Editor's Cut

The Testing Bubble Bursts

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Looks like the $2.3 billion standardized testing industry forgot to devise a much needed self-examination.

Two weeks ago, after two students paid fees to have their SATs rescored by hand, it was discovered that 4,000 students had received scores that were incorrectly low. A week later, the College Board announced that another batch of 1,600 exams had to be rescanned. The Washington Post now reports that another 27,000 exams still need to be rechecked.

Also two weeks ago, CTB/McGraw-Hill acknowledged that questions from sample tests were mistakenly placed on the actual exam used by the NCLB regime to assess schools and students for 400,000 7th & 8th graders in New York.

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March 29, 2006

Don't We Need a New Political Language?

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

A condensed version of this post, titled Had it With Hitler, was published today by the Washington Post.

Here's a modest proposal for improving national political discussion. Let's stop equating our opponents WITH famous dictators, their chief executioners, police apparatus, or ideologies. Let's declare a national ceasefire on "his (or her) view reminds me of..." -- fill in the blank: Hitler, Goebbels, Eichman, Stalin, Mao, the Gestapo, the Gulag, the KGB, etc.

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March 26, 2006

Giving Americans a Raise

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

This article, originally published in the April 10, 2006 issue of The Nation, was co-written by Sam Graham-Felsen.

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour for more than eight and a half years. If Congress fails to pass an increase by December of this year, it will be the longest stretch of stinginess in American history. The states are sick of waiting.

In the past sixteen months, eleven states and the District of Columbia have raised their minimum wage. In February Rhode Island's legislature overwhelmingly voted to pass HB6718, hiking the state's minimum to $7.40 by the start of 2007. Governor Donald Carcieri had threatened to veto the bill, but, facing tremendous opposition, he dropped his effort and signed it into law. And in March Michigan's Republican-dominated Senate unanimously approved a measure that would increase the state's minimum by 44 percent over the next two years. Michigan, which had stalled at the federal standard for the past nine years, will have one of the most generous minimums in the country, $7.40, by July 2008.

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March 23, 2006

Independent War Profiteering Commission (Continued)

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Payments to ghost employees. Contractors overcharging by hundreds of millions of dollars on no-bid contracts. And billions in reconstruction money gone missing. The list of reasons for an Independent War Profiteering Commission just keeps on growing.

The Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) disputed $263 million in charges from Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown and Root for its $2.41 billion no-bid contract. Normally, the Army withholds between 55 to 75 percent of the monies flagged by the auditors.

So what did the Army do in this case? It withheld 3.8 percent of the payments. Yes, you read that correctly, 3.8 percent – meaning it paid all but $10 million of the charges in question despite the alleged corruption.

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March 17, 2006

Sweet Victory: The Resolutions Roll In

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Co-written by Sam Graham-Felsen.

No matter how many polls show that the majority of American citizens (and even troops) want a speedy withdrawal from Iraq, the stay-the-course consensus continues to suffocate DC.

Yet, while politicians may be able to ignore polls, it's harder for them to ignore concerted, collective action in the form of official resolutions. On the eve of the third anniversary of the Iraq war, resolutions from America's largest cities, labor organizations, and religious groups are calling for our troops to come home.

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March 10, 2006

Needed: A New Direction for US-Russian Relations

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

This past Sunday, on Meet the Press, would-be-Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards and one-time-Republican presidential candidate Jack Kemp, used the fiftieth anniversary of Winston Churchill's Fulton speech to promote their new Council on Foreign Relations' Task Force Report, Russia's Wrong Direction: What the US Can and Should Do.

Edwards and Kemp didn't use Churchill's rhetoric of 1946. Neither spoke of "an iron curtain" descending across Europe. Yet in 2006, there are whiffs of a new-fangled Cold War. This new chapter in US-Russian relations already has its own codewords, checkpoints and nuances. (Underlying the rhetoric is an American triumphalism, as represented by John Lewis Gaddis's new history of the Cold War.) There is a hectoring tone and a familiar double standard, for example, when it comes to condemning Moscow for seeking allies and military bases abroad just as the Bush Administration is doing. As Russia expert and New York University Professor Stephen Cohen ( as well as longtime Nation contributing editor and, full disclosure, my husband) lamented at a conference on the Cold War held at the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow last week, US-Russian relations are being remilitarized.

Talking before a group of nearly 200 Russian and Western scholars, journalists, and diplomats, Cohen observed that "most alarming, negotiations for reducing nuclear weapons have, in effect, been terminated by the Bush Administrations' unilateral withdrawal from the ABM treaty, and by the essentially meaningless nuclear reductions agreement it imposed on Moscow in 2002. And all this, including new buildups on both sides, while Russia's means of fully controlling its existing nuclear devices are less reliable than they were under the Soviet system."

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March 7, 2006

Sweet Victory: The States are Sick of Waiting

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Co-written by Sam Graham-Felsen.

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 per hour for over eight and a half years. If Congress fails to pass an increase by December of this year, it will be the longest stretch of stinginess in American history.

The states are sick of waiting.

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March 3, 2006