Elaine Zimmerman [EZ]: It's good to be here. Given that we will probably spend a day together at the Capitol, and also in terms of thinking for people here, it would be very helpful for me if we could just go around and if you would introduce yourself, tell me where you're from and why you're interested in public policy.

Ina Breuer: Well I'm Ina, and I'm interested because I have to be . . . (laughter). No, I actually got interested in it in Cracow. I hadn't really thought much about the actual process of government making, and had always just spent time theorizing about what was wrong, and there's a lot more involved in how do you apply and solve problems.

Magda: I share what you say, not only because you said it so clearly, but it is the same. My name is Magda, we met in Cracow. I'm in public administration, and we found it very difficult in the beginning to adjust this course to our needs. I'm also looking forward to being introduced not only to the theory, but to the practice. How policy is made. Mainly I would like to relate it to social minority groups, how policy is made towards those groups, but in fact I need just the background.

Margaret: My name is Margaret, I participated in the first Cracow session a few years ago; I'm here with mass communication mainly, I'm interested in cultural issues connected with media, mainly with advertising, and I think it would be pretty interesting to enrich it and to get more information about regulation concerning media.

Darius Aidukas: My name is Darius, and I am from Lithuania, from the Institute of International Relations and Political Science in Vilnius. My interest in public policy is quite old. It started during my studies in the school of law in Vilnius, and now is a good opportunity to continue it, to go through constitutional administrative law, to ? issues and questions of practical policy and how it works somewhere in the United States. It's very interesting.

Dionyz Hochel: My name is Dionyz, I am from Slovakia, I'm interested in various aspects of public policy, for example social welfare policy, or NGO policy, and it's great to be here and I'd like to improve my skills.

Lazslo Ollos: My name is Lazslo and I am also from Slovakia. I am studying here ? issues, political philosophy and issues of American and European constitutionalism, but also some practical policy issues.

Gabor Juhasz: My name is Gabor and I am from Budapest, from the department of social policy, so I am dealing with social policy and my main concern is with legal aspects or legal regulation of different social policies, and I am dealing with the right to welfare. Is there a right to welfare, and what are the possible implementations of this right.

EZ: So you're here at a fascinating time.

Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni: I'm Heshan. Apart from my administrative obligation, I'm particularly interested in educational policy, particularly given what's going on. I'm now a member of something called STAND, which is a New York City, countrywide student pressure group on gaining access to quality education.

Lidia Bialek: I'm Lidia. I've been active in Polish political and social life for a few years, so I'm interested in both theory and practice, maybe 50-50. I took part in various meetings, lobbying, and the attempts at making policy work, so I'm really interested in seeing how it works here and how it can be formed. And recently I've just started thinking about youth delinquency and youth crime, maybe because I have a teenage son, or maybe because I'm in New York City and he's there. So this is what interests me now, among other things.

EM: Mariela is missing. Mariela is from Bulgaria and her interest is somewhat between social sciences and legal issues and the problems of constitutionalism.

Barbara: I'm Barbara and I'm a visitor, I have no status here. Actually I worked in public policy for about five years in Canada.

EZ: One of the things that I would be glad to talk with you and Elzbieta about is, in particular areas there are organizations in Manhattan that are working explicitly on the issue area that you're interested in, but it wouldn't be the theoretical side, it would be the pragmatic side, and if any of you are interested in observing an NGO for a week and just seeing how a community-based organization works in New York City, or sitting in the organization in this city that is the best in welfare, we could talk perhaps about a placement of a week or something so you could actually observe and ask people questions. So it's worth thinking about, if that's something that would be helpful.

Some of you have heard some of this before because we were together, but I'm going to indulge some of it. When we were meeting in Cracow, what was clear as we went around was that many people thought policy meant police, or rigid law, or bad history, or lack of freedom of the family, and my job at the beginning was almost to offer a counterpoint of what is possible under democracy, and I shared a personal story of how I came to be involved in public policy without having any intention of being involved in public policy. I was a schoolteacher while I was continuing my education, and I taught in a school that was for at-risk children--it was for children who were not faring well, who either had a drug problem or a delinquency problem or no family or something. But they were all thrown into these schools with labor-intensive teachers, and I was there teaching English. And all these kids would come to the school for lunch who weren't members of the school. And just like you're here from a different funding stream and you're here vising, nobody asked any questions. What were these people doing here? We didn't care. They came for lunch, we thought it was good. Who came a lot for lunch were these girls who dressed like hippies, in sort of gossamer clothes, and they just looked like they were part of the generation, because this was 1970, and they looked like hippies and no one paid much attention to them. But I had this feeling that something was wrong, you know, what were they doing there, why were they coming for lunch. They didn't just seem like they were hanging out. And they started coming to my class, which was interesting. Somehow what I think was happening was they needed to hear stories, the way a mother or father tells children stories. These were deprived children acting like grownup sexy girls, but there was something very young about them. And they sat absolutely mesmerized in an English class. I don't think the class was all that fascinating, I think it was the stories they needed to hear. After a while, I gave them little tape recorders which I told them to use to tell each other their stories. And it was very clear over time that they were not living in a house, they were homeless girls, and they were called in the United States at that time street kids. And people thought that street kids were drug addicts, hang loose, but these kids were clearly something else. And what became evident over time was that they were runaways, and they were running away from abusive environments, and most of them were incest victims. Their stories told these stories. Some of them had gone from one foster home to another, some of them, by the time I met them, had been in twelve foster homes, most of them had been raped at least once, and most of them had been battered in some form or another, and they were trying to survive. I knew something was wrong, gave them these tape recorders, and believed in language, which I think is very important when we talk about public policy, and believed in story, which I think is also very important when one is really crafting public policy rather than studying it or just being the person who writes the law. And so, after a time, the question was what do I do with all this information. So the next thing I sort of intuitively knew to do was to ask them what they thought needed to happen so their situation could be better, and what would have needed to have happened so they didn't have their situation. Essentially I was making the children the policy analysts. And they had answers. They knew what needed to happen. And I wrote this up. I wrote it up not knowing what I was doing. I just wrote it up, the same way a researcher might write it up. In a sense I was an anthropologist, but not knowing it. I sent this to a mayor of the town, with a little note saying, thought you needed to know this! You know, this is your town, you need to know what the streets are full of and you need to know why. And the other thing that was happening this summer was that the girls would disappear. And the reason the girls were disappearing was that the Mafia was beginning to pick them up, treat them as prostitutes, give them money and funnel them into prostitution in other states. And so what you saw was the abuse becoming more abuse becoming more abuse and ultimately becoming death, because these girls do not survive. And I think that's what did it to me to try to do something with this. I then left. It never occurred to me that you did anything other than that, you know, I thought well, I wrote it up, I gave it to somebody, and I left the area. I came back for personal reasons to the area and learned that the mayor had been trying to reach me. And she called me in and sat me down and said, what should we do? And I was stunned, because it never occurred to me that when you saw a problem and defined it and wrote it up that you would then be the person to define what should happen. And I also wasn't exactly sure what should happen. But it was precisely that moment, when she said what should we do, that I became a policy person. And overnight began to learn the power of seeing, hearing, really listening to the other person's story, not presuming, seeing, hearing, recording, really honoring story, honoring other people's language, figuring out how to put it in a way that someone else can then see it, and having them become the informants about what needs to happen. Which was all recorded. By the time this mayor got that, what really needed to happen from their eyes had already been delineated. And I'm proud to say that what happened over time was that the girls with me set up a home for themselves. They moved off the streets and into a home which then became part of the city law, that there was a home for girls who were runaways. And then we began to change the state law, and then we began to be part of the national law around this youth policy.

