When technology advances, the law often struggles to keep up.

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Knotts that “A person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.” The Court decided that police could track an individual by using a “beeper” hidden inside a portable container.

During oral arguments before the Court last week in the case of U.S. v. Jones, Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Michael R. Dreeben reminded the Court of the Knotts precedent. He argued that the 1983 case made the police conduct at issue in Jones legal.

Police, suspecting Antoine Jones of selling cocaine, attached a GPS tracking device to his Jeep Grand Cherokee without a warrant. They monitored his travels for a month, and used the evidence to convict him. But the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned Jones’s conviction, ruling that the amount of information collected violated the Fourth Amendment.

According to news coverage, most Supreme Court Justices seemed not to be convinced by Dreeben’s application of the Knotts precedent. They raised fundamental questions about the use of standards of “public thoroughfare” and “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The latter test was established by the seminal 1967 case Katz v. U.S., in which the Court held that warrantless electronic eavesdropping of telephone calls made from a public booth violated the Constitution. The “reasonable expectation of privacy” formula has since become the generally applicable standard for determining whether the Constitution affords protection against police searches.

Chief Justice John Roberts spoke up often. “That was 30 years ago,” he said of the Knotts case. “The technology is very different and you get a lot more information from the GPS surveillance than you do from following the beeper.”

Roberts strained to apply earlier precedents to the new technology. “I give you that, that it’s in public. Does the reasonable expectation of privacy trump that fact?…Is it simply the reasonable expectation of privacy regardless of the fact that it takes place in public?” he said, then added later that the police “just sit back in the station and they push a button whenever they want to find out where the car is. They look at data from a month and find out everywhere it’s been in the past month. That seems to me dramatically different.”

The Justices explored examples that suggested they are alarmed by the implications of GPS tracking. Justice Anthony Kennedy wondered whether the FBI could simply put a GPS device on an individual’s overcoat. Roberts asked whether the government could install tracking devices on the cars of the Justices themselves.

Justice Stephen Breyer summed up the defense’s case in an exchange with Dreeben. “If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movements of every citizen of the United States,” he said. “What happened in the past [with traditional surveillance] is memories are fallible, computers aren’t….So, if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like 1984?”

If the Justices indeed want to find a way to require a warrant for some kinds of GPS tracking, we should cheer them on. The circular “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard provides little protection in an age of constant technological progress. A test based on the amount and kinds of information acquired by police, like the “mosaic theory” applied by the appeals court, would likely stand up better. That court argued that the large amounts of data provided by technologies like GPS trackers reveal unprecedented amounts of information about suspects, creating a “mosaic” out of individual tiles. When it decides Jones next year, the Supreme Court may only make a narrow judgment. But we should hope that in this and future rulings, the Court articulates a sturdier foundation for privacy.

Harvard Political Review: What was your inspiration for entering politics?

Tim Roemer: Two things captivated me and sent me like a rocket ship toward politics. The first was the unconditional love and support of my parents. The second was a young senator by the name of Robert F. Kennedy. I’ll never forget in fifth grade class when the Sister asked for a volunteer to run a mock presidential campaign for Bobby Kennedy. My hand shot up so quickly that I think I dislocated my shoulder.

HPR: What inspired you to serve as Ambassador to India, and what experiences did you gain during your time in Congress to help you in the role?

TR: A very articulate, eloquent and convincing person asked me to do the job: President Obama. As ambassador, you work on many different issues, but one of the most compelling and consuming ones is national security. My time on the Intelligence Committee and other security commissions helped prepare me for building the relationship that we have constructed in the last couple years.

HPR: How do you balance all the different interests at play in working out export initiatives?

TR: I believe that since the late 1980s, Republican and Democratic administrations have not developed a compelling narrative for the American people so that they understand the importance of world trade and how exporting creates jobs and growth opportunities in America.  This is a win-win situation because, as you build this relationship economically, the middle class gets more opportunities to prosper and poor people are able to escape poverty.

HPR: How troubling an issue is corruption to India’s ability of succeeding as a democracy?

TR: Corruption doesn’t just affect the wealthy and high-level government people, it affects the common men and women. The middle class is getting fed up with it and they want changes. To be fair to India, she is only 60 years old and, when our democracy was just 60, we had a myriad of problems ourselves. We’ve come a long way in the last 100 years to cure those ills, to move in a better direction. India’s in the midst of that, and you’ve seen democracy at work in recent weeks with the anti-corruption campaign.

HPR: What do you see as the greatest risks in the security relationship between Pakistan and India?

TR: This is an issue of great concern to America and its national security policy. To address the problem we must first develop constructive, positive, bilateral relationships with both countries. Secondly, we must grow our strategic relationship with India and work to deflect the possibility of that next Mumbai attack by establishing ways to share more intelligence with India. We are working with India where they desire on border issues, technology, and helping to establish a new national counterterrorism center.

