William Safire used to write a column in which he'd try to read the mind of some world leader and imagine what Mikhail Gorbachev or Anwar Sadat really thought, as opposed to the diplomatic niceties they were obliged to utter aloud.

In homage to the master, let me try an imitation: reading Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's mind.

"Everybody asks me what the next plan is. There is no plan! We have broken our leg and we have to wait for the leg to heal. It's just a matter of time. And most of the bright ideas to heal faster will only make things worse.

"The banks need time. They are all broke. We have them on life support, lending them money at 0 percent and then allowing them to buy Treasury bonds at 2 percent. It's basically welfare to help them reduce their debts.

"Consumers need time. We can sprinkle money at them, but they aren't going to spend it. They borrowed and borrowed during the real estate bubble. Now they are paying off their credit cards, paying down their home equity lines. Don't look to them to start buying again until they feel more confidence they won't be laid off tomorrow.





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Editor's note: Kathleen McCartney is the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Cambridge, Massachusetts Across the country, parents have been busy preparing their children for the return to school. They have been buying new backpacks, new school supplies and new clothes.

Their goal is not to stimulate the economy; rather, they are providing incentives to jittery children who are about to trade the halcyon days of summer for homework. Change is hard -- and new sneakers ease the blow.

Education policy is changing, too. Last week, the Department of Education announced the second round of winners of its Race to the Top competition. Nine states and the District of Columbia received $3.4 billion thanks to funds included in the stimulus package.

The winning states are making dramatic changes in how they do business -- adopting common standards and assessments, building data systems that measure student growth and success, retaining effective teachers and principals, and turning around their lowest performing schools.

Critics are already on the attack. They argue that the federal government is micromanaging districts, that states have been force-fed national standards, that the competition is too dependent on union support, that the selection of states was based on politics, and that $3.4 billion is not meaningful, given that education is a $650 billion enterprise nationwide. And yet, 40 states and the District of Columbia applied to Race to the Top in round one, and 35 states and the district applied in round two.

I guess Race to the Top worked as well as new sneakers as an incentive for change.

Opponents also say that Race to the Top is funding unproven policies, like encouraging the growth of charter schools and linking teacher evaluation to student performance. It's a fair point; however, the sad truth is that the knowledge base in education is abysmal.

In contrast with medical research, we haven't invested in education research, so we don't know nearly enough about what works. Failing children can't wait for needed research. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is right to make some best guesses about best practices. The critics don't seem to realize that they are standing in the way of innovation.

The education sector isn't used to competition; it's used to complacency. So, to jump-start reform, the Department of Education has also asked organizations to compete for a share of its Investing in Innovation Fund.

The fund is modest -- $650 million -- designed to accelerate the growth of programs with demonstrated evidence of their effectiveness. Seventeen hundred institutions applied, and the 49 highest-rated applicants must now secure a 20 percent private sector match.

This is a new strategy for the Education Department -- it is willing to change, too. Soon, nonprofits such as Teach For America, districts such as Denver, Colorado, and higher education institutions such as Ohio State and Harvard universities will receive resources to bring good ideas to scale. We need more programs such as this to foster creative thinking in the education sector.

Most policies have unintended consequences, as is the case here. For example, in Burlington, Vermont, a well-regarded principal was fired because her school appeared to be a failure, based on fifth-grade test scores; however, a serious examination would have revealed that 37 of 39 fifth-graders in her school were either refugees or special-ed children.

Firing this principal was wrong, of course. Yet we can't use examples such as this as evidence of policy failure. Instead, as we implement new policies, we need to get smarter about how we evaluate performance at the level of state, district, school and child.

We must resist resistance to change. The status quo in education provides reason enough. Consider three stunning statistics. First, 53 percent of U.S. children in our 50 largest cities graduate from high school. According to research by McKinsey & Co., underperforming students, many of whom are poor, have lower earnings, poorer health and higher rates of incarceration. This costs us money -- the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession year after year, according to McKinsey.

Second, black and Latino students are roughly two to three years behind their white peers on standardized tests. For this reason, education is a social justice issue. Education is the gateway to success -- there is no other. Education cannot be the root of inequity and thereby inequality.

Third, the U.S. no longer has the best public education system in the world -- not even close. Our children performed 25th and 21st in math and science, respectively, on the Program in International Student Assessment, well behind countries such as Finland and Singapore.

Andreas Schleicher, a principal investigator of the Program in International Student Assessment study, has written, "Success will go to those individuals and countries which are swift to adapt, slow to complain, and open to change." We can listen to Schleicher or suffer the consequences. Global competitiveness, scientific discoveries and the very future of our democracy are all at stake.

Race to the Top and the Innovation Fund are not the answer in and of themselves, but they are important next steps in education reform. Already there are early signs of success. For example, both have incentivized school districts and union leaders to work together to improve teacher evaluation systems, a precondition for meaningful classroom innovation.

It is also clear that these policies will turn states and districts into learning laboratories. Then researchers can evaluate the impact of innovation on student achievement. To contribute to this work, schools of education have to make fundamental changes in our approach to research.





