Philanthropy Action News and Commentary

Fertilizer No Substitute for Good Management

2008-07-25T02:40:00-05:00

The current food crisis has a number of causes, but most agree that it will end only if high-yielding regions maintain and expand their crop production, and food-poor regions benefit from agriculture investments. A Financial Times article on soil degradation suggests, however, that neither is a given. The world’s soil is at risk. Even in highly fertile, well-managed areas such as the Midwestern United States, farmers are losing soil quality to erosion, grazing, overuse and other factors. The problem is much worse in parts of the world, particularly southern Africa, where the soil structure is too loose to hold water, and possesses a chemical profile antagonistic to nutrient availability. One of the most useful and non-obvious points made in the piece was that simply providing fertilizer to “African” farmers—a popular intervention in aid circles—will not in most cases solve the problem of soil quality, because the structure of “African” soils cannot absorb it. In practice, what that means is that some regions of the continent, mainly in Sudan and Ethiopia, but also South Africa, Angola and other countries, have highly acidic soils rich in iron and aluminum, which collectively create an environment in which phosphorus compounds bind into molecules with the iron and aluminum and become unavailable to plants. Providing fertilizers in these environments will not only do little to improve productivity, it will potentially increase soil salinity while increasing chemical runoff which pollutes water sources.

It is important to note that despite the impression given by the FT piece this is not true in all areas of the continent. Parts of Kenya, such as the Great Rift Valley, as well as areas of West Africa beyond the Sahel have highly fertile soils; the Central African region spanning much of the DRC also has rain forest-type soils which are good for certain tropical crops such as cocao and rubber. A soil map of Africa published ten years ago by the FAO provides a useful visual.

Absent an obvious and inexpensive way to improve soil fertility, then, where should investors turn? Another point made in the FT is that some places in Africa and around the world lack land title laws, or other provisions to ensure that a farmer is recognized as the legal holder or leaser of a plot. This lack of legal guarantee decreases farmer motivation for acting as responsible stewards of the lands they farm and graze, since they don’t own them and have no guarantee that they will benefit from conserving soil fertility for the future. The collapse of agricultural productivity after farm collectivization in many communist countries shows the impact of uncertain land titles.

It would be naive to suggest that title laws can change overnight, especially since economists and aid workers have been advocating for just those types of changes since economist Hernando de Soto wrote The Mystery of Capital nearly ten years ago. But there may be “test case” environments emerging now where researchers and philanthropic investors can experiment to see in practice whether stable ownership or resident status can positively impact both production and land stewardship. Just this week, the Cuban government announced its intention to allow private farmers renewable 10 year leases on 99 acres of government land as part of an effort to increase domestic food production. The land is currently unused because—surprise, surprise—under the Castro regime, farmers’ lost private title to land and progressively reduced the amount of land they farmed. Of course, another opportunity for philanthropic investors may be in providing agricultural extension services to Cuban farmers providing them with the tools and knowledge to maintain soil fertility on their new plots.

The Thorny Problem of Donor Intent

2008-07-21T16:10:01-05:00

Generally, when the topic of “donor intent” comes up in philanthropy circles it’s because of a complaint that a donor’s wishes are being ignored or subverted. That’s the back story behind the Robertson family’s suit against Princeton University, and its what conservative pundits are talking about when they say that the present incarnations of Ford, Rockefeller, and Pew have strayed from their founders’ ideals. On the surface it may seem that honoring donor intent in all cases is the right and obvious thing to do. But the recent revelation that before her death Leona Helmsley charged her multi-billion dollar charitable trust to attend to “the care and welfare of dogs” starkly illustrates that donor intent is a thornier question than it seems.

