Constitution World

Waiver States with Race to the Top Grants Slow to Reform

Since No Child Left Behind expired in 2007, Congress has shown only fits and starts of reauthorization activity for the most recent incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). In response, the Obama administration announced last year that it would exempt states from some of the most punitive provisions of NCLB – including one that requires all students to achieve proficiency on state reading and math exams by 2014 – if states proposed, and the Department approved, their own reform plans. The Department approved 11 states’ waivers in the first round of applications. Another 26 states and the District of Columbia applied for the second-round February deadline, and this week the Department approved eight.Education stakeholders, though, have expressed concerns as to how strictly the Department will require states to adhere to their applications. Naysayers point to Race to the Top (RttT), another key Obama administration initiative, as evidence that once-rigorous reform efforts have been laxly enforced. The Department has come under fire for states’ slow implementation of the ambitious plans they set forth in their RttT applications – in fact, Department officials even threatened to rescind Hawaii’s RttT funds because the state has delayed its implementation timeline so significantly (the state is still on probation).Of the eight states that have been granted waivers so far in Round Two, six of them – Delaware, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island – also received Race to the Top grants. (Connecticut and Louisiana also received waivers in round two, but were not granted RttT awards.) That begs the question: Have those states proven themselves to be effective reformers thus far?Across these six states, the Department has so far approved 38 requests for amendments (some requests included more than one amendment) to the states’ RttT proposals. Although some of those amendments are fairly innocuous, or even represent a positive development (for example, an increase in the funding level for a program included in one of the proposals), others suggest that the states face major hurdles in implementing the reforms outlined in their original applications.Perhaps most noticeably, each of those six states submitted at least one request to push back their timeline for implementation of teacher and principal evaluation systems. Of the four key components of the Race to the Top applications, teacher and leader effectiveness – including evaluations – was allocated the most points out of the possible 500 in the application scoring. (The three other components were developing high-quality standards and assessments, building and using comprehensive data systems, and turning around states’ lowest-performing schools.)Stakeholders should be concerned that these six states struggled to comply with the timelines they laid out in their RttT applications. This raises questions about states’ capacities to implement other massive reform efforts – like setting in place the entirely new accountability systems described in their NCLB waiver applications. Implementing these systems, as well as many of the other reforms required in the waivers, will be no easy task because they will require new infrastructure.Furthermore, states will be on the hook for implementation expenses under the NCLB waivers. With many states facing budget shortfalls, the costs of the waivers could be high; one California estimate found that a waiver would cost the state more than $2 billion to implement. That’s another potential stumbling point for states. States faced challenges in implementing Race to the Top in spite of a large pot of federal dollars available explicitly for that purpose (for the six states discussed here, awards ranged from $75 million for Rhode Island to $700 million for New York). But in the case of NCLB waivers, states aren’t even provided federal dollars for implementation.The No Child Left Behind waivers release states from the restrictive proficiency targets and other requirements set forth in NCLB, and therefore hold a lot of potential for states to experiment with alternative accountability systems and other reform efforts. But as in Race to the Top, states may struggle to find the capacity – and the cash – to implement major reforms. Whether states will be able to live up to the Department’s, and their own, standards for excellence remains unclear.
Federal Education Budget Project

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Lebanon’s Dangerous Sunni-Shiite Divide Widens

Randa Slim

May 26, 2012

The main fault line in Lebanese politics is the division between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Years in the making, this divide must be overcome soon or it could plunge Lebanon into another civil war.

Recent sectarian clashes in north Lebanon and Beirut are but a symptom of this growing divide. At the political-leadership level, Hezbollah’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the Future Movement’s Saad Hariri — the Shiite and Sunni de facto leaders — are not on speaking terms. At the grassroots level, a wall of fear and mistrust separates Lebanon’s two largest communities.

In the 2009 parliamentary elections, 93.1 percent of the Shiite vote went for Hezbollah candidates while 76 percent of Sunnis voted for Future Movement candidates.

Each of these parties enjoys a significant level of support from the Christian community, the third-largest religious bloc in Lebanon after Shiites and Sunnis. In the 2009 elections, the Christian vote split almost equally with 46.1 percent going to the Future-led March 14 coalition, and 49.4 percent for the Hezbollah-led March 8 coalition.

