efforts. But with fiscal and political realities likely to make this difficult, there’s also plenty that can happen outside Washington.

Employers, for example, are taking a growing interest in addressing the opportunity gap. Employers, after all, are the end users of workforce talent and thereby stand to gain or lose the most from the quality of the labor pool. Several prominent groups (including Opportunity Nation, Year Up, and MENTOR) are working with the Ad Council to develop a national public service campaign, due out in early 2014, that aims to shift public perceptions of vulnerable youth who would otherwise be overlooked by employers. This campaign will seek to portray “opportunity youth”—young people who are neither in school nor working—as “essential economic assets,” and make the case for altering mainstream business practices so employers large and small consider investing in these young adults.

Related to this effort, the new Employment Pathways Project will be launching an online resource library for employers and policymakers that includes hands-on tools for recruiting and hiring youth, proven best practices and case studies, and even a zip code locator to identify local mentoring opportunities and community partners who can facilitate training and hiring. At the same time, organizations such as United Way Worldwide, the National League of Cities, and the Aspen Institute’s new Forum for Community Solutions have all expanded efforts to help communities share best practices and advocate for policy change.

The dramatic rise of youth unemployment in recent years means that finding the right solutions has become more urgent than ever. Through a firm national commitment to supporting effective programs that create opportunity for youth, policymakers can ensure that success stories like Servon Lewis are the rule, not the exception.

To read more from our November/December 2013 cover package on opportunity in America, click here.

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For young people without a college degree, the future is bleaker still. While workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher have enjoyed earnings growth over the last three decades, those with only high school or less have seen their incomes stagnate. Employment among men with only a high school diploma or less has consistently declined—more than 40 percent of these men are unemployed today, compared to about 25 percent in 1979.

The problem isn’t that young people aren’t pursuing higher education; in response to job market changes, large numbers of young Americans are, in fact, going to college—many are just not earning a degree or credential once they get there. That’s especially true for low-income and minority students. At community colleges, students can attain associate’s degrees or certificates and enjoy some labor market gains afterward. But only about a third of those who attend eventually obtain an associate’s degree, and only half gain any credential at all—a completion rate that is embarrassingly low.

While addressing these problems effectively requires a range of education and workforce policies, one particularly promising set of schooling practices deserves more attention and development: high-quality career and technical education (CTE). Designed to prepare high school students for employment and careers as well as for college, these promising new programs could play a critical role in reviving both the academic and employment prospects of young people.

In the past, CTE was known as “vocational education.” But let’s be clear: we are not talking about our father’s shop class or old-fashioned voc ed. In those classes, students with the weakest academic skills spent their time in dead-end classes that often prepared them for low-wage or disappearing jobs, if any job at all. Even worse, the programs tracked students, particularly minorities and disadvantaged students, away from college, leading voc ed programs to become very unpopular in those families and communities.

By contrast, the best models of high-quality CTE today integrate rigorous academic instruction into the teaching of technical and employment skills and thus prepare young people for college just as well as a traditional “college prep” program does. These next-generation CTE programs, available in both high schools and colleges, typically encompass a broad range of work-based learning efforts, including apprenticeships, paid internships, and co-op programs, in addition to in-school instruction.

For instance, there are now several thousand “career academies” around the country, where students take classes that prepare them for jobs in a particular sector (like health care, finance, or information technology) as well as participate in more general academic classes. To complement their classwork, students are placed into jobs in their chosen field during the summer or the academic year. For example, the Ballard High School Academy of Finance in Seattle trains students in financial literacy and banking activities within a broader academic curriculum, and also helps students get internships with local financial firms.

Research shows that career academies improve the earnings of disadvantaged students, especially at-risk young males, after high school by nearly 20 percent, and that these gains persist for many years afterward.