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Editor's note: Peter Bergen, s national security analyst, is a fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank that promotes innovative thought from across the ideological spectrum, and at New York University's Center on Law and Security. He's the author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader."
Washington -- On May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, President George W. Bush announced "major combat operations" in Iraq had ended. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror."
For the umpteenth time, Bush bracketed Saddam and the 9/11 attack. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001, and still goes on."
The president went to describe the 9/11 attacks -- "the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble" -- as if this had any bearing on the Iraq War.
The president also made the definitive statement that Saddam was "an ally of al Qaeda," something that his own intelligence agencies had determined was not the case before the war.
Video: U.S. combat role comes to an end
Video: Iraq war never over for some
RELATED TOPICS
Iraq War
George W. Bush
Al Qaeda
Military and Defense Policy
Terrorism

Now seven long years later, another president will again announce that the U.S. combat mission is over in Iraq, which is a good moment to ask: Was the Iraq War somehow post facto worth the blood and treasure consumed?

Look at what was lost and what it cost:

-- More than 4,500 American soldiers dead and 30,000 wounded.

-- At least 100,000 Iraqis killed.

-- Costs to U.S. taxpayers that will rise above a trillion dollars.

-- Jihadist terrorist attacks increased around the world sevenfold in the three years following the 2003 invasion.
There is no question that the United States liberated Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's demonic tyranny, but that argument was not what persuaded Americans that a preemptive war against the Iraqi dictator was in their best interests.
They were hustled to war by the invocation of putative Iraqi mushroom clouds and the argument that there was a genuine and threatening Saddam-al Qaeda WMD "weapons of mass destruction" nexus.
The war against Saddam wasn't conducted under the banner of the liberation of the Iraqi people but rather under the banner of winning the war on terrorism. And by that standard, it was a failure, giving the jihadist movement around the world a new battlefront and a new lease on life.
A study by New York University's Center on Law and Security, which I co-authored, compared the period after September 11 through the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with the period from March 2003 through September 2006. The study found there were seven times more deadly attacks by jihadists after the invasion than before.
Even excluding terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, fatal attacks by jihadists in the rest of the world increased by more than one-third in the three years after the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq War, of course, did not cause all of this terrorism, but it certainly increased the tempo of jihadist attacks in places far-flung as London, England; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Amman, Jordan.
It also bears recalling that almost none of the goals of the war as described by proponents of overthrowing Saddam were achieved:

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Theresa Brown tells of dying patient who got much sicker from aggressive treatment
She says "fighting" serious illnesses can cause terrible agony, keep patient from family
Brown cites study suggesting palliative care offers better quality and longer life
Dying patients should not be pressured to go through drastic treatments, she says
Editor's note: Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse in Pennsylvania. She is a leading contributor to The New York Times' blog Well. She is the author of "Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between."
The patient, in his late 70s, had survived prostate cancer and had a new diagnosis of leukemia. A few days before, he'd been healthy and fine, but now his white blood cell count was so high that it was clogging his circulatory system, making it hard for him to breathe.
We brought his white count down and relieved his shortness of breath. At that point, he could have opted for palliative care and gone home on hospice with a decent enough quality of life to enjoy what little time he had left. However, the patient, encouraged by h
This is a hard case. In his recent New Yorker article "Letting Go," Dr. Atul Gawande explains how the first impulse of doctors, patients and family members to "fight" cancer or other serious illnesses makes it very difficult to have honest discussions of what treatment can and cannot do.
I understand why physicians find these conversations difficult, why it's preferable to focus on the good we can possibly accomplish rather than the likely futility of the struggle.
But there's another story to be told in these cases, and it's usually the nurse who's the observer of that narrative: the suffering caused by these well-intentioned treatments. Chemo was risky for this patient because of his age and medical history, and the damage done was unbelievably bad.
The problems began when cells killed by the chemotherapy spilled their contents, overloading my patient's kidneys and throwing him into renal failure. The intravenous fluids he'd needed had been too much for his circulatory system, and he developed heart failure, too.
Watching this patient suffer ... because of what we did to him in the name of helping him was agonizing.
--Theresa Brown
RELATED TOPICS
End of Life Decisions
Cancer
Chemotherapy
Medical Treatments and Procedures

One morning, I came in with his pills, and he said, "You're doing too much. I can't take it." The next week, he was on dialysis, but it wasn't working, and his entire lower body was hugely swollen with fluid. That day, he accosted me with, "What the hell are you doing to me?"
Both times, I told the medical team what he'd said and asked whether it was ethical to continue chemotherapy. Several members of the team shared my concerns, and as a group, we talked the situation over with the attending doctor. Our view was that the treatments were eroding the patient's quality of life with little promise of good in return.
The attending physician, whom I know to be conscientious and caring, disagreed, as did the patient's family. When the doctor prodded the patient, saying, "You want to keep going, right? Right?" the patient himself concurred, "Yes, let's keep going."
So the chemo finished. Then, blood began to appear in the patient's urine. His bladder was brittle because of the radiation treatments he'd had for prostate cancer, and because of the chemo, he had too few platelets. Without enough platelets, that fragile tissue would not stop bleeding, but it also formed blood clots in his bladder that caused excruciating pain.
Watching this patient suffer, not from his disease but because of what we did to him in the name of helping him, was agonizing. He'd wanted to "keep going," to "keep on fighting," but what did he really mean?
Always when I hear these phrases applied to oncology patients, I think of Peter Weir's 1981 film "Gallipoli." The film portrays two Australian sprinters, Archy and Frank, who enlist together during World War I and end up fighting the Turkish army at the Battle of Gallipoli.





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