The Muslim parties’ Achilles heel remains their lackluster appeal to Muslims on the other side of the sectarian divide.

Over the years, Hezbollah has tried to bridge the gap by reaching out to several different Sunni groups. In 2008, Hezbollah signed a memorandum of understanding with a Tripoli-based Salafi group led by Sheikh Hassan al-Shahal. Yet this group and other Sunni politicians who have allied with Hezbollah over the years have failed to command a following inside the Sunni community that is of equal weight with the constituency Hezbollah ally, Gen. Michel Aoun, has built among Lebanese Christians.

Similarly, the Future Movement has tried to develop a cadre of Shiite politicians and activists who could present a political alternative to the duo of Hezbollah and an older Shiite party, Amal. The Future Movement’s efforts have yet to make a dent, however, in the Hezbollah-Amal support base in part because the cadre is viewed as merely a surrogate for the Future Movement and a Sunni choice imposed on Shiite voters.

The divide between Lebanese Shiites and Sunnis has grown wider and sharper since the outbreak of the uprising against Syria’s minority Alawite government 15 months ago.

Most Lebanese Sunnis, particularly in the north, support the Syrian revolution. Their animosity towards Syrian President Bashar al-Assad goes back decades; many still believe he played a role in the 2005 assassination of the late Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

For most Lebanese Shiites, on the other hand, regime change in Syria would remove an ally from power. The majority of Shiites accept Hezbollah’s and Iran’s narrative that the Syrian uprising is an Israeli-Western conspiracy aimed at weakening the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis of resistance.

Regionally, the Syrian revolution has created a wedge inside the Islamist camp.

Prior to the Arab citizen revolutions, Islamist groups were united by their opposition to pro-Western Arab authoritarian regimes and by their support for the Palestinian cause. The revolutions in Bahrain and Syria have unraveled this unity.

Today, Sunni Islamists, in particular Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups such as Hamas and Lebanon’s Jama’a Islamiyah, support both the Syrian revolutionaries in their bid to oust Assad and the Sunni minority Bahraini government’s campaign to quash a Shiite rebellion that Sunnis believe was instigated by Iran.

The Iranians and Hezbollah, meanwhile, are assisting the Syrian regime in its brutal crackdown against the citizen uprising while supporting Bahrain’s rebellion. Both movements are fueled by the same values and aspirations motivating Arab citizens everywhere from Libya and Tunisia to Egypt and Yemen.

Hamas’ recent disassociation from the Syrian regime weakened the “resistance” argument which Hezbollah leaders trumpet in defending their support for Assad and crystallized the sectarian nature of the divide within political Islam. Shiites are supporting fellow Shiites and Sunnis are standing by the side of their Sunni brethren even if the latter happen to be authoritarian regimes engaged in a violent crackdown against their own citizens.

This contradiction has created problems for Hezbollah with the Islamist constituency it has spent so much time and effort cultivating. As a leading Egyptian Islamist figure, speaking on condition he not be cited, told me in April in Cairo, “The [Muslim] Brotherhood has a problem with Hezbollah and Hezbollah has a problem with the Brotherhood.”

While Salafis have always been part of Lebanon’s Sunni religious fabric, their recent rise to prominence also is evidence of a trend of anti-Shiite radicalization that is taking shape inside the Sunni community — especially among the poor and lower-middle classes in rural areas and some urban centers.

Beirut, a Sunni-majority city, has yet to embrace this phenomenon in the same way that two other major Sunni-majority urban hubs, Sidon and Tripoli, have done.

The Salafis are gaining momentum for two main reasons. One is a leadership vacuum in the moderate Sunni camp that is mainly represented by the Future Movement whose current leader, Saad Hariri, has coined a new meaning for leadership — tweeting. The other reason is the Salafis’ simple appeal of wanting to restore Sunnis’ dignity from the humiliation they suffered in May 2008 when Hezbollah launched a military incursion into the streets of Beirut.

It is ironic that the same argument which was used by Shiite religious leaders, including the late Imam Musa al-Sadr in the 1970s, to justify the establishment of a Shiite armed movement as a precursor to Hezbollah, is now being proffered by Salafi religious leaders when they talk of Sunnis needing to carry arms in self defense.

