Education

How Can We Fix Our Public Schools? By Making Them Private
The widening gap between the cognitive elite and unskilled workers is threatening to transform America, in effect dividing the Republic into two nations, one in the first world, the other in the third. How can we prevent such a division? Only by providing good schools for all our children—which in turn means making our public schools private. Nobel laureate and Hoover fellow Milton Friedman explains.

Failing Grades
How race and ethnicity still affect party allegiance. By Hoover media fellow Michael Barone.

School Choice: The Evidence Comes In
Critics of school choice have long asserted that it would lead the best and brightest students to desert public schools, confronting such schools with an even worse crisis than the one they already face. Milwaukee has had a voucher program for 10 years. The result? Milwaukee’s test scores are up—way up. By Hoover public affairs fellow Hanna Skandera and Hoover associate director Richard Sousa.

The Private Can Be Public
Businesses have always played an important role in public schools, whether publishing textbooks or managing payrolls. Now businesses are offering to manage entire schools on behalf of public school boards, hiring principals and teachers—and taking responsibility for the results. Will the profit motive benefit kids? The answer, according to Hoover fellow John E. Chubb, is yes.

Economics

Private Property, Freedom, and the Rule of Law
Juxtapose the history of England with that of Russia. What emerges? The importance of private property. By Richard Pipes.

The Dollar Club
In countries throughout the world, the dollar has long served as an unofficial currency. Now quite a few of those countries are deciding to make the greenback official. Here’s why. By Hoover fellow Robert J. Barro.

Drug Policy

Stalemate in the Drug War
Under Plan Colombia, the United States will provide the government of Colombia with nearly $1 billion to use in fighting the drug trade. Yet if the war on drugs has already proven a dismal failure here at home, why should we expect it to succeed anywhere else? Hoover fellow William Ratliff reports from Bogotá.

Race

Saving Souls—and Cities
How much worse would our inner cities be today were it not for black churches? Much worse. By John J. DiIulio Jr., director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

E Pluribus Unum—Sooner or Later
How race and ethnicity still affect party allegiance. By Hoover media fellow Michael Barone.

The Battle for Color-Blind Public Policy
According to Hoover media fellow Robert Zelnick, the government should end racial preferences as a matter of principle. "The ultimate political question," writes Zelnick, "is whether whites and Asians in this democracy have the same constitutional rights as blacks, Hispanics, and other favored groups."

Environment

The Greening of U.S. Foreign Policy
The environmental movement has managed to place its agenda smack in the middle of American foreign policy. This is not good news. By Hoover fellow Terry L. Anderson.

How Not to Protect Wildlife
Under the Endangered Species Act, once a species is listed as endangered, it is more likely to go extinct than to recover. If only the act itself would become extinct. By Ike C. Sugg.

Technology

Fueling High-Tech Industries
Hoover fellow Paul M. Romer argues that our universities place far too much emphasis on preparing students for careers in academia and far too little on preparing them for careers in the private sector. He proposes a remedy.

National Security

Keeping Secrets in the Digital Age
To prevent the transfer abroad of sensitive technology, the United States has imposed drastic export controls. They don’t work. Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz offers a more sensible approach.

Strategies of Containment, Past and Future
Our policy of containment helped win the Cold War. Does the policy have any relevance today? By Hoover fellow John Lewis Gaddis.

Defense

NATO Ten Years from Now
The Europeans want a bigger share in running NATO—and a smaller U.S. presence on their continent. Hoover fellow Peter Duignan explains why nothing would serve our interests better.

International

Confronting the Post–Post–Cold War World
The geopolitical vacuum of the immediate post–Cold War years is quickly being filled, with the United States now facing a neoimperializing Russia, an ascendant China, an emerging India, a restive European Union, and a rising—and often militant—Islam. By Hoover fellow Thomas H. Henriksen.

The Europeanization of the United States
Why some bad ideas simply refuse to die. By Hoover fellow Charles Hill.

Russia

Moscow, Misreading Bush
Vladimir Putin and his inner circle quietly rooted for George W. Bush last November, assuming that a Bush administration would overlook Russia’s human rights record. Now it’s time for the Bush administration to set the Russians straight. By Hoover fellow Michael McFaul.

Britain

And Now: The British Election
This year’s British general election looks as though it will be a replay of the American presidential election—the 1996 election, that is. By Hoover fellow Gerald A. Dorfman.

Canada

Incroyable!
Incredible but true: tales from Canada’s language wars. By Hoover fellow Arnold Beichman.

Interview

Friedman on the Surplus
What should the Bush administration do with the surplus? Give it back to the American people, of course. In an interview with Hoover fellow Peter Robinson, Hoover fellow and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman explains why he is "in favor of any tax cut, under any circumstances, in any way, in any form whatsoever."

History & Culture

A Personal Odyssey
In this excerpt from his new book, Hoover fellow Thomas Sowell reflects on his early years. A memoir by the man the Washington Post recently called "our most valuable public intellectual."

The Reagan Legacy

How Reagan Did It
What made Reagan Reagan. By Hoover fellow Peter Robinson.

Reagan, in His Own Hand
From 1975 to 1979, Ronald Reagan wrote more than 600 radio addresses in his own hand, planning every plank in what would become his presidential platform. Herewith, a sampling of classic Reagan, compiled by Hoover fellows Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson.

Mount Reagan
One speechwriter’s experience with "the largest and most magnificent American of the second half of the twentieth century." By Hoover fellow Peter Robinson.