Stephanie Strom of the New York Times describes the extreme, but not unusual, dilemma faced by Helmsley’s trustees. While many donors have given to animal-related charities, Ms. Helmsley’s trust will have an endowment of $5 billion to $8 billion. Ms. Strom notes that at the low end that’s still 10 times more than the combined 2005 assets of all registered animal-related charities in the US. The trustees are not just concerned with how to manage a gift that dwarfs existing resources in the cause. According to the article, they are more concerned that such a lavish gift dedicated to dogs instead of people may incite public outcry. As Ray Madoff, a professor at the Boston College Law School, notes in an editorial titled “Dog Eat Your Taxes?” this is not just an issue of Ms. Helmsley’s right of self-determination. The gift to establish the trust is tax exempt, which means society forgoes several billion dollars in tax revenues allowing Ms. Helmsley to fund the trust. To put the numbers into useful context, Mr. Madoff calculates that the taxes due may have equaled half of the annual budget of Head Start.

The trustees could legally decide to expand the trust’s mission, or they could follow an earlier mission that includes “indigent people” as well as dogs. Their dilemma is how, and whether, to honor Ms. Helmsley’s wishes. For the rest of us, the concern is whether a public policy that allows donors nearly unchecked ability to designate a philanthropic cause serves the public good.

The central question here, as with all regulation of the philanthropic industry, is how to define “public good.” A good definition is hard to come by, a fact illustrated by the obituaries for Sir John Templeton, who died on July 8th. Sir John was the benefactor of the John Templeton Foundation, whose mission includes seeking ways to reconcile religious and scientific world views in the hope that each can gain insight from the other. Given the rancorous and unproductive rift between religion and science for centuries, it would be hard to argue that such a mission doesn’t serve the public good. Yet most of the obituaries noted that there are many outspoken critics of the foundation who claim that it seeks to undermine science and push a religious agenda in disguise. An alumni vs. alma mater battle at Harvard University surrounds the same issue: an increasing number of alumni are seeking to divert alumni giving away from Harvard’s already enormous endowment and toward higher education institutions in sub-Saharan Africa with the argument that gifts to Harvard no longer serve a public good.

When confronted with questions that are difficult to answer—for example how to define First Amendment protected speech—the general public and the courts have generally taken an expansive view. The dangers of drawing lines too narrowly, most believe, exceeds the harm of the few aberrations. Ms. Strom told me that after her piece was published reader response was essentially split between those who were outraged that so much money was being devoted to dogs, and those who staunchly supported Ms. Helmsley’s right to do what she pleased with her wealth. It’s also interesting to note that despite the now large number of blogs devoted to philanthropy, there was practically no discussion of the issues surrounding the Helmsley trust.

Some may consider the Helmsley gift an aberration, and unworthy of deep discussion. Given that the amount of wealth held in the upper tiers of society continues to grow, and the forecasted wealth transfers as the pre-boomer generation passes away, aberrations like Ms. Helmsley’s will likely become more common. Now is the time to begin a conversation on whether our public policy on this issue is appropriate. For instance, legal and economic scholar Richard Posner discusses the issues, possible changes to policy and the impacts that they might have.

On the other hand, delaying a substantive, reasoned debate on donor intent and the definition of the public good is a mistake. As large fortunes are increasingly be bequeathed to problematic—or even esoteric, rarefied or bizarre causes—the backlash may produce legislation that veers too far and constricts donor intent in ways that breed unintended negative consequences. Starting the debate now may allow us to successfully handle the issue while avoiding the worst of the thorns.

An Emerging Markets Cellular Behemoth Means Opportunity

2008-07-16T20:27:00-05:00

The gossip in emerging markets investment circles these days is focused on a family battle in the Reliance empire. Reliance Group is an Indian conglomerate built by the late Dhirubhai Ambani; the group was effectively split between his sons Anil and Mukesh in 2006. Reliance Communications, which is owned by Mukesh Ambani and is one of the largest cellphone operators in India, is in advanced merger talks with MTN, one of the largest cellphone operators in Africa and the Middle East. Anil Ambani reportedly objects to the deal and his ability to block it under the terms of the split-up agreement is a topic of hot debate.

The juicy nature of conflict in one of the world’s richest families is dominating the coverage of the merger. Yet the development and investment opportunities inherent in a fusion between MTN and Reliance Communications are far more interesting. The combined company would have more than 100 million subscribers, almost all in developing countries, stretching from South Africa to India. Those numbers would make it second only to Vodafone Group in terms of global cell phone subscribers; in emerging markets it would be by far the largest.