Other new and very promising CTE models are developing around the country. The High Schools That Work model, which combines rigorous academic work with career education, has been implemented in dozens of school districts, especially in the South. In California, several school districts have implemented Linked Learning, which integrates strong academics into career exploration and development. Many regions are also developing “apprenticeship schools,” which grant associate’s degrees to high school students completing a program of classwork plus work experience in specified sectors. Many states are encouraging these trends by developing new career-oriented paths of study and work, often linked to high-growth economic sectors, and providing appropriate support for local schools and with business involvement.

The students who stand to benefit from these models are young people like Levi McCord and Nehemiah Myers, both students at the Lehigh Career and Technical Institute in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania. McCord, who takes traditional classes such as English and sociology at his public high school in the morning and then travels by bus to Lehigh for technical courses in the afternoon, plans to head straight into the workforce after graduation. “I’ll already have most of the skills I need to know to get a job,” said McCord, who is learning to become a welder. As a certified welder, he can eventually expect to earn as much as $67,000 in some parts of the country.

Myers, on the other hand, has been studying electromechanics and mechantronics part-time at Lehigh. He plans to enroll in a co-op program at a four-year college next year, where he can get paid work experience while working toward a bachelor’s degree in engineering. “I’m hoping to get accepted into one senior year,” Myers said.

By teaching high-level academic work in more applied contexts, like project-based and work-based settings, high-quality CTE can make academic material more accessible and more appealing to students like McCord and Myers. Because they are more motivated to learn this material in a real-world context, and understand it better, their performance in high school and enrollment in college might actually rise. Moreover, the stigma now associated with career education among the best-prepared students should diminish over time.

Given the potential demonstrated by these new models, dismantling the walls that have separated CTE from more traditional programs leading to higher education should be a priority for educators and policymakers. Our goal should be to have all students graduate from high school ready for both college and careers, and be able to choose from a range of appealing higher education and labor market possibilities afterward.

This implies a need not just to teach CTE in “silos” that separate these students from those who will attend college, but also to offer at least some education about careers and employment skills to all students. Of course, we do not envision locking students into specific careers so early in their lives; rather, career exploration and education should enhance their labor market knowledge and future opportunities, without closing off any higher education or professional options.

For instance, students need more information and counseling about jobs and careers to help them pick courses of study that they can complete and that will lead to good-paying jobs. And colleges should face stronger financial incentives from the government to help students do so. Employers and industry associations should also stay involved in efforts to develop CTE curricula, to ensure their relevance to the skills employers seek (and often have difficulty finding) among potential workers. And appropriate assessment tools must be developed to measure student attainment of technical and employability skills, beyond those measuring the usual academic outcomes, along with policies holding schools accountable for their development.

In addition, high-quality CTE should provide a range of social and academic supports, especially to students who have fallen behind in academic preparation. Teachers and administrators might also need professional support to keep up with newer curriculum and pedagogical developments in this area. High schools must develop agreements with local colleges (known as “articulation”) to ensure that students find appropriate pathways from the former to the latter, and perhaps begin their post-secondary work while still in high school.

To achieve these goals, the states and the federal government could do more to support innovations in high-quality CTE and the scaling of successful models. For example, the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, which provides about a billion dollars each year to state and local CTE, should target funds to programs based on newer and better models. Building better career pathways in high schools and colleges for young students as well as adults could be encouraged through other federal laws, such as the Higher Education Act and the Workforce Investment Act, or other programs that provide grants for the most innovative state and local efforts. All would require more rigorous research and evaluation to identify the successful approaches before moving them forward.

State governments could also provide funds and technical assistance to local school districts to help them generate more effective CTE teacher development and student support services. They could do more to help build modern teaching curricula that combine academic and technical skill building, and develop more partnerships between industry and educators to ensure the job market relevance of CTE. They could also help develop tests that better assess the technical and employment skills of students as well as their academic ones, so we could hold districts more accountable for the quality of the CTE programs they provide.

More broadly, we need to better integrate the worlds of education and workforce services and make both more responsive to job market trends. In an era when public funding for education will remain tight, we must use the resources we currently spend more effectively than we do today. While we don’t have all the answers to the labor market problems of our young people and our disadvantaged citizens, providing better career tech education and workforce services would certainly help.

