Recent News

Starting in the mid­1990s, education advocates began making a simple argument: National education standards will level the playing field, assuring that all high school graduates are prepared for first-­year college classes or rigorous career training. While there are reasons to doubt that claim — it’s hard to see how Utah, which spends less than one-­third as much per student as New York, can offer a comparable education — the movement took off…

Recent media depictions of the protests in Ferguson, New York City, and around the country have given in to old-fashioned fear mongering. On Fox News and CNN, protesters are depicted as irrational, and the protests as disordered and dysfunctional, a challenge to both our democratic functioning and our better natures. Thomas Sowell, writing for the National Review, lamented “The Steep Cost of the Ferguson Riots” and described the protests as an “orgy of anarchy.”…

Whenever I tell people that I study racial profiling, they exclaim how timely the work is.  It is in fact not so much timely as timeless. It seems like there is always a story involving Black suspects and excessive policing.  When the specifics are shocking, as in the Garner case, and they gain media attention, the public awakens.  But young, Black men are subjected to extra policing on a daily basis.  The cases we hear about…

WASHINGTON - The United States Senate today confirmed President Obama's nomination of Nani Coloretti [MPP '94] to serve as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). As the second most senior official at HUD, Coloretti will manage the Department's day-to-day operations, including a $45 billion annual budget and approximately 8,500 employees. "Nani is a proven executive who has excelled at making government more efficient at the municipal and federal levels," said HUD Secretary Juliá…

HILARY W. HOYNES, Professor of Economics and Public Policy and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities in the Richard & Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, is the recipient of the 2014 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. Given annually since 1998 by the American Economic Association’s (AEA) Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), the Bell Award recognizes and honors an individual who has furthered the status…

It is a time of protests: Occupy, student fees, police killings. Are they all connected? Yes and no. They share the theme that disenfranchisement of frustrated populations with little political power has reached a tipping point. The protest movements may inspire each other but, if we lump them together, we may fail to learn the lesson of this moment and move forward. The continued protests in cities around the country, including Oakland and Berkeley, over police killings of unarmed black…

I am very pleased to announce that University of California President Janet Napolitano has been appointed a faculty member at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.   One of the hallmarks of top-ranked public policy schools is that they not only have world-class academic scholars who develop the scientific basis for new public policies, but they also have faculty members who have made major impacts on public policy through their innovative work.  These leaders …