I share this story because I think that people get unnecessarily mystified about doing policy rather than studying it. I sort of fell into it the way someone else might fall into a lake. But I swam, and so did all the girls, and the outcome was actually quite positive, and over time we did change youth law in a state. All because people were willing to notice, and also because people were willing to tell and speak. Sometimes you find that public policy doesn't work because no one had been really looking or hearing or listening and recording the stories; it's one person's idea of what needs to happen, and over time that simply falls apart.

What I have come to love about public policy is that it really is an art. There's something about it that isn't still, you know, you see these books in the United States and you see these little one-pagers that say How A Bill Becomes a Law, and they have little pictures of buildings, and they say first it goes to the Senate, and then it goes to the House, and then it goes into conference. It all looks very flat, and you have this notion that if you take this page of paper and you do this and this it'll all be done. But that's not how policy works at all. Policy is very alive. It's sort of like putting a little doggy in a forest, and you have no idea, by the time that doggy gets out, whether or not the dog will get out, whether or not the dog will have all four legs, whether it will have hair, and in all likelihood by the time the dog does get out of the forest it will be in a different shape. That is what public policy is about. If you're doing really good public policy and you seed an idea, you have to understand and know that by the end, if it's the same as what your idea was, you haven't done your job. Because it is in a sense like an oral tradition--more and more people must add on to it, and change it, and there must be debate, and there must be committees debating it, and it must happen on multiple levels, and by the end of that something else happens, and hopefully, if you're a humble human being, what ultimately happens is actually better than what you'd originally thought.

The word policy comes from the root word pele, and pele in Greek means city, police, acropolis, and politic. In German, it means open field, floor, piano, and planet. And I love those two different meanings, because I think that public policy is precisely that. It is like police, it is a rule, it is a law, ultimately, but around that, and under it, and how it comes to be, is very much like what a piano is, it's a chord, it has to be played, it's alive. And in fact, unlike many things, when you finish public policy it's not done, because, there's an expression in politics, it's not done until it's over. Because you can watch an idea become a bill, you can watch it go through houses, you can watch it get debated, you can watch the public respond, you can be part of all that, but then once a policy becomes a law you could find that no one implements it. Or you could find that the public doesn't know about it, so even if somebody's implementing it the public doesn't use it optimally. Or you can find that through new elections and new leaders, what you did and what people agreed to create is gone, because a new leader decided that this should either be gotten rid of, or they simply don't focus on it. And that is why public policy is so truly like the word piano, because you can have a piano, but if you don't play it, it's just a piano. Public policy is like that too. People like to think of public policy as law, but the truth is if you look at the United States Code you will see that we have thousands of laws that aren't implemented, and we have thousands of laws that actually would be helpful for the public but no one knows about. And I'll give you a very sweet example of this that's a city example. I spend a lot of time, when I'm not writing laws and creating initiatives, teaching parents how to use the law. I teach a class for inner city parents on how to use the law. And there was a woman who was a teenage mother who spoke Spanish as her first language and who was in poverty. And she was fascinated by all this, and a school in the city that I worked in, the roof caved in. In America, the roof caved in, and nobody did anything. And they took all the children and the parents from this particular school, and they moved them to another school. Which is terrible, which what that meant was you had double the number of children in the school building, and it also meant that the parents' work schedules were not respected, because in order to have that many children in the building they had to stagger the hours for the children. So they paid no regard to the parents' work hours, and they paid no regard to the stress on the children. This is a city right near here. And she, in learning about law, then went and studied all the city laws through a city ordinance which I taught about. You have to understand, this woman never finished high school and English is not her first language. She just went and studied. And she is a very humble woman, she didn't say a word to me, I had no idea she was doing this. What she finally did was she found that, in this particular city, it was illegal to have the buildings connected to education be damaged without immediately repairing them; she went to a city council meeting where the city leaders were meeting, and she stood up, she waited till the whole meeting was over when they said does anyone have anything to say, and here comes Ida Morales, totally poor, in a ridiculous outfit, barely speaking proper English, and she cites the code and tells them that they are out of compliance and shows them that they have one week to fix the roof. And they did. That roof had not been fixed in four months. And then all the children got to go back to this school. And it was all because Ida Morales saw a law, a policy, that no one was implementing, and no one knew that they'd better beware of.

So what's so fascinating about policy is not only is it exciting to figure out what the needs are and how to design it, but there's just as much choreography in how to get it to happen and then how to get it implemented. And then you could have very wise people in elected office who know to implement law, but you may not have the public knowing how to use it or knowing how to expect their leaders to use it. So essentially, public policy is threefold: it is assessing need and knowing what to do with that; it is making sure that it is implemented; and it is making sure that the public is aware of it and uses it. Because once again, if you have a law and you implement it but no one knows about it, it's again the piano not played.