The rise to power of Islamists and Salafis in Arab countries — with the possibility that Egypt’s next president could be a Muslim Brother — has also emboldened Lebanon’s Sunni community to challenge the political status quo, which they believe is dominated by Hezbollah. Conversely, Lebanon’s Shiites feel under siege and are worried about an emerging anti-Shiite Arab order, hence their interest in preserving the status quo.

This is the time for dialog and compromise. President Michel Suleiman’s decision to convene a National Dialog in mid-June is a step in the right direction. Hezbollah’s leader has announced that his party will participate. Future-led March 14 has conditioned its participation in the Dialog on the resignation of the cabinet, a non-starter since the coalition lacks the parliamentary majority to force a no-confidence vote.

More than the dialog among the political bosses, what is urgently needed is a reconciliation process at the grassroots level involving high-school and university students, religious figures, civil society and trade associations, among others.

During an interview last week (May 25) on New TV, an older woman from Beirut’s Shiite southern suburbs remarked: “We don’t hate anybody. They hate us.”

I would bet residents in Beirut or Tripoli or Akkar would say the same thing about people in the southern suburbs. With every incident of sectarian violence, the chasm separating the two communities grows wider.
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Reply Comments on Wireless Service Interruptions

GN Docket 12-52

Public Knowledge, Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontrier Foundation, Benton Foundation, Center for Media Justice, Free Press, Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Open Technology Institute

May 31, 2012

The above captioned commenters remain concerned that codifying wireless interruption policies will result in serious infringement of users’ First Amendment rights, while inviting increased usage (and potential abuse) of interruptions and increasing uncertainty for consumers, carriers, and authorities alike. The clearly disparate judgments of when interruption is appropriate suggest that leaving such policies to multiple state and local authorities will only result in uncertainty. The Commission should therefore exercise its preemptive powers to provide certainty to users, carriers, and authorities.The Commission should be wary of attempts to “balance” speculative harms to public safety against ever--‐present fundamental rights. While law and public policy are involved in a constant process of reconciling different public interests (such as safety and the First Amendment), it would be a mistake to attempt to assign all such interests equal value. Not just because some may be more fundamental than others, but because wireless service interruptions disproportionately do far more harm to free speech than they could ever benefit public safety. In fact, in this instance, the values of free speech and public safety are consonant. Wireless service interruptions not only threaten the speech rights of targeted and non--‐targeted speakers, they also risk dire consequences for public safety as well, since wireless interruptions will limit the ability of emergency services personnel to obtain and transmit vital information. In the interest of both free speech and public safety, the Commission should implement strong rules and policies to prevent interruptions and ensure that an overlapping network of interruption policies and technologies do not threaten the critical public interest, convenience, and necessity in accessing wireless communications.The full reply comments are available for download as a PDF.
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Reply Comments on Wireless Service Interruptions

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Humanitarian Intervention Again and Again

Peter Beinart

May 30, 2012

Every time I hear about a massacre like last Friday’s in Houla, Syria, I think back to Srebrenica, the July 1995 Bosnian massacre that helped turn me—and many other post-Vietnam era journalists and policy types—into liberal hawks. Since then, humanitarian intervention has become a recurring feature of American foreign policy debates. After the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan (no, they weren’t humanitarian interventions but they have sapped America’s capacity and stomach for war), I’d have thought discussions of humanitarian intervention might go the way of the dodo bird. They haven’t. In fact, the debate over intervention in Syria sounds a lot like the debate over intervention in Libya, which sounded a lot like the debate over intervention in Darfur, which sounded a lot like the intervention in Kosovo, which sounded a lot like the debate over intervention in Bosnia.

Understanding these debates requires understanding that they’re really four-sided affairs. There’s the liberal hawk position, which advocates humanitarian action regardless of whether it extends the frontiers of American power. Think Samantha Power. There’s the neoconservative position, which tends to support humanitarian action because it extends American power, since neoconservatives believe it is mostly American power that makes liberal ideals possible. Think John McCain. There’s the anti-imperialist position, which sees armed humanitarianism as immoral because it extends American power. Think Noam Chomsky. And there’s the realist position, which sees armed humanitarianism as unwise because it detracts from American power. Think Brent Scowcroft.