To read more from our November/December 2013 cover package on opportunity in America, click here.

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What’s going on here? One of the most powerful factors correlated with a community’s opportunity level, as measured by the indicators in Opportunity Nation’s Opportunity Index (see here), is the number of young people aged sixteen to twenty-four in a community who are “disconnected”—both out of school and out of work. In the United States, at least 5.8 million young people fit that description. Their wasted talent is not only a tragic loss for them personally; it also damages our communities, our national economy, and our global competitiveness. All told, youth disconnection costs taxpayers $93 billion a year in lost revenues and increased social services. (See Richard Florida, “The Living-in-the-Basement Generation.”) These young people represent an opportunity for the nation to tap the talents of millions of potential leaders and productive workers at a time when America’s skills gap is significant.

While state and local leaders are already pursuing successful strategies to create more robust education and career opportunities for young adults (see Dorian Friedman, “Connecting Kids to College and Careers”), federal policy also plays a critical role. The following road map can ensure that all of America’s young adults get a fair shot at moving up the ladder and contributing to the health and vibrancy of our society.

Increase pathways to success for all youth.

Over a lifetime, the earnings difference between a high school dropout and a college graduate is more than $1 million. Yet too many young people are dropping out of high school, at a tremendous cost to themselves and the country. Although high school graduation rates have been improving over the last decade, especially for African American and Hispanic students, more than three million young people aged sixteen to twenty-four were high school dropouts in 2010—a number that is still unacceptably high.

The answer to solving this crisis is to first recognize that there is no silver bullet—students who drop out or who are at risk of dropping out face a wide range of needs and unique challenges. Many educators and schools are becoming more strategic about ensuring that all students have access to multiple resources tailored to meet this broad range of needs—an approach that requires increased support and resources. States and school districts should invest in proven strategies that increase graduation rates in high-need schools, better enable students who have left school to return, and facilitate the entry of high school graduates into post-secondary
education.

Such a comprehensive approach might include flexible class schedules; early warning systems that identify students who are at risk of dropping out and provide them with services designed to keep them in school; and wraparound supports such as academic and career planning, mentoring, and tutoring.

High-quality work-based learning experiences can also provide students with the opportunity to earn money while gaining critical professional and academic skills. One successful model is 12 for Life, a partnership between Southwire, a major electrical wire, cord, and cable company, and Carroll County Public Schools in Georgia. Students combine their studies with practical real-world experience at a customized Southwire manufacturing facility. Since it began in 2007, 12 for Life has helped more than 630 students earn a high school diploma while gaining valuable work experience. Federal policies and resources should support investments in programs like these.

Update and reauthorize the Perkins Act.

The global economy demands that more employees have a post-secondary degree or industry-recognized credential. By 2020, roughly two-thirds of jobs will require some form of post-secondary education—a dramatic switch from the 1970s, when only 28 percent of U.S. jobs required such training. One way to meet this demand is to improve the quality of and access to career and technical education (CTE). (See Harry J. Holzer, “Not Your Father’s Shop Class.”)

CTE is a crucial component of America’s education system. It reaches 94 percent of high school students and thirteen million post-secondary students in the United States. Almost all high school students take at least one CTE course, and one in four students takes three or more courses in a single program area.

Research suggests that CTE programs can improve student education and career outcomes. More than 70 percent of CTE students go on to pursue post-secondary education soon after high school. In addition, workers with CTE-related associate’s degrees or credentials earn, on average, between $4,000 and $19,000 more per year than workers with associate’s degrees in the humanities.

Unfortunately, the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act—last renewed in 2006 to support increased access to career and technical education—has become antiquated and is in desperate need of modernization. Creating better opportunities for college and career advancement means requiring increased collaboration and coordination between high schools and post-secondary institutions, and between CTE and the private sector. This will ensure that CTE programs align with regional and state workforce needs and expose students to career and work-based learning opportunities.