I think what I'd like to do is to talk a little bit about the different kinds of policies that there are, because some people think of policy as just national, a country's law, but there's different kinds of policy. One kinds of policy is the budget. There are a lot of people who study public policy who learn about social policy, or whatever, but who never learn how to read a budget. The secret, at least in the United States, is that a great deal of policy is done through the budget. The reason it's done through the budget is because the budget isn't debated in policy committees. That could be different in different countries, and we should talk about how it works differently in different places. But it is very, very important, wherever you are, to both be following the literal law, the literal code, as one is debating it, but never, in whatever country you're in, just pay attention to what's moving through a policy debate between leaders without also looking at whether anyone put any money in the concept, or whether or not there's enough money. Because you could have people showing off and debating something and you could well know that there's no money to have it happen. So, for example, there's been a critical debate in the United States about welfare, and there's been a larger debate, way beyond welfare, about how the United States should give money to states. And as you probably know, the federal government closed down. I knew, because I know how to read budgets, that the deal had already been cut. I knew exactly what had been negotiated, weeks ago. Because if you know how to read budgets, or if you know how to ask questions about the budget and you understand the process, there are hidden answers here [points to blackboard diagram] that won't show up here. And it is easy for elected officials in a democracy to show off a little bit here. It is easier to have what's really happening be in the budget. It's just something to watch for, it may be different in different countries, I'm very humble with you about that, I don't know how it works in each country, but it's very important to understand that these are two different trains, although ultimately if they're not on the same track by the end, it won't happen. So there was a thing in the United States called the Budget Reconciliation Act that had already passed both Houses [of Congress] and the president had already agreed to it, and everything that they're debating now is already in it, was already done. And people were saying, who knew the budget in the United States, Clinton can't undo that, it's too late, he'll never undo that, if he undoes that he'll have to call special sessions, it'll go on for months. So people who knew how the budget process worked knew that we were tinkering at the edges. And yesterday I got the conference committee resolution, and in fact we were tinkering at the edges. Then the negotiation, the final compromise, is actually much worse than the Senate version of what was being negotiated. This is maybe way too much detail, but people in the United States who follow this policy are very curious which side is going to win the Senate bill or the House bill in Washington, and people were acting as if it were possible that all of this would just be called off. And it looked like that, it was quite a drama. But the decisions were already done. Except for the edges. You know, we have an expression in English of tinkering at the edges, which means everything is pretty much filled in, but maybe there's a little teeny bit. And the public can think that it's the whole apple, but it's not.

Lidia: So can we put it this way, that budget affects law?

EZ: Absolutely. And it can work the other way too, which is that, if you study budget, which clearly I'm encouraging you to know well--even if you're afraid of numbers. I tell you, I take these massive budget books and throw them at inner city parents, and they die. They look like they're going to throw up. It's like, how could you expect us to do this. And by the end of the class they know how to get the basics enough to ask the questions. That's all one needs to do. I think it's way too complicated to expect people to understand every detail and nuance of a budget. But to begin to ask the questions, which people don't do now. They'll ask, well, where do you stand on x? But they won't say, is the welfare money in the Omnibus Resolution Act, and was that already voted on?

EM: Can you give an example? Because I think this is very important.

EZ: Sure. In the state that I'm in now, Governor Roland in Connecticut has passed the most conservative version in the United States of what is being called in our country welfare reform. It's not welfare reform, but that's what they're calling it. So in the state that I'm in, if you are poor you will be taken off any state entitlement after 21 months. And it will not matter whether or not you have a little baby. You're just off, and you have to have a job. And if you can't find a job, it's too bad. And you won't get any state support, and you won't be helped to find a job. So there will be no job training, there will be no job placement, you will just be off at that point. The Governor says, I am committed to self sufficiency, I am committed to getting rid of the cycle of poverty we see in the United States where the mother is poor and then the child's poor and then the next, too many generations of poor people relying on state money and not motivated to work in the country, and I'm going to do this by the following things. And then he lists the things he's going to do in his welfare policy, and he says, I'm going to provide child care. So if it is impossible for someone to work -- you know, this may be so foreign to you because in most of your countries child care is just there, but it's not in our country. So he says I am going to provide child care which will allow the poor women to work. And it's not quite law when he says this. It's sort of a policy direction, a policy goal. I'm going to get people off of welfare, 21 months you're off, that's it, there's no more money, but I'm going to provide you child care and I'm going to give you health coverage. And then you look in the budget. And there's no child care money. Now, if you didn't look in the budget, you know, you can debate, and plenty of people do, whether anyone who's poor should suddenly be thrown off state support after 21 months, but that's not what I'm talking about right now. He's saying, I'm going to help people get to work because I'm going to provide child care, and you look in the budget, and the money that would be necessary to provide the child care so that the number of people he's throwing off welfare will be working isn't in the budget. And then you can say, excuse me, the money's not there.

EM: Who says excuse me? EZ: I did. EM: But public invited, other officials, professionals? EZ: Okay, so you could have different elected officials saying excuse me, you could have budget analysts saying excuse me, you could have policy scholars saying excuse me. Now in our country the role of a policy scholar would probably be in a newspaper writing an editorial, Governor Roland says blah blah blah, but I don't think this is true, because all the studies show that in the United States in order for a women to be off welfare she needs child care, but looking at the budget it's not there. EM: Media, the role of media. EZ: So you see, the media would take on . . . And then you would think through very carefully which media, and then you would probably either get it in the New York Times for the national picture, and for Connecticut you'd get it in the Hartford Courant. So you'd think through which newspaper. The poor family? This is probably too high-falutin' to expect an AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] mother to say, it's not in the budget. But what wouldn't be too high-falutin' would be for an organizer, someone who runs an NGO, to call together fifty people who are in poverty, and to say, do you want the governor's goal, would you like jobs, and you know what? They're going to say yes. Very few people want to stay on welfare in the United States, so they'll say yes. So what do you need to get the jobs? And it's very similar to what I did with those runaway girls. When you say to poor people, what do you need to get the jobs, they say, we need jobs; we need training to get to the jobs; we need child care; and increasingly, in the state that I live in, they'd say we need housing, because they don't have a place to live, and you can't work if you don't have a place to live. So they'd say they need these things, so what you could do as the leader of an NGO is you could have these people, they could say what they need, then you could put that in a newspaper article. Or you could get them on TV. And what you would do would be to show that, of the fifty poor people who are on the television show being interviewed, they all want to work, so actually it's not true that they're all lazy slobs, they want to work, but there's no jobs, or the jobs there are they're not trained for, or they have a two-month old baby and they want to be with their baby. So you can do different things with different pieces.

