Posted on December 23, 2010
Following the release of several other federal dashboard information websites earlier this year, the Department of State and USAID have launched the Foreign Assistance Dashboard on December 16, 2010. Like other federal dashboards, the Foreign Assistance Dashboard was created in response to Obama’s Open Government Initiative – for which he signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government on his first day in Office. The initiative aims to create openness in the U.S. government as well as engaging public trust by establishing “a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.” Besides ensuring greater accountability in government spending, another major objective of the Foreign Assistance Dashboard is to enhance foreign aid effectiveness and efficiency. The creation of this dashboard is also a part of U.S. commitment to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action.
The Foreign Assistance Dashboard ties in very nicely with the recently issued Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), which highlights the importance of embracing transparency for achieving efficiency and effectiveness in foreign aid investments. The goal of the dashboard is also consistent with Global Washington’s policy recommendations, Global Development through Aid, Partnerships, Trade and Education, which includes transparency and accountability as one of its four principles on aid effectiveness.
So, what does the Foreign Assistance Dashboard do and how does it work? Let’s look at several key features:
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- • By Country – users may use maps to track where the money is going. You may, for example, click on a particular country to see how much funding the U.S. government overseas post receives in a particular fiscal year.
- • By Sector – thirty-five sectors are organized under seven broader foreign aid categories. For example, if you are interested in U.S. foreign aid investments in Economic Development, you will be able to see how much of the $58 billion foreign aid budget has been appropriated for several areas under Economic Development – e.g. Infrastructure, Agriculture, Macroeconomic Foundation for Growth, Trade and Investment, etc.
- • By Initiative – even though not all foreign aid funding is attributable to an initiative, there are three significant interagency targeted initiatives that are highlighted on the dashboard as they all have received “unprecedented investments” from the U.S. government to make improvements in critical development areas. They are the Global Health Initiative, the Global Climate Change Initiative, and the Feed the Future Initiative. You will see detailed funding information for each of these initiatives.
- • Top 10 Things You Should Know – it contains a simple explanation of the goals and limitations of this dashboard, a quick overview of the entire U.S. government budget process, and definitions of what the data means.
- • FAQS – users may find answers to their general and data questions from this page.
I think the Foreign Assistance Dashboard is successful in terms of enabling the public to examine, research, and track foreign aid investments in a standard and easy-to-understand format. The data is shown in very digestible ways of color-coded, 3-D charts and maps, and the data can be searched by country, by sector and by year. The data sets can be further filtered in a variety of ways. However, one thing to note: this dashboard is still in the very early stages of development. The current data only contains foreign aid budget information for the Department of State and USAID, but it aims to integrate all U.S. Government foreign aid budget, financial, program, and performance data. The dashboard does not make any promises on when this next phase will be completed. Hopefully, this will happen very soon. Then, we can have an accurate and full picture of foreign aid spending, and the efficacy of this dashboard can be maximized.
Posted on December 20, 2010
A Review of Enhancing U.S. Education and Competiveness
an article in Foreign Affairs by Arne Duncan
Review by Linda Martin, guest blogger
In Enhancing U.S. Education and Competiveness, an article which appears in the November/December 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan links U.S. economic competitiveness directly to the American educational system. The news is sobering. U.S. competiveness is sliding. The causes− low educational performance of U.S. students; teaching systems that fail to deliver on preparing students for 21st century employment; and protectionist attitudes towards international educational investment.
| “The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.”– President Barak Obama |
Through eye-opening statistics, Duncan demonstrates how the problem starts early in the education cycle and continues through college. By the end of 2010, “the portion of U.S jobs demanding a postsecondary education will be 63%” and the discrepancy between supply and demand is growing. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that the United States will be short 3 million college graduates by 2018. According to Duncan, potential solutions include:
- Implementing reforms, including STEM (Science, Technology and Math) programs; new Pell Grants and new K-12 competency standards.
- Upgrading language requirements, expanding multicultural learning opportunities and offering incentives to boost the number of teachers in foreign languages fields;
- Channeling spending toward the most challenged students;
- Relinquishing protectionist views towards international education, and embracing an ethic in which “advancing education everywhere brings benefits to everyone.”
- Supporting new technology based knowledge delivery systems; and higher quality teacher training.
Duncan paints the picture of a U.S. economy with growing needs for an educated workforce, and an education system that is not keeping pace. Technology has dramatically increased the demand for skilled college graduates, who compete worldwide for positions in the global marketplace. Yet in one generation, “the U.S. has fallen from first to fifth position among developed countries with the most college graduates, and ranks ninth in college completion rates among 25 to 34 year olds”.
In an unprecedented effort, the U.S. government is investing $3.7 billion in STEM (Science, Technology and Math) programs, including $1 billion for K-12 initiatives. Yet research has shown that money alone will not suffice. “With the exception of Luxembourg, the United States spends more per elementary student than any other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nation.” At the secondary level, only 3 countries spend more per student, and no other country spends as much as the U.S., at the college level.
Developed nations with higher educational performance rates than the U.S. target their resources to students with the most need. In the United States, however, school funding often depends on tax levies that reflect the affluence of local communities. Duncan quotes an observation by Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association, that “other developed nations are more successful at recruiting talented teachers, providing first-rate teaching preparation and professional development, and honoring the teaching profession. Unlike in the United States, in South Korea teachers come from the top ten percent of graduates — and those who teach are viewed as making an important contribution to building their nation”.