For liberal hawks, making humanitarian intervention happen requires winning support from both other nations and from neoconservatives, two groups with diametrically opposed desires. Other nations will support humanitarian intervention if they believe it is not a vehicle for extending American power. Neoconservatives will support humanitarian intervention if they believe it is a vehicle for extending American power. For other nations, UN Security Council approval is crucial because it limits America’s ability to make humanitarian war serve its own ends. For neoconservatives, UN Security Council approval is dangerous because it limits America’s ability to make humanitarian war serve its own ends. What other nations liked best about the war in Libya was that America “led from behind,” which was exactly what neoconservatives liked least.

I suspect that we’ll increasingly see the same dance play out over Syria. To get Russia’s support in pushing out the Assads, the United States will need to find ways of limiting America’s influence over a new Syrian regime, which is exactly what neoconservatives oppose. Asking Vladimir Putin for help, declared McCain, is evidence of “a feckless foreign policy which abandons American leadership.”

Therein lies the rub. For neocons, “American leadership” is a good in and of itself. There’s little recognition that American leadership might ever be bad for America and for the world, just as there’s little recognition on the anti-imperialist left that American leadership might ever be beneficial. The Obama administration, which is largely an alliance of liberal hawks and realists, is trying to figure out how to exercise enough American “leadership” to pressure Russia into dumping the Assads but not so much that Russia fears Syria becoming an American client. Whether that effort will work is anyone’s guess, but the idea that America can be more effective when it restrains its power via international cooperation—as the US did when it helped establish NATO and when it forged international military coalitions in the Gulf War and the Balkans—makes a lot of sense. Self-limitation can be a tricky concept to defend at home. Then again, as in the days of the Balkan wars, most Americans aren’t paying attention anyway.
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What the Hell Should We Do About Syria?

Randa Slim

May 31, 2012

The massacre in al-Houla, where Syrian military forces and allied militiamen massacred more than 100 civilians in cold blood, leaves no doubt about the intentions of President Bashar al-Assad's regime: survival at any cost and through any means. Assad does not have a Plan B.

While the United States and its Western partners remain publicly wedded to a toolbox of diplomacy, sanctions, and pressure to force Assad out of power, he responds with escalating violence. And it will only get worse: As long as Assad remains in power, more horrific massacres will follow. As long as Assad and his military elites believe they can win this fight, they will not relent, and defections from the senior brass -- whether out of loyalty or fear -- will remain minimal. The steady flow of Russian weapons and Iran's financial and military assistance reinforce their calculus.

Assad is digging in for a long fight. As the struggle goes on, the regional implications of Syria's crisis will increasingly become a complicating factor. Sunni-Shia sectarian tensions are already at a boiling point next door in Lebanon.

The Syrian opposition is also becoming more militarized, and will grow increasingly lethal with time. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are providing the weapons that are transiting through Turkey. According to recent news reports, the United States is playing a coordinating role in this process, vetting rebel groups to make sure the weapons do not fall into the wrong hands.

But don't expect this influx of arms to be a game-changer: The weapons being shipped to the Free Syrian Army do not present a serious challenge to the regime's military arsenal. They will neither serve a deterrent function nor prompt the senior brass to recalculate the long-term costs of their support for Assad. At best, the weapons will help prolong this fight.

Nor does the international climate provide much reason for hope. Russia and Iran, Assad's two principal patrons, are not ready yet to abandon the Syrian regime; they do not yet believe Assad's rule is in danger. And though the West might be overestimating Russia's sway over the Syrian leadership, it is deliberately ignoring Iran's influence in Syria. For now, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stands firmly behind Assad.

Over the years, the Iranian leadership has nurtured contacts and relationships inside Syria's Alawite community, particularly with senior Alawite figures in the security and intelligence services. They have a good feel for the dynamics inside this community. Whether the Iranian regime is ready to be part of a deal to unseat Assad remains unclear, but the fact that an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official has recently publicly admitted to the presence of elite Iranian forces in Syria is partly intended to send the message that a NATO-led military intervention in Syria will be costly. It is also a signal to the international community that any future deal in Syria must involve Iran.

