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"Like a picture in a magazine." That's how Angel's mother Leah wanted their small townhouse in Pacifica, California, to look. Picture perfect. Leah says that she got the idea of giving her 12-year-old daughter chores after Angel's school sent home fliers describing the importance of teaching children how to "become successful adults." When her adolescent daughter failed to manage perfection -- when Angel missed a task in her 16-point list of chores that ranged from cleaning the…

When I served as the chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency at the World Bank, one project I found especially interesting was the construction of an electricity highway between the rich geothermal energy fields of the Rift Valley in Kenya through the Lake Turkana plains—where the best wind resource identified to date in Africa was recently mapped—to newly constructed hydroelectric facilities in Ethiopia. Not only are these indigenous renewable energy resources largely untapped,…

I tell my students, and only somewhat flippantly, that arts policy is the most important policy arena. Seriously? Well, most people think health policy is right up there—but why live longer if life isn’t worth living? And if you don’t think government has a lot to do with whether and how you can engage with art, you just don’t understand the situation. Think about a world in which our great paintings and…

One of California’s great strengths is the repertoire of ideas and practices that our diverse immigrant population brings from all over. However, some really good ideas from elsewhere have trouble taking root here and, as an East Coast import, I have been especially puzzled that owner-occupied rental housing, a pattern that has worked so well there, is an object of suspicion and even hostility in California. I know of no neighborhood pattern that does so many useful things…

Workers repair the roof of a holiday resort days after Cyclone Pam in Port Vila, capital city of the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu March 19, 2015. REUTERS/Edgar Su With the devastation caused by Tropical Cyclone Pam, progress in developing the small island state of Vanuatu has been wiped out. Focus is now rightly being placed on getting immediate relief to people suffering, and on rebuilding. But once the headlines disappear and the aid workers board their last plane home,…

New research shows that California teenagers in foster care display a surprising optimism about their future, despite the many challenges they face. “In general young people [aging out of foster care] tend to be pretty optimistic, in that sense I don’t think they differ much from their peers,” said Mark Courtney, Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and director of the CalYOUTH study. Initial findings from the CalYOUTH…

On Feb. 12, California Attorney General Kamala Harris held a press conference in Los Angeles to announce the creation of a "Bureau of Children's Justice" with goals ranging from reducing truancy and combatting "childhood trauma" to improving the foster care and juvenile justice systems. While the mandate Harris outlined was broad, members of the newly minted bureau's staff said that this was by design. Aside from a handful of specific issues, the office is currently in reconnaissance mode, gathering…

In a one-room rural schoolhouse an hour’s drive from this city in a coffee-growing region of Colombia, 30 youngsters ages 5 to 13 are engrossed in study. In most schools, students sit in rows facing the teacher, who does most of the talking. But these students are grouped at tables, each corresponding to a grade level. The hum of conversation fills the room. After tackling an assignment on their own, the students review one another’s work. If a…

Derek Turner (MPP ‘06) began working on policy related to internet while a student at the Goldman School. For the past decade, he has been the research director for Free Press, a nonprofit organization specializing in media policy. He spoke us about his decades-long experience advocating for Net Neutrality and the FCC’s recent decision to approve it. Your interest in this issue began as an internship and an APA. How did that experience launch you into this arena? …

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Feb. 26, 2015                                               BERKELEY, CA – On March 4th the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, Berkeley’s MOOCLab and EdX and will launch the first ever Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) focused on using solution-based journalism to drive social change. The seven-week course, Journalism for Social Change (J…