Recent News

In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that the children of illegal immigrants cannot be denied a free public education. It’s not their fault, after all, that their parents brought them into this country. But until recently, 20 school districts in New York State effectively kept undocumented youngsters out of school by imposing bureaucratic roadblocks such as insisting that the students’ parents produce Social Security cards. It took a full-court press by the State Education Department and the state attorney…

This article is the fifth in a series exploring the effects that unconscious racial biases have on the criminal justice system in the United States. The science is clear that unconscious—or “implicit”—biases contribute to racial disparities in law enforcement outcomes, influencing everything from who is stopped by police (black more than whites), and what happens to them during those stops, to the severity of their sentences if convicted. Most relevant,…

The Goldman School is deeply saddened by the passing of visiting Professor Robert Stern, who died on Sunday, May 17, 2015. Professor Stern was Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and began teaching at GSPP after he moved to California in 2010.  "It was our great good luck to have Professor Stern come to us after retiring from the Ford School at Michigan," says Dean Henry E.…

Former Congressman Barney Frank visited the Goldman School during "Stop the Clock" week, which provides students and faculty with a chance to interact with leading decision makers who have worked in public policy and government. The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Frank and PolicyMatters Journal editors Joe Broadus and Matt Unrath.  PolicyMatters: How has financial regulation played out over the last five years since Dodd-Frank was passed? Frank: The move away from having the lenders be…

Felix Owusu with former MA Congressman Barney Frank, who co-authored the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act which established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I came to the Goldman School to develop my skills in quantitative policy research while gaining experience designing, researching, and evaluating policies that reduce poverty and inequality. With these goals in mind, I chose to work in the Office of Research at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) this past summer in Washington, DC.…

In the summer of 2009, a North Korean ship containing illicit cargo departed from its territorial waters, seemingly headed for Myanmar (Burma), possibly before transfer to the Middle East. Delivery of the cargo would have been in clear violation of several United Nations Security Council resolutions. As Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs, Michael Nacht was called upon to participate in an inter-agency team to assess the situation and help formulate a response. “We did not want…

The story of how Farhat Popal (MPP '09) got to DC is a lesson in persistence and the importance of networks. In 2010, she was working in the auditor’s office for the City of San Diego. She knew she wanted to do Afghanistan-related work, but had no active leads in DC. She reached out to friends and GSPP alumni working in international affairs who connected her to people in relevant fields. She introduced herself via email and followed up with…

The conventional wisdom among social scientists is that there’s little payoff in investing in troubled teenagers. As the University of Chicago economist James J. Heckman argued in 2011, “we overinvest in attempting to remediate the problems of disadvantaged adolescents and underinvest in the early years of disadvantaged children,” when the potential gains are supposedly the largest. But this consensus is wrong, as we now know from recent scholarship. Take YouthBuild, which runs 260 programs in 46…