A company of that size would have the potential to make capital investments in infrastructure that could drive faster subscriber growth in key geographies. We’ve written before about the positive development impact that increasing cellphone use can have at a local level by improving information flow in local markets. One study in India showed that fishermen using cellphones to learn the current prices at various seaside markets raised the average price they received for their catch while simultaneously decreasing average prices paid by buyers. A number of studies plausibly conclude that there is a strong correlation between cellphone penetration and national GDP growth on the order of a .6 percent GDP growth increase for every 10 percent increase in cellphone penetration. This macro impact is most likely driven by the compounding effect that occurs when many local markets operate more efficiently.

The larger and more exciting possibility for development experts, philanthropists, and emerging markets investors is the possibility of using cellphones as a transaction mechanism. A huge barrier to the development of consumer markets in developing countries is high transaction costs. Many people do not have access to bank accounts, cash can be unsafe to keep or carry, brokers may not be trustworthy, creditworthiness of customers is difficult to ascertain, identity can be impossible to prove, and so on. Cellphones could mitigate most of these problems. There are plenty of initiatives involving the use of cellphones for transactions in the developing world. Microfinance institutions are experimenting with cellphones as tools for both clients and loan officers. Mastercard, the GSM Association, Citigroup and Vodafone are involved in various experiments to send remittances by cellphone. SafariCom of Kenya has widely deployed an application called M-PESA that allows subscribers to transfer funds to any other subscriber. While these experiments have been interesting, a carrier with the scale of a combined MTN/Reliance would make investing in such applications far less risky, both for its own capital and for that of developers. The volume of users, both buyers and sellers, could drive down the deployment costs for merchants, microfinance banks and other nodes in the system. Cellphone minutes could even become an alternative trans-national currency.

A developing world cellular behemoth could therefore enable dramatic improvement in the efficiency of transactions, in turn contributing to more rapid development of a middle class in these emerging markets, which would drive more consumption of goods and services and further economic growth. All that means opportunity.

The Role of Genetically Modified Crops in World Food Security

2008-07-11T17:43:00-05:00

As researchers and governments discuss ways to tackle the current food crisis, genetically modified (GM) foods are frequently mentioned as part of the solution to a complicated problem. An article published in the Financial Times today explored whether expansion of GM acreage could keep food prices in check, while a recent Washington Post Op-Ed argues more directly that they would.

Different from crops that are cross-bred with other strains to make the most of a desirable characteristic, genetically modified crops are bred with genes from un-related organisms or with chemicals to produce such properties as microbe resistance. The most commonly planted genetically modified crops are soybeans, cotton and maize (corn), although two genetically modified strains of rice are expected to move into wider commercial use in the next five years. Benefits of the GM version of a crop may include resistance to blights that wipe out entire harvests, such as bollworms which affect cotton, or reducing the need for inputs like herbicides. Despite early claims, GM crops apparently are not inherently higher yielding than their native counterparts in ideal environments; they just yield more under the stresses for which they are bred. Basically, they can save farmers money. A study cited in the FT piece claimed farm-level savings of $33.8 billion for GM crops since their introduction in 1996. The next generation of GM crops are of particular interest for anti-poverty circles, as they are being bred with traits such as drought resistance, heat tolerance or water efficiency, all characteristics which would make them ideal for crop-vulnerable environments in sub-Saharan Africa.

Euphoria around GM crops is in limited supply however. The most frequent, and most successful, opponents of GM crops are environmental and public health groups who argue that GM strains threaten native species and crop diversity and they are potentially damaging to human health, beneficial insect species and soil microbes. While these concerns should not be dismissed out of hand, they seem less relevant in light of other issues of more pressing concern to the poor. Most problematic is the fact that GM crops are not fecund, meaning a farmer has to buy GM seed every year, and those seeds are more expensive than regular seeds. In the developing world where the majority of food production is in the hands of small farmers, the need to acquire annual seed supplies is deeply problematic--most small and subsistence farmers do not have access to seed distribution systems, nor do they have the cash on hand to purchase seed. While proponents argue that these problems can be fixed, it’s important to remember that we’ve known these problems need fixing for decades and have yet to accomplish much outside of South Asia.