But the core piece is, the budget is a kind of policy. And it is very important in whatever you do that you check the money side. Now I'm in a negotiation now that I can share here but I wouldn't share in Connecticut, where when I saw what was happening I went to the head of the welfare department and said there is no way that you're going to be able to do this. You don't have the child care, it is not in the budget, the governor is going to look bad . . .

Question: Does it work so fast? I mean, direction of policy implementation, it takes I guess several months or even years, so it's possible to negotiate on the next year budget.

EZ: Exactly. I'm with you. That's what I was saying when I was saying that policy is alive, and that it sort of is never ending. Because you have to know how far you can get each time. We, in the work that we do, always try to come up with as many pieces of legislation we think we can get through, and then we intentionally come up with two to three that we know we will not get through, but we want to begin to move to force public education, and we launch campaigns around them, media campaigns, and sometimes we have a two-year goal and sometimes we have a five-year goal, because we know it will not take place. And also it is very possible in the United States to design a policy agenda for when your governor is up for reelection. So here we are now, the governor is up for reelection four years from now, you plan five, eight, ten pieces of legislation that will help in social policy, you know that of these, three don't have a chance, but by this time [points to blackboard diagram] you'll be able to move them, and in fact he will have done such damage that you'll probably get them through then, because you'll hand them to his opponent, and he'll take them. So it's thinking that through. And it may sound fancy, but it's not, it's sort of like learning any terrain, the more you know it the easier it is to start to change things.

So budget is one form of policy. Another form of policy that people don't talk about very much is municipal policy. Now municipal policy, in the United States municipalities are able to do a great deal, because the mayor and the elected officials on the city or town level determine a host of local issues. So it's very important wherever you are to have a sense of what happens on a state level and what happens on a local level. Now in my understanding in Eastern Europe, which is very modest, what's starting to build up is the role of cities in public policy; in some countries that's not quite happened yet, in others it's happened dramatically, in others it's starting. but I would predict that municipal policy will take on new meaning, and then the challenge of the role of municipal to state and municipal to many countries will becomeimportant. And there are inevitable tensions between what a city can do and what a state can do. But what's interesting about a municipal level is there's plenty of power there. In our countries, municipalities are in charge, in some instances, of distributing money from the state, in some instances distributing money from Washington, rather than the individual state like New York state. In other instances they're in charge of zoning, so they can say, sorry, we won't let you have child care here; sorry, we won't let there be a facility for senior citizens here. They're in charge of what gets placed where.

They're often in charge of something called regulations. And regulations are also a form of policy. Regulations look to many people like boring, boring bureaucracy. But a regulation says something like you can't have a restaurant without having x number of sinks and x number of bathrooms. You can't have a child care facility without having two teachers who know how deal with children that are choking. You can't have a home for seniors without having x number of footage. Now in some instances regulations look like red tape, they look like things to keep you away from getting something done. And in some instances, they are precisely that. So the other thing that is important to learn in public policy is how to change regulations. Because you know, I remember when I was a kid I loved the story of St. Exupery, Le petit prince, I loved the little prince, and at a certain point in the story the little prince is on another planet, and there's somebody sweeping, and he sweeps and sweeps and sweeps, and finally the little prince says why are you sweeping, because there's no good reason, there's no dirt, the guy is just sweeping; and the sweep says, those are the rules. Well, regulations can be like the sweeper, or they can be to protect safety. You don't want someone with your child who wouldn't know how to help your child if your child were two and swallowed a grape. You want someone who is trained in choking. But there are other regulations that, for better or for not, do keep things from happening for social good or to help change. So you want to understand how regulations work. Regulations are both on the municipal level in the United States and on the state level. And you want to understand how they work. Because they're not just rules, like the sweeper said, it's not just those are the rules; regulations can change because there are city charters, for example, and every once in a while a charter is up for renewal, so you can change what's in the code. Or you can simply go to a leader and say, this regulation is no good, it needs to be changed. And then they can change regulations. So when people say it can't be done, those are the rules, they are lying. Sometimes it's not intentional lying; some people believe that rules are rules, just like that sweeper did; but you can change that.

There's also policy in national laws; you have state, you have municipal and obviously you have national law. What's an example of a good or a not so good national law? President Clinton decided he wanted to bolster civic participation and community involvement, and to help more people get college educations. So he wrote a bill that he gave to congress that established the National Service Program in the United States. And the National Service Program says that I can go to college and pay off my college expenses by working in the community for x number of years, and I can pick an area and I will learn from it, it will help me develop a career path, because I can pick different ways of being involved, it helps on multiple levels; it helps me get my college education and pay it back, it helps me think through career paths empirically because I get to participate in community, and it helps create an intergenerational model because you have young people working in very specific community efforts that are earmarked. So that's an example of a national policy that passed, and there's a National Service Corporation and it's part of the United States now, though you'll see if you read the New York Times anytime this week that national service is being fought about. In fact, I'm intentionally trying to give you examples today that I trust you'll see in the newspapers. They're issues people are fighting about right now. The Republicans are trying to kill national service. They literally wanted to stop the whole program.

Question: Why?

EZ: On the surface they say, it costs too much money, and we are for people volunteering in the community, not getting paid to be civic minded. Clinton spends too much money and he's giving the public the wrong values. That's what they say. He says, I will hold up the United States budget and I will not compromise until you free up national service. And so now they are taking money away, but not killing it. And I predict that they'll kill it by next year. It's back to what you said: many years. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.

There's other kinds of policy. One is a benchmark. This may be a phrase that's a particularly odd English phrase. A benchmark would mean, we want children in the United States to be healthy. We have as a goal, as leaders in the United States, to have all children under the age of five be healthy by the year 2000. And we understand that to be healthy means every child must have prenatal and postnatal care, and every child must be immunized routinely and at the appropriate time. So one benchmark will be, that we want to make sure that 80% of all children under the age of 2 are immunized within the next 2 years. And that will be a benchmark for us to see whether we have succeeded. Now if you think about the word, bench, like what you sit on, mark--you see? We're going to sit on this, we want to make sure. So the word, when you break it open . . .

EM: And if it's done, we marked it off.

EZ: Now why do I say that benchmark is a policy rather than an evaluation? It is policy because it expresses a value. If you came up with benchmarks that didn't really have much to do with your goal. It's sort of like claiming you want to do something in law but not putting money into it. So how you decide to look at something and to measure it shows your commitment to the policy. In a sense, evaluation and the stepping stones that you determine to judge something and its worth are policy.

Lidia: So that's checking whether something worked and evaluating it at the same time?

