Today, Eric Hanushek and Macke Raymond call for more American school districts to follow the lead of Washington, DC, and Dallas in adopting performance-based teacher compensation reforms to improve student outcomes; Condoleezza Rice explains the importance of American leadership in international affairs and of technological innovation to the future of peace and prosperity; and Josiah Ober outlines the conceptual similarities and practical synergies between well-functioning market economies and rights-respecting democratic political systems.
Reforming K–12 Education
Writing at The Washington Post Opinion page, Distinguished Research Fellow Macke Raymond and Senior Fellow Eric Hanushek raise “the disquieting fact” that in many school districts across the country, teacher salaries are “virtually unrelated to effectiveness in the classroom.” After highlighting successful performance-based pay reforms in Washington, DC, and Dallas, Raymond and Hanushek consider why more districts have not adopted similar changes. They suggest that the American school system “is both compliance-based and a fierce defender of existing personnel and operational structures.” More spending alone has not improved outcomes, so the authors call for “extensive changes” requiring “new thinking by the states, which already have considerable flexibility that has gone largely unused.” Above all, the piece argues for a reexamination and removal of “the constraints on performance that have grown to envelop our schools.” Read more here.
Revitalizing American Institutions
Speaking with Lara Trump on her My View program on Fox News, Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice analyzes a variety of current topics in world affairs. Responding to the Trump administration’s crackdown on issuing student visas, Rice acknowledges the need for legitimate security vetting while also noting that “most of these kids are coming for the right reasons. They want to see this extraordinary country which is the United States of America, experience its freedoms—and we benefit from that.” On the competition between the United States and China for dominance in advanced artificial intelligence systems, Rice stresses the importance that a democratic system of government win this race. Closing with a discussion of America’s role in the world, the former secretary of state reiterates her view that America has an “essential” part to play in constraining the global instability seen in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Watch here.
Speaking on a panel at an event hosted by the Columbia Center for Political Economy, Senior Fellow Josiah Ober details the close relationship between market economies and democracy. Ober’s remarks focus on the structural similarities between a properly set-up market economy and a democratic political system, where citizens engage in self-governance. Both involve “the aggregation of preferences and information.” Ober contrasts this open aggregation with the closed-off nature of authoritarian political systems and command economies, which do not allow for bargaining, deliberating, or voting on public or economic questions. Ober also speaks to the importance of keeping income inequality within certain limits, to prevent the use of overwhelming resources to take over a political system that is based on the contributions and decisions of citizens endowed with equal rights. In Ober’s view, this ongoing threat requires a “civic bargain” that can ensure “meaningful equality of political influence from all citizens.” This argument builds on the themes of Ober’s coauthored 2023 book The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. Watch here.
In his weekly column at RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz responds to the 4,000-word New York Times essay “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” by Steven Pinker. In Berkowitz’s view, Pinker’s “defense of Harvard” from right-wing critics “is damning,” because it minimizes what are real problems with stifled academic freedom at the university. Berkowitz includes quotations from his own correspondence with Jack Goldsmith and Adrian Vermeule, both professors at Harvard Law School, to question Pinker’s assertion that there are “dozens” of prominent conservatives on Harvard’s faculty. While Berkowitz concedes that “Pinker is correct that the right would do well to rein in its invective,” he maintains that “his Harvard-is-not-as-bad-as-it-seems rhetoric could use some fine tuning as well,” given serious ongoing issues with intellectual diversity and the “impoverishment” of Harvard’s undergraduate curriculum. Read more here.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
In a column for the Centre for European Policy Research, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Michael Bordo and Visiting Fellow Mickey Levy marshal historical economic data to argue that “tariffs harm economic performance.” The authors suggest the most likely scenario for American tariff policy would see import duties of “12–14% [on] average (roughly $140 billion or 1.4% of GDP), including negotiated lower tariffs for Canada and Mexico.” While Levy and Bordo think this “less-worse case” scenario could induce a “marked economic slowdown or mild recession,” they anticipate that the long-term impact on US growth would be relatively small. A larger challenge they raise is that “soothing relationships with allies and achieving diplomatic normalcy may take years of good US behaviour, and is unlikely during the Trump administration.” Nevertheless, the authors conclude with a reminder of “the exceptional capabilities and potential of the US’s private sector and economy.” Read more here.
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