Duncan makes the point that investments in STEM, while laudable, need to be balanced with investments in other areas. Employers lament the inability of the educational system to cultivate the skills they want – “the ability to adapt, innovate, synthesize data, communicate effectively, learn independently, and work in teams.” New and expanded initiatives in multi-cultural learning, language acquisition, and the arts and humanities, can provide a more fertile ground for building the combination of intellectual, creative, humanistic, and professional skills needed to compete and collaborate in the 21st century.
| If you talk to a man in a language he understands,” that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language that goes to his heart.”– Nelson Mandela |
The dilemma the U.S. faces in foreign language acquisition exemplifies the systemic nature of the problem. Elementary school is a time where language is perhaps easiest to learn, yet only 1 in 4 schools offer foreign language studies. At the secondary level, according to Duncan, “only 10 U.S. states have foreign language requirements in order to graduate, while 75 % of states have reported shortages in foreign-language teachers (2007-08 figures)”. Without exposure to other cultures and languages, what motivation do students have to consider teaching language as a profession, or to consider other occupations where the ability to communicate with colleagues from diverse cultural backgrounds is critical? Duncan points out, “In 2002, just months after 9/11, U.S. postsecondary institutions nationwide awarded only six bachelor’s degrees in Arabic language and literature. By 2008, the total had risen only to 57”.
One thing we can all do that does not require money or other resources, is to realize that “expanding educational attainment everywhere is the best way to grow the pie for all”. Better-educated populations abroad mean greater markets for U.S. goods; a globally educated population can better meet challenges that the U.S. cannot achieve alone; research confirms that a better educated world is a less violent world; and well-educated immigrants help our economy. Per writer Ben Wildavsky, “from 1995 to 2005, immigrants started one-fourth of all engineering and technology companies in the U.S.”
Along with our global competitors, we can gain from sharing best practices. For example, the American traditions of free inquiry and peer-reviewed research are held in esteem by many countries, and we are unrivaled in providing educational access to students of all socioeconomic levels.
Given American innovation in the field of technology, we can choose to take a leadership role in expanding educational access globally while responding to new U.S. student demographics. We can do this by combining successful classroom based experiences with “technology-rich learning environments, online classes, distance learning, and electronic instruction.”
Improving the U.S. educational system, and in so doing so, the U.S. economy, requires a strong and serious commitment at all levels of the U.S. government, partnerships with the private sector and community activism. It requires collaboration with other nations and sharing of best practices, to the benefit of all concerned. Success depends on a new mindset of mutual and shared progress; a stronger valuing of the teaching profession and higher quality teacher training; new ways to deliver knowledge; and a balanced investment at all levels of education. Working together, schools can cultivate the skills employers want and the world needs to solve global problems. Duncan delivers a thorough analysis of the challenges and the solutions that can help the U.S. restore its educational capital, and establish itself as 21st century world leader in educational innovation.
*according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, China
Posted on December 15, 2010
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the release of the long-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review (QDDR) final report today. The QDDR is a sweeping assessment of how the Department of State and USAID can become more efficient, accountable, and effective- it aims to be a blueprint for elevating American “civilian power” to better advance our national interests. One of the four key areas of the QDDR is to “elevate and modernize development,” which includes focusing investments on areas of comparative advantage, and building the capacity of USAID to be the world’s premier development organization.
This review has been ongoing for over a year, and its release has been postponed many times since last spring. The development community has been waiting, sometimes impatiently, for the QDDR’s release, because it could spell important changes for the way development assistance is carried out by the U.S. government. There were concerns about a power struggle between USAID and the State Department, and that the QDDR findings would be in conflict with the concurrently developed PSD (Presidential Study Directive) on development, now known as the PPD (Presidential Policy Directive) on Global Development (read in our blog about the PPD here).
We have only had a short time in which to digest this 200+ page document and the summary materials, but it seems that some of the worst fears about the QDDR have not been realized. It puts forward some important support for USAID, and makes positive statements about the direction of development policy in general. USAID is named as the leader of the White House’s Feed the Future initiative, and the Global Health Initiative. It also supports the “USAID Forward” program, with specific objectives for strengthening USAID. For the most part the QDDR seems to support the PPD. There are however some important areas of concern, namely that short-term political objectives may override longer-term development goals. As InterAction puts it, “With State Department officials having ultimate oversight of development strategies and budget proposals, it is unclear how short-term political objectives will not harm the delivery of longer-term development outcomes, namely poverty reduction and local ownership by key stakeholders.”
Quick Links for the QDDR
Download the QDDR in its full 240 page glory from the State Department’s website here.
View Secretary Clinton’s town hall event releasing the QDDR here.
Download the official QDDR fact sheet here.
Download the QDDR executive summary here.
Read Secretary Clinton’s prepared remarks at the town hall here.
News and Views about the QDDR
InterAction analyzes the QDDR, breaking down the positive elements and areas of concern.
See InterAction’s QDDR page here.
MFAN Statement on the QDDR.
Oxfam’s Press Release: “State’s QDDR vision is compelling yet incomplete”
The Cable (Foreign Policy blog) reports on the QDDR release
