New America Foundation

On February 12, 2013, the Early Education Initiative submitted comments in response to a request from the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education on the State of Preschool Survey 2013-2015. The State of Preschool Survey, conducted annually by the National Institute for Early Education Research, is a critical source of data and information for families, researchers and policymakers.

The Arab uprisings that shook the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have raised significant questions about the efficacy of America’s leadership in the region. After decades of aligning with and materially supporting authoritarian regimes, the United States was forced to abandon several allied Arab leaders in a remarkably short amount of time, out of deference to universal values and public will. The result left Washington exposed, lacking long-standing traditional allies and doubting basic strategic assumptions.

If the ongoing Arab uprisings that began in late 2010 are a turning point in the history of the region, are they also for the relationship the region has with the West, particularly for the United States, a crucial regional actor since the 1950s and a hegemonic one since the 1990s?

Economic assistance has been a staple of United States foreign policy in the Middle East for the past six decades – particularly in the oil-poor states of Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, which collectively received about $133 billion between 1946 and 2010. In the 1950s and 1960s, these three economic aid programs displayed marked similarities, most notably a focus on small projects and technical assistance in public administration, infrastructure, industry, and agriculture.

More than 11 years after the attacks of 9/11 and nearly a decade since the rise of popular online jihadi Internet forums, there is strikingly little empirical research on the manner in which jihadi activists use the Web to propagate their cause. Whereas researchers and policy analysts have systematically collected and analyzed the primary source material produced by al-Qaeda and its allies, very little work has been done on the conduits through which that information is distributed—and even to what extent anyone is accessing that propaganda other than counterterrorism analysts.

One of the more significant recent economic developments in South Asia was the revival of trade talks between India and Pakistan in 2011. A question frequently raised is why India and Pakistan trade so little with each other despite the existence of common history, language, culture, and long borders. Economic theory and evidence from around the world would predict that trade between the two largest economies in South Asia would be far greater than its current level of around $2.5 billion.

As we settle into 2013, it’s hard to believe that CCIP isn’t even one year old, and that we’ve produced our first annual report, available in PDF form at right! The California Civic Innovation Project began last April with generous funding from the James Irvine Foundation.

The recent deliberations in Washington about the fiscal cliff have triggered a national debate in the United States about the nature, extent and future sustainability of key elements of the U.S. social safety net: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, support for education, the unemployed and the poor.

The greatest loss of human life and economic damage suffered by South Asia since 2001 has not been due to terrorism and its ensuing conflicts, but rather due to natural disasters ranging from the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the Indus floods of 2010 to seasonal water shortages and drought.  Although such calamities themselves might not be preventable, their human impact can certainly be mitigated. This report argues that such mitigation of environmental stresses is possible only through regional approaches to ecological cooperation.

If there is to be any durable hope for a social contract that transcends left-right partisanship, that contract must rest upon a majority consensus about policies that are efficient, fair, and sustainable. Once the smoke has cleared from this November’s battle over the role of government, what will endure are several policy prescriptions kept alive by an objective reading of economic history and a general consensus among economists.