During the recent discussions in Baghdad between the global powers and Iran, the United States rejected an Iranian proposal to add Syria and Bahrain to the discussion agenda. It might be worth pursuing this proposal at the next round of talks in Moscow. Time and again, Iranian senior officials have stressed the need for a political resolution to the Syrian crisis. They have been reaching out to different groups in the Syrian opposition. As the Western community keeps searching for a political solution in Syria, Iran might have some ideas about how to bring it about.
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Special Announcement: ED to Fund College Accounts for Low-Income Kids

The Education Department just announced a new College Savings Account Research Demonstration Project, which will be implemented within the GEAR UP Program. The demonstration will test the effectiveness of pairing federally-supported college savings accounts with GEAR UP activities against just GEAR UP activities. They will initially allocate $8.7 million worth of funds that are already appropriated to support the demonstration.The project will use a rigorous, randomized control design and will be on a large scale, offering accounts to 10,000 students and comparing them with a control group of another 10,000 students in the GEAR UP program who will not be given access to accounts.We're excited to host an event this afternoon where Under Secretary Martha Kanter and Congressman Chaka Fattah will describe the demonstration and its links to GEAR UP. You are welcome to join us this afternoon in person, watch it live on our webcast, or view it at a more convenient time. The announcement will be followed by a panel discussion, featuring Willie Elliott III, whose research was particularly influential with federal policymakers.Much more to come on this, but needless to say this is an exciting step for ED to take and proud of the role we were able to play in providing consultation to ED as they designed the program. We are looking forward to monitoring and critiquing this project as it continues to be developed and is implemented.

Asset Building Program

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Children and Media: Saying ‘We Just Don’t Know’ Isn’t Quite Right

Last week, the Diane Rehm Show featured a segment on how touch-screen devices – and any other interactive, screen-based media – affect young children. I had the good fortune to be one of the guests, and the recurring theme was that we just don’t have enough research to make broad statements about what is good or bad for kids.It’s a line that many of us who follow media and children’s issues have repeated over the years, in part because there are so many unanswered questions and so many variables. Are children learning anything or being harmed in any way? If so, what are they learning or how are they being harmed? Which device, which piece of software, which moment within the game, is responsible? Which kinds of kids are affected more than others? Are there differences by demographics? By the interactions they have with their parents? By what they had for breakfast that morning?The questions can be endless, and so the easy response is to say, “we just don’t know.” But as I reflect on last week’s radio show, I wonder if I misspoke. It’s not as if there is a complete void of information. As I learned in writing Screen Time, there is a solid research base on the impact of television and video for children from age 2 on up. (It’s the foundation for my mantra of the Three C’s: content, context and the individual child). Research on infants and video, an area that was virtually untapped a decade ago, has grown as well. Child Development published a study last month, for example, on how infants are slower to track information on a screen than 4-year-olds. And as Ellen Galinsky shows beautifully in her book Mind in the Making, scientists have gained enormous insight over the years on what affects young children’s cognitive and social-emotional development. Research centers around the country – at Georgetown, Northwestern, Temple, Vanderbilt, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin and others – are starting to marry those insights with findings on children’s media, including interactive versions. The interactive-versus-passive-video experiment I described in Slate earlier this month is one example.The uncharted frontier now is the realm of mobile media for very young children, delivered via a touch screen. Here, yes, there is a lot of “we just don’t know,” though some work is underway. Researchers at EDC, SRI and the Michael Cohen Group –three research firms conducting work for the U.S. Department of Education’s Ready to Learn program – are investigating how preschoolers use iPad and Android tablets and apps in classrooms. Some early, non-academic studies of electronic books, including a report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center this week, are providing hints of what to consider as we examine what is helpful to learning, what is a distraction and how the joint engagement between adult and child matters. (For a helpful synopsis, see this Huffington Post piece by the Cooney Center's Michael Levine.)Don’t get me wrong. There is a desperate need for more independent, peer-reviewed research. We need larger sample sizes and randomized trials. We need experiments that include children from a multitude of backgrounds. We need research conducted outside of laboratories – in natural settings such as children’s homes, infant-and-toddler care centers, preschools, libraries and elementary schools.But some of the fear and frenzy around today’s new media might be lessened if we took note of the information that does exist so far and where it points us. In my interpretation of the existing research, that means educators and parents should be zooming in on the quality of the interactions children are having with their parents, siblings and teachers as they use media. Child development research shows us the positive impact of meaningful back-and-forth conversations and a shared focus on enriching content on a child’s language development. Let’s aim for early learning experiences, with new media and without, that enable children to have those kinds of interactions.And let’s keep asking for more research too.
Early Education Initiative