There are other issues that pertain particularly to food insecure regions in the world: water scarcity, soil quality, erosion and native tastes. Agriculture is one of the world’s heaviest users of water resources, which makes water capture and storage a particularly important issue for developing world farmers. And yet farmers, for instance, in the South of India--one of the more water unstable places in the world--are more likely to pump water from underground aquifiers than invest in capture and storage infrastructure, all because the government pays for the electricity to run the pump. Available GM varieties also are not necessarily developed for the kinds of crops that, say, Ethiopians want to eat. Again, proponents can argue that GM strains will be developed to use less water, and that world markets will take on crops for which there is limited local interest. But wouldn’t it be simpler and less expensive to develop less technical solutions to those problems, such as adopting policies that support farmers and encourage appropriate land and resource stewardship?

That is the central question that most discussions of the role of GM crops fail to raise: have the non-technical solutions and agricultural policy modifications been explored and exploited fully enough that we can confidently say that the production challenges we face have no organic solution? The answer is undoubtedly no. Thus, donors with an interest in agriculture development shouldn’t overlook opportunities like water catchment and use, land management and other issues. Let the Monsantos of the world invent the perfect rice--we can make lots of headway before they get there.

Bush Proposes Tracking Mechanism for Aid Pledges

2008-07-07T20:03:00-05:00

At the Group of Eight meeting that began in Japan this past weekend US President George Bush proposed that the group establish a mechanism for tracking aid pledges made by wealthy nations to Africa and assessing whether those pledges have been met. The purpose would be to hold wealthy nations accountable for the promises they make to the poor. A number of the G8 countries, including France and Germany, are significantly behind on the pledges they made at the 2005 summit, where as a group the Eight promised to double the amount of development aid to Africa.

In the event that it is implemented, such a tracking mechanism would be a step in the right direction for injecting more accountability into foreign aid. Within the current environment, leaders often make executive pronouncements at relevant meetings, but payments come much later and in much smaller amounts than promised. Part of the disconnect between pledges and payments come about as a consequence of the democratic process in which congress or parliament must approve payments. This dynamic is in evidence right now in the United States, where a small group of Republican senators are delaying the vote on the PEPFAR bill; their argument in essence is that the bill’s current commitment of $50 billion over five years is too generous. By matching pledges to payments, a monitoring mechanism keeps wealthy countries honest, and can provide some perspective on international generosity.

So the monitoring mechanism should be implemented, and once implemented it should be expanded to include not just what was pledged and paid, but also, eventually, how paid funds were spent and to what end. Enough evidence exists to leave little doubt that not all paid aid money is spent well. It is right and sensible to begin by making sure that promises are kept. The next step should be to ensure that they bring positive results.

Use of Child Soldiers Still Common Despite Decrease in Conflicts

2008-06-27T16:59:00-05:00

The use of child soldiers in conflicts and wars around the world remains an enormous problem. A recent report released by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers quantified a significant decrease between 2004 and 2007 in the number of conflicts involving children worldwide. But where conflict occurs the practice continues unabated.

In Darfur, for example, children are being recruited from refugee camps in Eastern Chad and sold to militias. A report from the British organization Waging Peace states that recruitment is taking place with full knowledge of the Chadian government agency in charge of refugees (CNAR), and Chadian armed forces, and despite the presence of European Union troops. Children are being recruited and sold to the Justice and Equity rebel movement, a rebel group fighting the Khartoum-supported Janjaweed, as well as to government-backed groups. The United Nations estimates that between 7,000 and 10,000 children have been recruited, from a population of approximately 250,000 refugees displaced from Darfur and residing in camps in Eastern Chad.

The rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Ugandan, headed by Joseph Kony, has also been long known for its use of child soldiers. Michael Gerson argues in the Washington Post that recent peace talks between the LRA and the government of Uganda were pursued by Kony as a stalling tactic, and that Kony has issued orders to abduct “1,000 new recruits” from the Congo, the Central African Republic, and Southern Sudan. Gerson also states that since late February Kony’s forces have trained between 200 and 300 children abducted from camps in Northeast Congo.

African armed conflicts have been particularly associated in the popular imagination with the recruitment of child soldiers, and the recent success of such books as Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala, have reinforced that impression. The phenomena is in no way limited to Africa, however. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers report confirms that children continue to be used as combatants in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Furthermore, it is not only “irregular” forces, such as the LRA or Justice and Equity rebel movement that recruit minors with impunity; a handful of governments continue to use child soldiers, including Myanmar (Burma), Chad, Congo, Somalia, and Uganda.

Official donor initiatives seeking to reduce the number of active child combatants have been largely ineffective. Donor-sponsored programs aimed at demobilizing child soldiers from conflicts that have been resolved likewise have a poor track record. The Coalition report cited one case in the Central African Republic in which 7,500 fighters were demobilized and given cash and training to start new lives; of them only 26 were children. Gender disparity plays a role as well. Girls, who are often abducted and forced to work as cooks or as sex slaves, are less likely to receive assistance because they are either ashamed to come forward, or because they do not have weapons to redeem for cash.

Collectively, the evidence from ongoing conflict and the information from reports suggest that any reduction in the use of child soldiers over the last four years is attributed to conflict resolution. As a result, donors should support the work of high-level advocacy groups such as ENOUGH and International Crisis Group, who have the field staff and access to policy-makers necessary to formulate conflict-resolution policy recommendations specific to crisis areas, and which are actively advocating for intervention from governments in the resolution of the war in Uganda. Donors should also seek to improve programming targeting demobilized child soldiers. Extending demobilization incentives to child combatants, both boys and girls, will not only help children recover from the emotionally, psychologically, and often physically disfiguring experience of war, but will also reduce the chances of such children taking up arms again.

Putting a Price on Water

2008-06-23T14:24:01-05:00

Why is it that some of the resources useful to the common good are assigned clear market value and some are not? Why do consumers today pay $4 a gallon for gasoline from the pump and virtually nothing for water from the tap? Gasoline clearly isn’t more inherently valuable than water.

When an item seems to cost nothing it’s difficult to think about its value. If Americans paid four dollars for every gallon of water used to flush the toilet or take a shower we would be more careful about how we used the resource. Water, though scarce and getting scarcer, is vulnerable to some magical thinking because it seems like an infinitely renewable resource. We use it, it goes into the ground or the ocean or evaporates up into the clouds and then comes back down again as rain. On such a large scale, we can’t see that what is taken is not replaced one to one, and not every place receives rain sufficient to support its needs. This is a huge reason why consumers and legislators fail to calculate the consider the cost of water when determining the value of an agricultural good, a dangerous oversight in the current craze for water-intense bio-fuels.

The other factor contributing to our indifference is that the real cost of water for Americans and most other Western people is hidden. Water access, like passable roads, or public safety, is considered a right of citizenship, something the government is required to provide. Sure, we pay taxes and fees for these types of services, but the water bills most of us pay do not come close to covering the actual cost of finding, purifying, distributing and treating the water we use. Taxes, municipal bonds and other fees generally make up the difference--though many US communities, most prominently southern California and New York City, are finding that they have dramatically underinvested in their water supply.

The dynamics of global warming and increased water scarcity are possibly changing the historical practice of providing water for free. The staging ground for this change is the world’s water scarce regions. In places such as India’s arid north and the southwest United States water-hungry farming and ranching are counter-intuitively among the primary businesses. Residents of both those regions have irrigated their lands for decades by pumping water out of underground reservoirs at rates many times faster than rains could replace it. In neither case has the water cost enough to cause the farmers to utilize efficient practices. In the United States underground water resources are like gas wells: the landowner is free to pump out anything he can access from his land, even water that actually sits underneath someone else’s property. In the case of India, the government subsidizes the electricity farmers use to run the water pumps, which provides financial incentive for landowners to pump as much as they can and then sell what they don’t use. This dynamic results in extraordinary exploitation between neighbors, and even against the poor, since the farmer with the bigger pump will take the most water. This is one factor contributing to a decrease in India’s agricultural production over the past ten years, as water scarcity, among other things, has driven farmers to see more value in selling their land to industry than in working it.