EZ: That's correct. And in the United States right now there's a fascinating debate going on which I think is near closure, I don't think it's really a debate any more, which is, it used to be in our country over the last 20 years, when we talked about public policy and we were evaluating it, we would do process evaluations to find out how everything went, and we would do numbers: how many people called your service to see the doctor. And someone would say, 7,200 people in New York City this year called our clinic, which shows you that the phone program works. But it doesn't show you anything, you know why? No one says how many went to the doctor. All you know is that they called you. Well, calling and getting there are two different things. So we are beginning in the United States to not do process evaluations and number evaluations, but to look at outcomes. Meaning, okay, you wrote a law and you said that there should be XY program and you said that the goal of this program is to bolster apples, then what you want to know by the end of three years or two years is how many apples were there--not how many people went to the farm, but how many apples were there. And we in this country have been looking at how many people went to the farm. So that mentality is changing, and it's much more outcome driven rather than process driven.

Now, how does policy happen? We talked a little from the personal example I gave you that there's a felt need, then one assesses that need, one looks at how to address and meet that need, what the objectives might be and what the best materials might be to address that. And I'm going to put a chart up here just to show you this.

The first thing would be that you would assess what the need is, and you would figure out from that what your goal is. So when I saw these rumpled up teenage girls, I knew there was a need. Then I had to figure out what the goals were, and their goals were to be free and away from their parents without harm, and to be safe. Then once you assess the goals you have to get feedback. because it could be that someone goes to a goal that isn't exactly right, it's on the right track but it isn't exactly right, so you have to keep getting the feedback to assess what makes the most sense. And then there's constraints. And I'm going to go through examples of this after I write this up here. You want to get a sense of what the constraints are, and what the objectives are, which are different from goals, and back to this budget question, you have to get a sense of what the resources are. Because you could know something happens, but your country could have absolutely not enough money to address it. So good idea, but ridiculous, right? And then, in the feedback loop, you want to be doing what Lidia and I were just talking about--you have to be evaluating, and you have to look at implementation, is it doable? And you need to also look at alternative strategies, in case you come up with something that just isn't doable. Your country can't do it, it doesn't have enough money, there isn't the political will, the system doesn't know how to implement it. So you came up with an idea, you're sort of on the right track, but it's just not going to work. You find something you love you want to put on your farm, but it just won't grow in this country. So what are you going to do? You find something similar.

And ultimately, you would come up with a choice. So let me give you an example, and I'll use what's happening in Congress. The Republicans in our country say, we need to balance the budget. The United States has too much debt. Our goal is to balance the budget in seven years. So they get feedback. Some people think this is terrific. The need: we need to balance the budget. The goal: Let's do it in seven years. We'll just stop funding things, that's what we'll do. We'll just cut out a lot of programs, a lot of programs that we think are unnecessary, that we think are fat. That's an expression used a lot in politics in the United States, meaning it's unnecessary, get rid of it. The feedback from some within the Republican Party and within the Democratic Party was, we can't really do that because we need some of these programs, they're not all fat, you can't just cut the budget. And so we need to change the objectives. And another thing we need to look at, they said, those who were giving the constraint side, there's not the resources to cut the budget and take care of the public need if we do it so quickly. Some Republicans said, we don't care. This need is more important that poor people's needs.

EM: Than the public's need.

EZ: Than a certain public, because they care about some people but not others. So they said no, balancing the budget and getting out of debt in the United States is more important than other goals. So then you see what happens is you have to begin to prioritize different goals. How do you measure national budget against public need? And how do you determine where money should go, and for how long? And this debate is happening in Washington right now.

Comment: The result is compromise.

EZ: Yes, the result is compromise. Some people would say the result is not compromise, it's bigger than compromise, because the outcome is undoing how the United States has done social policy for forty years. So it's actually a grand example of public policy negotiation in that the outcome is so large, in terms of different from how we are used to proceeding. Whereas if we took something not like the national budget, but like the National Service Program. Clinton says, I think we need to help people pay for their educations and we need more people working in the community, so I'm setting up national service. The opposition says it's too expensive and we should promote volunteerism, we shouldn't be paying people to be in the community. Compromise ultimately, it'll just be cuts.

Comment: Because this program, Medicare . . .

EZ: Now that's a fine example, and in President Clinton's list, this strand of pearls he won't give up on, Medicare is on it. National service is on it, child care is on it, and health care for little children is on it. And he will not budge until those get negotiated out.

Now I've just presented this map from the framework of elected officials. But you could have this map just among us. Let's say we all had very common values. It would still be very possible as a policy team, because we want to improve economic development and job possibilities in our region, that one of us would say manufacturing; someone else would say, I think technology, I think we need to focus on technology, it's the wave of global economy and we have to stop investing in manufacturing. Someone else would say, I don't think it's about that at all, I think that ultimately university education will make people skilled to do whatever. And so there will be a difference in need even if the goals are the same , and you'll still end up with constraints, objectives, resource discussion, evaluation, and ultimately you'll begin to question, how do we determine our criteria if we have the same goal and we see need. The need is, people are unemployed and we want to bolster our community; how do we determine what we will do? How do we decide whether or not to build up manufacturing, to go to technology, to do more international economic development. And then you'll find yourself looking at models, what's worked other places, resources, and ultimately there will be debates and compromises. Then you finally land on technology. So then what happens is, it then has to become either implemented by the president or the mayor, or it has to be implemented by your parliament or legislature, however it works in your particular country.

Now, a lot of people think that once they have an idea and they reach this box called "choice," they're done. But the fascinating thing about public policy is, when you get to choice it's just begun. Because then you have to figure out how to move it through the forest. Because you can take an idea and you can give it to elected officials, and they can all agree, but the public can think it's wrong. Or, they can disagree. Or there can be multiple disagreements among leaders and many disagreements in the public. Or the public can not know about it at all. So I want to talk about, once you come up with a policy choice, what the real political configurations are, at least in the United States, so you can think about what might they be in my country. And what's fascinating about public policy I think anywhere is, there is some almost transient choreography that has to happen to make it work. If you don't have certain variables in place, it just won't happen. And so how you help that moment of bringing together different pieces is the art part of public policy.