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EVENT: Making Savings Work for the Poor - What We Know, What We Don't, and Where We're Headed

On Tuesday, June 5th, the Global Assets Project (GAP) will be part of a three day discussion on savings for the poor. The webinar, hosted by Microlinks will address three questions that are at the heart of the savings field: where are we now? What is working and why? Where are we headed?On the first day, GAP’s Jamie Zimmerman, along with Debbie Dean of the Grameen Foundation, will examine the current landscape of formal savings for the poor. They will address and tackle certain assumptions that we in the savings community deal with every day, including the very definition of “savings for the poor”.Day two will be hosted by Rossana Ramirez (Freedom from Hunger) and Jasmina Glisovic (CGAP). They will explore good practices and policy interventions with an emphasis on client perspectives and savings product development. They will also focus on savings product innovation, particularly with respect to technology’s impact on new and sustainable delivery channels.Finally, Jamie Zimmerman will return on day three, along with Nisha Singh (SEEP Network) in order to have a candid discussion over what we still don’t know about the savings landscape. They will focus on identifying the questions that still need to be answered in order to make the savings community more impactful.The Speakers Corner will take the form of an online, facilitated seminar from June 5th (8:00 AM EST) to June 7th (6:00 PM EST).In order to participate please sign up here. We’re looking forward to an engaging and productive discussion!

Asset Building Program

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Giving Civil Society a Voice in Internet Governance

India may be the world’s most populous democracy, but its online territory is rapidly becoming less democratic. Last week, for example, a Madras High Court ordered Internet service providers to block a number of websites. While courts in other countries, including the Netherlands and the UK, have ordered file sharing website The Pirate Bay to be blocked, India’s growing restricted list goes much further, including video sharing websites Vimeo and Dailymotion as well as the website Pastebin, which is used to share links, stories or code.Last week’s court order was an example of how a law increasing intermediary liability, such as those that make websites legally responsible for third-party content, can restrict Internet freedom. Last April, the Indian government passed the Information Technologies (Intermediaries guidelines) Rules 2011, which, among other things, made websites responsible for all user-generated content that could be considered harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, or libelous. In testing how web companies interpret the law, the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore found that “intermediaries to err on the side of caution and over-comply” with the legislation, resulting in chilling effect on freedom of expression. But opposition to the law has been increasing, particularly as civil society groups get more involved. Earlier this month, Aseem Trivedi and Alok Dixit from Save Your Voice, a campaign against web censorship in India, began a hunger strike in protest of the government agenda. Rising opposition has pushed Indian IT Minister Kapil Sibal to promise to review the new rules. Yet India is not alone in imposing restrictions on Internet use and content. China, Russia and Uzbekistan, among other countries, are also actively restricting their citizens’ freedom of expression online. China has long served as an example of how to control content, with net freedom advocates referring to the Chinese censorship machinery as the “Great Firewall of China.” In Uzbekistan, access to the government-run social networking site Muloqot.uz requires a valid mobile phone number which is linked to a user’s passport number, ensuring that users are easy to trace.

While Indian courts are attempting to control content domestically, a simultaneous effort from India’s national government is focused on increasing governmental control of the global Internet. Last October, India submitted a proposal to the United Nations for the creation of a UN Committee for Internet-related policies (CIRP). CIRP would be a government-only body tasked with overseeing Internet governance and standards setting.  

This would alter the current landscape of international Internet governance, which is a multi-stakeholder process including civil society as well as government actors. The US-based public policy organization Center for Democracy and Technology describes the current model as "bottom-up, decentralized, consensus-driven approach in which governments, industry, engineers, and civil society" contribute to policy outcomes. The distribution of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and top level domains, for example, is managed by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization. Organizations like Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium work together with engineers to develop standards.  

A Global Trend

India is not alone in its attempts to reshape the international Internet governance landscape. Last September, China, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan submitted a proposal for an “International Code of Conduct for Information Security” to the UN General Assembly to codify international norms of Internet regulation.