Meanwhile it has become increasingly apparent that the huge underwater aquifers that have sustained this system of “pump all you want” have run dangerously low. Without intervention, this scarcity may only exacerbate the problem, as farmers and other landowners preemptively pump even more in an effort to get as much as they can for themselves before it is gone. That’s the thinking of T. Boone Pickens, a former oil-and-gas magnate, who is moving into water. Pickens owned a mid-size ranch above a section of the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies water to much of the Plains states of the US. He realized that in Texas his neighbors could pump out the water from under his land and sell it. Not content to let anyone else profit from “his” water, he began buying up water rights and land from his neighbors. Now, he is proposing that the city of Dallas, three-hundred miles away, buy the water he now owns, and has maneuvered the passage of legislation to allow him to build a pipeline from his ranch to the city to make it happen. So far, Dallas has demurred, but Pickens is patient: he reckons all it will take is a year or so of drought for big cities in Texas to realize they need more secure access to water.

That water should be priced according to availability and value seems an idea whose time is overdue. There will be consequences: higher food prices, since agriculture is the single biggest user of water around the world, for instance. But the consequences of ignoring the world’s water issues for too much longer will have even greater consequences. By beginning to assign a real price to water, the biggest users will have an incentive to invest in efficient use techniques, with the end goal of keeping more in the ground for use over time. If we ignore the issue by continuing to think of water as a commodity that every user has an equal right to, than entrepreneurs like Pickens will steal a march on this problem. Given that his aim is to turn water into the next oil, an industry whose profit margins are based on pumping as much from the ground as quickly as possible, that’s an approach we should be aggressively forestalling, not by sticking our heads in the sand, but by being realistic about a limited resource.

Doing the Right Thing is Not Always Easy

2008-06-17T13:31:00-05:00

What do activists and presidential campaign managers have in common? They both have to be wary of message fatigue, the point at which a message is repeated so often that the listener’s response is the exact opposite of what the message was trying to inspire in the first place. A New York Times article this past weekend addressed the issue of message fatigue within the ‘green’ movement. The evidence is surprising, and concerning: a study referenced in the article found that consumers in 2006 were 22 to 55 percent more likely to buy a ‘green’ product, such as environmentally friendly cleaning supplies or chlorine free diapers than in 2007.

Message fatigue can come about for any number of reasons. For one, constant bombardment with information about how bad things are can cause people to feel that their individual actions are meaningless. Equally concerning, however, is that the information itself over time often becomes contradictory as an issue gets more attention and, consequently, more information. Complex issues, such as environmentalism, are especially vulnerable to internal inconsistencies because human failure to live gently on the earth manifests itself in a number of different ways: in the take-over of natural habitats for human residence and use; in the use of toxic materials in industrial and agricultural practices, traces of which ultimately end up in the earth and in our water; in our reliance on fossil-fuel hungry mechanized methods for transportation and production; in the packaged and processed form in which we consume much of our food. The concomitant launch of separate efforts all geared toward different aspects of Problem Earth can leave a green-oriented consumer very confused. She can help keep toxins from the water by buying organic, help keep greenhouse gases to a minimum by buying local, and help keep packaging and processing down by buying fresh. But what happens if the fresh, local stuff is industrially raised? Or the organic stuff is shipped from across the country? And if she forgets to bring along her hemp bag, should she ask for paper or plastic?

A recent piece in Wired magazine took on these contradictions with an article that argues that global warming trumps all other environmental concerns and should be the dominant driver of environmental decisions in the coming years. According to Wired that means choosing industrial farming, since organic cows, as one example, produce less milk and need more time to grow to slaughter weight, thus using more resources and belching more methane; it means reinvesting in nuclear energy, especially since research on biofuels suggest they likely produce as much emissions as oil and require huge amounts of water for production; it means abandoning such anticipated tools as carbon trading whose benefits are impossible to monitor or verify; it means abandoning the bucolic dream of suburban, ex-urban and country living, and giving in to the efficiency of the city.