I'm just going to write these out and then I'm going to go over them. Context, constituency, principles and ideas (values), actors and institutions, media, research. Now, if you look at these, each of these are component parts of what in the United States would lead to something catching. You can have plenty of ideas, and it's sort of a good thing that not every idea catches, we'd be overwhelmed and things would change too quickly. It is important that public policy should be difficult, because it should take time, it should be debated, and there should be numerous checks and balances to disallow some stupid idea from catching.

Context would mean the social, economic, demographic, political or the ideological factors that shape an environment. An example of context: in the late seventies and 1980s you saw in the United States a real emergence of the women's movement; at the same time as the women's movement was happening, the economy needed more women in the workforce, they needed more workers; and behind the women's movement there was also a social justice movement that had happened around the war, and before that around civil rights; and also demographically, you had a very large population of young people, so large that people couldn't even imagine the impact of this population, because it was the babies born after World War II--everyone came home after the war and they had babies, and we had a big new population. Now this new population happened to come right into a war that this country was debating, and racial integration--movements that showed a great deal of hope and justice and power. And a sense that the public could influence debate. And so what you found--I'm just using this to give you an example of context--was a context for what we began to see in legislation, that developed for example comparable worth. Do you know what comparable worth is?

Barbara: This is the issue I worked on for five years in Canada! Comparable work differs from equal pay. The idea behind equal pay is, if you have a male engineer and a female engineer, they both get the same pay. The idea behind what we call pay equity and what you call comparable worth is, if two jobs have the same value, they should be paid the same. So if you have, say, a carpenter and a seamstress, and the jobs through various measurement tools are considered to be equal, and they're working at the same company, then it's incumbent upon the employer, the employer is required by law, to pay these two people the same.

EM: How do you judge the comparable worth?

Barbara: Ah, that's one of the big questions, of course.

EM: How do you figure out whether the seamstress job is equally important as the carpenter's job? They seem to be like apples and oranges.

Barbara: Well, what makes it even more interesting is that where I worked on this particular issue is the only jurisdiction in all of North America that's ever required pay equity in the private sector--which because of the particular context at the time, it was a minority government in which this could be maneuvered through, but it overcame enormous business opposition, and the business opposition was centered exactly around that point: you'll never be able to compare apples and oranges, how are you, as a government, going to be able to dictate to us tools of measurement. It was all centered, in a way, on very technical details of implementation. You know, nice idea, social justice, but you can never do it in practice.

Heshan: Because the benchmarks were too hard to figure out.

EZ: But ultimately not.

Barbara: Ultimately not. I'm presenting the business opposition. In effect, I would argue that that was not the case, that was just a convenient grounds of opposition. In fact, there are measurement tools that have been around for 45 years that have been used in workplaces for all kinds of things, there's no reason why they can't be used for this too. And that's ultimately what happened.

EZ: And there are certain occupational categories that are easier to get how they would be comparable, like a nurse and a certain kind of medical assistant, but if you looked within our health system the medical assistant was a male and the nurse was a female, and if you looked at those it was just glaring . . .

EM: The differences in salary . . .

EZ: Yeah, in fact the functions were identical, but it wasn't equal pay for the same job because they really were different categories. So what helped move comparable worth along was that sometimes you could look at different job categories with very similar functions, and you saw glaring differences.

Barbara: I mean I used the carpenter and the seamstress, and that invites that kind of reactions. We had this absolutely brilliant thing happen at a public hearing I was involved in, and it was orchestrated by one of the unions that were lobbying on behalf of what you call comparable worth, pay equity. It was a woman who'd been working something like 20 some-odd years in a hospital, in a secretarial type of role, in a fairly responsible role where she was making health care decisions. And they brought in with her her son, who was working as a janitor at the hospital, and he had been working there for like a year. They went through how long he worked versus she worked, what her qualifications were versus what his qualifications were, and she made something like two dollars less an hour than her son. It was just this glaring example, because it was a mother-son, male-female, older-younger, all kinds of things were driven home with that particular . . . .

EZ: That's a great example. Also because it's a family unit, so they would want the most money they could get, they wouldn't be as antagonistic because of gender . . .

Barbara: Well, that was one way of overcoming some of the opposition to this policy--okay, you may not be a woman wanting equal pay, but you have a household, and chances are you have a sister, a mother, a wife who should be getting paid more for the work they're doing . . .

EZ: So you see, context. In a time when there was a whole lot of hope, a large population that was voting and had a great deal of political will, and a lot of social movements behind it, it was not terribly hard, though hard enough, to move certain things that were about justice. So that's a good example for that.

Constituent activities include direct and indirect pressure by both organized and unorganized groups. Now, it tends to be the case that most constituencies are somehow organized; they either have an NGO equivalent, or a church leader, or a neighborhood leader, something brings them together, that's what makes them a joint constituency. It's rare that people who do not know each other would come together over a policy, unless you had some kind of leader who had the gift of bringing a whole cluster of people together who didn't know each other on an issue. But I'll give you an example of a constituency and a context. When I was in California, the context was 1982, for the first time in the United States since women got the right to vote, and in our country men got the right to vote before women did, so since women got the right to vote for the first time women were voting in large numbers and they were voting more progressively. It was called the gender gap, a funny phrase, sort of like benchmarks, because it was showing that there was a gap between men and women in voting patterns. Women were voting, and in the late 70s-early 80s women began to show much more sensitivity to peace, to community accord, to health and safety, than men. They were literally showing, for almost in any policy, a peacefulness and a desire to bring together rather than competitive type policies, and they were against the war. So what happened was that politicians began to be suddenly aware that they needed the women's vote to win elections.

EM: That was the seventies or eighties?

EZ: Early 80s. It began in the seventies, but it really took hold around '80, '82. In California, at the time, it became clear that poor women weren't voting, and poor women weren't voting because they didn't feel they could have any influence on something as powerful as government. After all, they were poor, they didn't have skills, many of them didn't have education, they weren't voting, they felt removed from government, they didn't trust government. And so on a gamble I, with some others, including a woman in New York City named Bella Abzug, began to take the gamble to see whether or not we could link women's poverty to the gender gap. This is going to sound like a long shot. We decided to link poor women and their concerns to the voting block and to see if we could do two things. Well actually, Bella was interested in getting poor women to vote because she wanted to vote bad leaders out. I was interested in getting poor women to vote so that we could move a women's economic agenda in the United States, and the only way to get that to happen was to show that poor women were voting. So we all came together and we designed a real campaign that didn't have a candidate. The candidate was poor women. And we decided to campaign. I wrote this silly thing that said, two out of three adults in poverty are female, what if we were all to go to the polls? And that turned into a big art poster, and it made it to so many front page newspapers it was uncanny, it fits your media issue. And women started registering who were poor, in droves, because we were able to say the women's vote finally matters. It's true, you haven't had an influence, but now you can. We organized. I would call a woman in a city--this was in California--and say, I understand you're very active in your church; would you be willing to have a meeting at your church of women from your whole neighborhood, and I'll come talk to them, and you can talk, and we'll register them to vote, and we'll talk about what policy changes they need, and I'll take that to the legislature. And for one full year, this was an organizing drive, and by the end of it, 250 women were selected by vote among themselves to be delegates at the state capital in Sacramento, California, and the first women's economic agenda in the United States was written. That was in 1982. And the California legislature implemented it. That's when we got comparable worth.