Encourage partnerships with employers.

Employers in all sectors can connect young adults to meaningful employment, mentoring, education, internships, and training opportunities, particularly in partnership with educational institutions and nonprofits. Successful partnerships are currently happening in communities across the country. For example, Chattanooga State Community College and the Chattanooga Operations of the Volkswagen Group of America have developed training programs designed for individuals interested in working in the automotive industry. These three-year programs offer students a unique blend of classroom and laboratory instruction with paid, on-the-job training experience in the Volkswagen plant.

At the federal level, the Community College to Career Fund Act, introduced by Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken and California Democratic Representative George Miller, encourages such collaborations and other job training efforts. These include registered apprenticeships and paid internships for low-income students that allow them to simultaneously earn credit for work-based learning in a high-skill field.

Pair college planning support with savings plans for low-income youth.

While it’s increasingly clear that post-secondary education is critical to a young person’s economic security and mobility, the escalating cost of higher education is putting the dream of college success further out of reach. The real cost of the tuition and fees of a four-year degree at a public institution has more than doubled in the last twenty years, skyrocketing from $3,810 in 1992 to $8,660 in 2012. Families and students are borrowing more money to cover the costs. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of college graduates had student loan debt, with an average of $26,600. Barriers to college access and affordability disproportionately affect lower-income students. In 2009, just 8.3 percent of students from the bottom quartile of family income earned a four-year degree, compared to more than 82 percent of students from the top income quartile.

As the burden to pay for college shifts more to students and their families, college savings plans, particularly for low-income children, are a potentially important strategy for helping students afford college. At least one study shows that students with a dedicated college savings account in their own name are six times more likely to go to college than their peers without such
an account.

One promising model is San Francisco’s Kindergarten to College Program, or K2C, which launched in 2010 and now reaches more than 7,500 students. The program provides every kindergarten student with up to $100 in an individual college savings account that is eligible for matching grants and to which parents, friends, and family can contribute. These accounts are coupled with financial education in the classroom aimed at encouraging students to save and effectively manage their accounts.

At the federal level, Delaware Democrat Chris Coons and Florida Republican Marc Rubio in the Senate have proposed the American Dream Accounts Act, which would authorize the creation of online college savings accounts combined with resources and support aimed at encouraging college savings and preparing students for college.

Invest in programs that work.

Historically, the federal government has sometimes supported programs regardless of whether they actually achieve results. Funding programs that don’t work wastes valuable taxpayer money and fails to help the people at whom the programs are aimed.

Pay-for-performance initiatives included in the reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act, the Higher Education Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and other federal education initiatives have the potential to change the status quo by ensuring that federal funding is linked to results and outcomes. Providers get paid only when they achieve the intended results for the people they serve and only to the extent to which they meet performance measures. In return, programs enjoy flexibility, which encourages innovation. One bipartisan example is the Careers Through Responsive, Efficient and Effective Retraining (CAREER) Act, introduced by Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman and Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennet, which would implement a pay-for-performance model for job training programs.

Another promising idea is to create an Enterprising Pathways Innovation Fund. This fund would reward and replicate successful approaches, leverage support from the private sector, and ensure effectiveness by strengthening performance measurement and accountability for results.

Initiatives like these can help guarantee that every taxpayer dollar invested in the future of America’s young people is going toward a program that can truly help them succeed.

We know that in a free society, some inequality is unavoidable, and that people will always differ in skills and ambition. But inequality without the chance for mobility is inefficient and unjust. One’s zip code should not condemn anyone to an inescapable fate. When the American Dream is at risk for some, we all suffer.

Strong federal policies aimed at opening the doors of opportunity will help move the needle for millions of Americans. They are important tools to jump-start the American Dream for the next generation, and make sure our young people have a fair shot at a meaningful life and career in the twenty-first century.

To read more from our November/December 2013 cover package on opportunity in America, click here.

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