The Agenda Series

The Agenda briefs raise and answer fundamental questions about what is at stake in critical issue areas.

Turnaround Schools That Work: Moving Beyond Separate but Equal
Richard D. Kahlenberg, The Century Foundation, 11/12/2009
Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s far-reaching efforts to transform the country’s lowest performing schools into successful ones, don’t reach far enough according to a new report from The Century Foundation. In “Turnaround Schools That Work: Moving Beyond Separate but Equal,” TCF Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg details why ‘turnaround” approaches that focus on changing principals and teachers but fail to address issues related to parents and students, have fallen short of expectations. Download the report here.

Fixing No Child Left Behind
Richard D. Kahlenberg, The Century Foundation, 6/12/2008
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed in 2001 with broad bipartisan support, but in the years since its enactment it has come under sharp attack from many quarters. The controversial legislation, which requires states receiving federal funding to test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and to hold schools accountable for making adequate yearly progress in raising student achievement, is now widely acknowledged to need a major overhaul when it is reauthorized. Richard D. Kahlenberg explores these issues.

Reinventing Transparent Government
Patrick Radden Keefe, The Century Foundation, 9/10/2008
In “Reinventing Transparent Government,” a new policy brief for The Century Foundation, Patrick Radden Keefe, fellow and expert on national security and civil liberties issues, calls for rolling back the secrecy of the Bush years and restoring transparency and accountability to American government. In the brief, Keefe explores the broad range of areas in which the United States government has adopted a policy of reflexive secrecy in recent years, and examines the extent to which that posture represents a departure from the American tradition of accountable, transparent government. Keefe makes five concrete proposals for specific changes a new administration could make to usher in a new era of sound, open, responsible government, and invokes James Madison’s admonition that “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce, or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.”  

Getting More Value from Medicare
Maggie Mahar, The Century Foundation, 9/29/2008
In “Getting More Value from Medicare,” The Century Foundation, fellow and HealthBeat Blog editor Maggie Mahar (www.healthbeatblog.org) points out that past proposals for containing Medicare’s costs, such as putting a cap on physicians’ fees or requiring beneficiaries to pay more for their care, have not worked. She calls for a fundamental set of reforms that would not only save money but also improve the quality of care that beneficiaries receive.

First Steps toward Restoring American Leadership: Legality Matters
Jeffrey Laurenti, The Century Foundation, 10/30/2008
In “First Steps Toward Restoring American Leadership: Legality Matters,” The Century Foundation’s senior fellow and director of foreign policy programs Jeffrey Laurenti argues that the collapse of America’s global standing during this decade—a direct consequence of Washington’s most cherished assumptions about power and exceptionalism superseding traditional commitments to respecting international law—has real and measurable consequences in shriveled U.S. capacity to influence events worldwide. Legality matters, he says, and given the complexity of many of the major issues the next administration will have to work to resolve to rebuild American credibility substantively, the new president and Congress can most swiftly reclaim U.S. credibility and leadership by a series of steps to reaffirm the international rule of law that has eroded over the past quarter century.

Guantánamo and Beyond: What to Do about Detentions, Trials, and the “Global War” Paradigm
Stephen J. Schulhofer, The Century Foundation, 1/14/2009
Among the many mega-headaches facing the incoming administration, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp poses unique dangers, symbolically and operationally. By detaining hundreds of prisoners there, without access to lawyers or to the courts, the United States probably has neutralized some dangerous terrorists and acquired useful intelligence, but we also have damaged relationships with our allies and fomented hatred against us, creating many violent extremists in the world at large for every one that we held in Guantánamo. In this new publication from the Agenda Series, Stephen J. Schulhofer discusses how the new administration can restore domestic and international principles by relying upon the pre–September 11 institutions of military and civilian justice.