So it had to do with context and constituency.

(Question about word "comparable worth.") You know, there's the expression "of comparable worth," "of comparable value." Your job and my job are of comparable value, regardless of what gender we are. We got a lot more than that though, we got child care, we got job training, and we got a lot of women elected.

Q: But you are talking about the beginning of the eighties, but that was the beginning of the Republican era in the political arena, they are not so socially oriented, how can you explain?

EM: Because Reagan went to Washington and left them alone in California!

Question: No but, in general, the ? question are based upon social welfare and issues like this, but it was a time when the Republicans came to power, and their political base is very different.

EZ: That's right. In the late seventies, early eighties they had to listen to the women's vote in a way that they are not now. California has a significant right wing and is a very conservative state, and because of the context of the women's vote mattering, and because of the constituency being ready to be mobilized because of the context, and this context, in this case, was because someone said to them, you finally matter--the Republicans had to listen, and in fact that year California had the highest turnout of women voters in the United States. You are absolutely right though. So you're asking a bigger question. Are you asking how we did it, or what happened, what has changed since then?

Question: Both.

EZ: Good questions. I think at that time, Democrats and Republicans had to listen to the concerns of the poor. There is no longer a gender gap. They are no longer listening to poor people at all. Poor people have stopped voting. People of color have stopped voting. And low-income women are not voting. So there is in fact a correlation between voting and the impact that the vote can have on a leader, and the media and the public display of values about that, and how much you can move an agenda at a certain time. I think your question is a perfect question. One could not do what we did then now. One couldn't even do it in one's dreams. Those days are gone for now. We'll probably see them again in fifteen years. Now what we see in the United States is an anti-poverty strain, anti-social policy, anti-poor people, and a lot more bias against people of color. There's much more permission for racial divisions than there was in the early eighties. So you're right. Now what has happened--well, there's been a severe breakdown of the Democratic Party and the Democratic coalition in the United States, and the Republicans have moved seriously to the conservative side, so that the center Republicans, the moderate Republicans right now in the United States are having a terrible time.

EM: Yesterday somebody resigned, right? The woman said she was not going to run again, the moderate Republican, Kassenbaum . . .

EZ: Kassenbaum? I didn't know that. People are just peeling off. It's becoming a very hard time for both Democrats and center Republicans. That will not last, but it is a sort of pendulum swing. This example couldn't happen now, in California or here. So it shows the timing. You can design policy knowing that it's going to take years of sort of accordion strategy, but you can also know that things will be dismantled. That's why it's very helpful to know what is good or bad policy and what you believe in , but also to be flexible. You know I haven't quit government, I still work the same issues, I just go where the opportunities are to keep moving it.

Principles and ideas, well we've already talked a lot about that. Principle might be social justice, it might be a commitment to full employment. Another commitment might be citizen participation. Different principles and ideas affect policy.

Institutions and actors. Look at Gingrich. One actor, really. One actor in a context of a broken Democratic coalition, a Republican party moving to the right, and a tremendous fragility and perceived lack of solidity on the president's part. And one actor with the institutions of the right wing and certain elected new young leaders in Congress that this particular actor, Gingrich, helped elect, and the tides have turned. So actors and institutions affect things.

Media. We had in the United States a bill that said that people who needed food should get food. How should women with little babies who didn't have enough food get food? It's called the WICK program, women and infant something. That vote was finally cinched in Congress when the television showed a picture of a starving baby. So the media finally did it. The media can also do negative things, but sometimes one thing can change something. There was a point in the United States where there was a little girl who was in child care in Texas, and she fell in a hole in an oil well, remember that? See, anyone who was in the United States at the time would remember that. Her name was Jessica. Jessica fell in the oil well, and it was not clear whether Jessica was going to get out of that oil well. And the United States stopped. I swear to you, people were watching whether this little baby was going to get out of the hole. She wasn't really a baby, she was a toddler. And Wall Street, the stock market, you saw men in suits, dealing with their money, gripped, watching the television. Now there was a mistake made. That little girl was in an unlicensed child care facility, it was not safe. The child care policy people should have immediately, once that child was saved, shown that it was illegal and changed the laws in our country to make child care safe. They didn't do it. That's an example of not taking a media moment and moving it. When the country stops . . .

EM: But Megan's Law did it, no? Which is now being moved to New York? This is after the girl who was raped and killed by a sex offender who was released from prison earlier, and put in the community, and the community didn't know that he had a repeat history. So now there is a law that that kind of crime, if it's repeated, must be reported to the community so that would not happen. So Megan had died, but now Megan's laws are installed all over.

EZ: So media can move policy intentionally, like they showed visually hungry children, and at that point in the United States, that worked--it wouldn't work now. So you see how you can use it to move something, you also see how you can miss an opportunity. And I would argue that these opportunities must always be honest; that when one starts to manipulate these things, you will lose. When you use the things in front of you to move what you believe is right as a group, that is very different. Because then you are open, you're open to debate, to difference, you're open to questions. If you have a diehard agenda and you are rigid and you are manipulating, that's not good policy, and that's not what I talk about when I talk about policy as democracy. I'm talking about really assessing need, figuring out, coming to your final choices, and then you have to learn how to move things, and you have to work with everything that's around you, including the media.

Barbara: But in a way by saying that, you've introduced something else, which is almost like a sort of bargaining in good faith; honesty, or social integrity, or something that isn't necessarily in your list there.

EZ: Yes, it's the value that I would put on all of this. When I talk about this as an art form, it has to be honest or it's not an art form.