The proposed shifts toward more central control in international Internet governance models would be a dramatic departure and would mean that governments, rather than engineers or civil society, set standards and policies. The debate has been heating up in anticipation of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)’s first World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT12) in Dubai. Gary Fowlie, Head of the ITU Liaison Office to the United Nations, noted at a recent event that WCIT12 will be an opportunity for the ITU to revise its mandate to include Internet governance. Analysts fear that this may provide an avenue for President Vladimir Putin and others to assume international governmental control over the Internet, locking out civil society actors.

The battle against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. demonstrated not only the dangers of changing Internet standards to control information, but also why public input is so critical in these discussions. Massive public outcry against SOPA and PIPA forced lawmakers to reconsider to potential damage the legislation would cause. The reaction, both online and off, demonstrated the widespread desire of citizens to be involved in Internet policy-making. On January 18, 2012, 115,000 websites blacked out in protest and over 7 million people petitioned Congress to oppose the bills.

Nevertheless, the United States is also trying to export restrictive policies with efforts such as the Trans Pacific Partnership, a secretly-negotiated treaty that proposes to export strict copyright enforcement. The closed-door nature of the TPP negotiation process that has made it significantly more difficult for opponents to fight this effort than the publicly-debated SOPA and PIPA bills.

Unfortunately, the ITU’s Council Working Group, which is charged with setting the agenda for WCIT12, is accepting input from governments and members, but has excluded suggestions from civil society. Last week, over thirty civil society organizations, including the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, sent a letter to ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Touré that asks for “full, equal, and meaningful participation of civil society stakeholders” in WCIT12. The organizations also requested that members be allowed to share WCIT documents.

Without transparency and civil society input in Internet governance discussions, the outcomes would be damaging to the global Internet. In a recent Op-Ed, Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell criticized centralized approaches to Internet governance as “antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without borders.” Furthermore, without civil society input, citizens will not have a voice to impact the Internet we each use on a daily basis for our political, social, and economic well-being.

The Pirate Bay, Dailymotion, Vimeo and Pastebin are some of the websites blocked in many countries.

Open Technology Institute

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Event Thursday: Financing College Success (with Special Guest Speakers)

While a lot of people are off relaxing for the Memorial Day week, we’re in the midst of one of our busiest weeks in a while. Hot on the heels of today’s inequality event we’re really pleased to be hosting another exciting event tomorrow, May 31st. Financing College Success: Innovations to Promote Readiness, Access, and Completion will investigate the ramifications of student debt, inadequate college savings, and college affordability on the economic outcomes of low-income students, and better still we’ll be looking at some potential solutions that are being tested to address those problems.While student debt dominates headlines, the financial road to college success is determined long before that debt starts piling up. The financial lives and experiences of K-12 students have a significant impact on their college readiness. As recent work by William Elliott and colleagues has demonstrated, children form savings habits and college-bound identities from a young age. Meeting national goals for college enrollment and completion requires us to focus on the many steps that occur well before students set foot on a college campus.We’re very excited to be welcoming two new speakers to the event, Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter and Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-PA). Rep. Fattah has long been a leader in promoting college prep for students from low- and moderate-income families and we’re excited to hear from him and Dr. Kanter, who is something of a path breaker in her current position.How can we eliminate college access barriers? What are the best ways to get students invested in higher education opportunities from a young age and to prepare them financially to be able to attain those goals?We’ve got a great panel to examine those issues and some exciting programs that are demonstrating possible routes to success. Professor Elliott will be here, along with Debra Saunders-White from the Department of Ed, Kevin Carey from Ed Sector, and Evelyn Ganzglass from CLASP.Please join us in person (RSVP) or online beginning at 2:30pm (Eastern time) for what’s sure to be an exciting event. Just look at this lineup:Opening Speakers
Martha Kanter
Under Secretary, U.S. Department of EducationThe Honorable Chaka Fattah
Member, U.S. House of RepresentativesFeatured Speakers
Willie Elliott III
Assistant Professor, School of Social Work
University of KansasDebra Saunders-White
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Programs
U.S. Department of EducationKevin Carey
Policy Director
Education Sector

Evelyn Ganzglass
Director, Workforce Development
Center for Law and Social Policy
Asset Building Program

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