And none of this even begins to get at the broader issues of contradiction between disciplines, such as between environmentalism and food scarcity. Both global warming and food scarcity are affecting the poor in developing countries most. Given the current context of rising food prices, and the protests exploding in the developing world, it seems a bit precious to start talking about expanding organic farming, no matter how much evidence exists about its real benefits to health and to soils. Everyone focused on the food scarcity issue will tell you that access to fertilizer--chemical fertilizer--is the best way to increase crop yields in developing countries where people are at severe risk of malnutrition or famine. Yes, some studies--even ones we’ve written about joyously--have suggested that organic methods can eventually produce as much as industrial approaches but only after a period of decline. Clearly, now is not the time for a decline in global food production.

For donors, all this contradiction means, simply, hard choices and a need for good information. But no one said doing the right thing was easy.

Conflicting Data on American Education “Crises”

2008-06-12T16:23:00-05:00

It’s difficult to find anyone today arguing in the public square that US public schools are working well. While there is vociferous conflict over the source of and remedies for the “crisis” in public education, it seems that everyone agrees that there is a big problem. One particularly loud debate first emerged in the mid-90’s with the release of conflicting reports about the relative educational status and success of American boys and girls.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) kicked things off with a 1992 study that claimed that girls were shortchanged in math and science class. The organization posited that the gender gap in technical and scientific careers evident today was based on this bias in schools and urgent action was needed to correct the problem. Soon thereafter a number of studies came out, for instance this one from the Women’s Freedom Network, claiming that girls were outperforming boys at all levels of education--and that the real problem was a “boys crisis.” The media has since been filled with point and counterpoint from pundits arguing about which sex had a bigger educational crisis and therefore deserved more attention and funding.

This past week the AAUW released a new study in support of it’s girls crisis thesis. The new study acknowledges the main points of the boys crisis camp--girls, on average, have higher grade point averages, fewer disciplinary problems, are more likely to graduate high school, receive a bachelor’s degree and are closing the gap on boys in math and science. However, the study avers that there is no boys crisis because boys’ standardized test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment rates are also rising (just not as fast as girls’ are). The AAUW finds a crisis none-the-less: “the (education) crisis is not specific to boys; rather, it is a crisis for African American, Hispanic, and low-income children. Students coming from families with incomes of less than $37,000 struggle in math and reading. Additionally, African-American and Hispanic students score significantly lower on standardized test scores than white and Asian students.” This conclusion should come as a surprise to no one.

Meanwhile a group of European academics has used the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment data to bolster the AAUW’s argument that gender bias is responsible for girls’ lower average math scores. In their study, the group shows a strong correlation between the relative size of the math score gender gap and various measures of social equality between the sexes--in other words, in countries where women are viewed as men’s equals the gap in math scores is much lower than in countries where women’s social, economic and political opportunities are limited. There was something in the data to support the boys crisis camp as well though: while math scores equalized with social equality, girls’ advantage in reading grew.

A number of media outlets covered the AAUW’s newest volley in the educational crisis wars, but little was generally made of the AAUW’s finding that average standardized test scores, graduation rates, college enrollments and college graduations were all rising. That finding flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that we are facing an education crisis in the United States. Of course, many would argue that falling standards rather than improvements in performance are responsible for what appears to be a positive trend. That point of view, however, suggests that all of the assessments being used are unreliable--which would mean that none of the gender crisis data can be trusted either.

Ultimately what all of this points to is how little we actually know about the scope and scale of challenges in our educational system, much less the best way to fix them. And it says that rather than spending millions of dollars fighting over education ideology (keep in mind that all of the gender gap studies and reports on both sides are funded by philanthropy) we would all be better served by taking a humble approach that focuses on experimenting and testing various approaches to improving learning and performance by all students.