EM: Well, I also think from a pragmatic point of view. If your arguments are not supported by real causes and cases, which could be checked, in other words if the cases are not honest, you can be so easily disarmed and lose not only on that, but lose your credibility in everything you do. It's not just because from an ethical point of view this is the right thing to do, but pragmatically from a policy making point it would lose, wouldn't it?

EZ: Ultimately, yes. And the other thing is, there are so many people who in trying to not have something happen, put bad things on the table. "Oh, you can't do the wages you want to do in Canada because it's too difficult" -- people are always throwing out obstacles. And so you have to be clear, and you have to know when you're not clear. Just like in a relationship. This is of a different order, but it is about relationship.

The last is research. I think there are times in environments where research can really make a substantive difference. There was a period in the United States in children's policy where they did some studies, they were called the Ypsilanti studies. In the Ypsilanti studies they found that when they took poor children and put them in quality early-childhood environments, quality preschool, quality child care, and they compared that child and another child from the same neighborhood who didn't get that, they found that the child who had been in the quality environment delayed pregnancy, finished high school, went on to college and was employable. So the Ypsilanti study, which then became the Ypsilanti studies because nobody could believe that early childhood programs could be that important to long-term schooling and employability, so they started doing more and more of them, and over time the studies became the research that showed that the United States had to invest in little children, that actually economic development policy began earlier than age six, which actually many Eastern European countries had known for years.

EM: Except the quality of child care, it's questionable.

EZ: Because it was for a different purpose, it was to have women working, it wasn't because it was paying attention to the children.

So that's an example of research where it really did influence public policy. Now there's an example of research that's interesting, the research in Congress showed that the job training programs that the United States had invested in were not showing employability as an outcome, and the Republicans are now using that study, the GAO report on job training, to justify the end of welfare.

Comment: It also depends on who pays for this research.

EM: Or is it that the programs were faulty?

EZ: It's probably both.

It is not the case that one of these will make or break policy; it is the case that you need some variation of these components to make something stick. It is also not the case that you would need all six. I would conjecture that you need at least three or four or it's not going to stick. And I also don't know that the component parts are precisely the same in different countries, but once you're in the practical world of implementing policy there are component parts, and it would be worth comparing and seeing what else should go on your list. In fact, I invite that now; where does this not make sense, and what else would be on the list depending on the country?

EM: I think that context matters almost everywhere. I think probably actors and institutions matter a lot. I'm not sure about constituencies, which is the saddest thing. I'm just not sure how much the constituencies in the countries we're talking about have an awareness of their own power beyond voting, or even in voting, I have to say. Obviously what I'm talking about, disappointment with the Polish elections may speak through me, you can hear it, it's not cynical, but I think the way to build democracy, is to have elections, elections and elections, but I don't think that's enough. I think it's extremely important to develop that tight connection between the voters and those who are then responsible for sticking to the promises. And once that is seen, and I don't think it has been seen yet in the region. I don't thing we can talk about a mature constituency. The example that you gave of those women in California, you can say beyond political divisions, because it's not right or left--we don't have that. The political fragmentations in the countries make a lot of mess as far as the policies are concerned, because the fragmentations are not related directly to the policy making, or the promises are not. I think it's still pretty muddy, and part of a mature democracy in which people can actually see the candidate and express preferences so the candidate can see their constituency, I think that that's not yet transparent.

Gabor: Perhaps the problem is with parties, the parties are not mature yet in Central and Eastern Europe. Because I think that it was easy to mobilize the constituency when they felt that their vote was important, and they made the rational choice, from their own perspective, at least in Hungary, because they voted for the program which was the favor of them. But that's another question . . .

EM: But the program which promised them, in this case, the social net . . .

Gabor: Not only the social net, but the changes were to become free, on the one hand, and on the other had to catch up to the living standards of the western countries.

EM: Are you talking about the first elections or the last elections?

Gabor: Both, I think. So they made the rational choice. There was a party program and they voted for the program of that party which offers the most for them. Don't forget that the socialist party did not challenge the promise of building a market economy or joining the west. So I think they try to make the best choice. But on the other hand, the parties are not settled right now. Because in Hungary, I can speak about Hungary, the socialist party now introduced a quite liberal program. Of course there is a liberal party in coalition, but the major governmental party is the socialist party. I am sure if there were elections, the picture would be different, because people felt a bit disappointed. So I think the socialist party is trying to be a social democratic party; on the other hand, the former government party, the Democratic Forum, announced that it was a conservative party, but sometimes now they seem more leftist than the socialists, so it means the parties are not settled right now. And if the parties are not settled, it is difficult for people to find orientation when they vote.

EZ: I think the issue of constituency raises profound questions about voting and linking votes to outcomes and to ongoing participation in the policy debate. In the United States we see that when you just have voter campaigns that try to get people out, but you don't link them to participatory democracy where they are discussing what the issues are, the voting pattern doesn't last. EM: That's what I was complaining about! EZ: If you think about that strategy in California, women were asked for a full year what they thought. It is linking voting to policy, not just linking voting to a leader. If I just vote for you because I think you're smart, I vote for you, you win, and I go home and bake my cookies. But if there is an ongoing dialogue and an expectation that the community is going to tell you what matters, and we believe that you want to know, and we learn how to talk about that, which also has to do with skills building--people can't talk about democracy and what policies they want if they don't have the tools to ask the right questions. So one has to learn how to ask the right questions in democracy to affect policy, and once one can do that, I tell you the vote changes.

Ina: This is also where the role of media comes in.

EM: I had one question related to the very beginning of your presentation when you were talking about this woman Ida Morales. I think it would be interesting to know where there is a place to go and study the policies, the existing laws. The public library?

EZ: I don't think so. What I'm finding is that learning about the vibrancy of policy and that it's something alive really that you work with, is not something that the general public understands in the United States and it's not something fully emerged in Eastern Europe. I think that people don't know where to go, and they think that policy is for lawyers. In our country, people don't think that public policy is for academics. In our country, academics don't do policy. They study theory, but they don't effect change publicly.

Comment: That's very cultural.

EZ: They can influence the media, and they can train people to think who become leaders. EM: And to do research. EZ: They can influence the context some. They hold on to number three [in her list on the board], they move the principles and the values. They are the religious metaphor, they are the ones who hold onto the ethics of what's rights. And they are an institution that can influence the media and a certain kind of debate.

Heshan: Unfortunately it goes the other way in normative terms as well. The bell curve discussions have basically justified means testing and the fact that it's not nurture, it's nature that's really affecting education. It goes the other way too.