HPR: Are you considering ever running for elected office again?

TR: I’ve got four young kids and I’m spending more time trying to get my kids elected to the student council than I am trying to get myself elected to anything. But, when you’re at the Kennedy School…it puts the fire back in your belly to stay involved and maybe run again someday.

Harleen Gambhir ’14 is a Contributing Writer. This interview has been condensed and edited. 

Harvard Political Review: How did your business background help you as a political strategist?

David Muir: Coming from a background in market research, you learn a lot about people and how they interact. You also learn that what you want to say and how you communicate can actually be different. These elements of communication and engagement are important in the world of politics. The other thing is the role of emotion. Emotion drives people and markets, but too often political discourse is divided by emotion.

HPR: How did British politics change with Gordon Brown?

DM: The first two parliaments of Labour government, led by Tony Blair, were under fairly benign economic circumstances. The government was a clear beneficiary of globalization because, once China entered the market, there was massive downward pressure on inflation, and inflation has somewhat been the British disease. Globalization also created lots of jobs in the U.K., especially in the financial and technology sectors. Conversely, in Gordon’s time as political leader, globalization was no longer a benign force. China’s huge growth created resource constraints…We had been a massive beneficiary from the downward pressure on prices and now we were struggling because pressure was upwards.

HPR: How do you think Mr. Brown’s decision to step back affected British politics and the Labor Party?

DM: I think his decision to stand down was exactly the right decision. If you’ve lost an election, it’s time for somebody new to take over. But he and Tony Blair were absolutely giant figures within the Labour Party, and they dominated the field. I think it’s best for them to stay off the field in order for the new generation to build itself up. Blair and Brown cast a long shadow on British politics in a good sense, but it is imperative that the younger generation gets out from underneath that shadow.

HPR: What are your thoughts on the current economic crisis?

DM: It is clear with hindsight that Greece should never have become part of the Eurozone, but people have to be clear that, if Greece is kicked out of the Eurozone, you’d have not just a bankrupt state but also a bankrupt corporate sector. It wasn’t just the Greeks who wanted to be in the Eurozone, but was also the French and the Germans, thus making it an aggregate responsibility. Ultimately, I think the E.U. as it currently stands is actually incapable of solving this crisis; instead, the IMF must be brought in to solve the problem, but that may be plausibly unpalatable and is likely to be resisted by the European leaders.

HPR: What do you think is the role of the U.K. during the Eurozone crisis?

DM: The U.K. is definitely going to be affected, but at the moment is very much a bystander. I think this bystander status is definitely a big change and would not have happened if Gordon Brown was still prime minister. Instead, the U.K. is confined to being a spectator. It will probably pick up a big tab, since the U.K.’s biggest export market is Europe, likely causing its growth further decline and weaken. Therefore, there’s likely to be political controversy in the U.K. over the next six months about whether having a fiscal austerity at a time when demand is contracting is the right thing to do.

Alpkaan Celik ’15 is a Staff Writer. This interview has been condensed and edited.

The reasoning behind the above comments has its roots in the mainstream/neoclassical theory that dominates today’s academic economics departments. The problem lies in the fact that this orthodoxy is taught to prospective economics students not as one of several competing theories, but as the only theory, a positive science that can be used to “formulate theories with mathematical precision, collect huge data sets on individual and aggregate behavior, and exploit the most sophisticated statistical techniques to reach empirical judgments that are free of bias and ideology…”[1] Orthodox economists, beyond their key differences (such as whether they belong to the new classical or new Keynesian school, like Mankiw),[2] tend to share this contention. While it is true that this way of thinking about economics has provided us with many empirically useful statistical and econometric models, these sophisticated and elegant mathematical models cannot compensate for incorrect basic assumptions.[3] In his Monthly Review essay “Why Socialism?”, Albert Einstein expressed his skepticism regarding such assumptions, as they corresponded to the predatory phase of human development, not to democratic socialism: “we should be on our guard not to overestimate [economic] science and scientific knowledge when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.”

As a thorough critique of these assumptions cannot be attempted here, it suffices to say that the conceptual apparatus of neoclassical economics is attempted to be so constructed as to transcend any particular set of social/class relations, to be “objective” and timeless. It thus fails to understand capitalism as a particular historical form of society, and to study economics as “the science of the social relations of production under historically determined conditions.”[4] Above all, as its focus is on the way in which economic relations appear on the surface, i.e. as relations between things, it is not able to analyze the exploitative and alienating relations that underlie the process of exchange, relations that are becoming all the more clear to broad masses of discontented and dispossessed students and workers (those engaging in both manual and intellectual labour, the employed and the unemployed, unionized and non-unionized, legal and ‘illegal’ workers) as a result of the crisis.

The fact that the majority of academic economists rarely address these concerns is certainly not a matter of intelligence, but rather one of ideology and class. As Karl Marx wrote: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”[5] As the representatives of society’s ruling ideas in a crucial academic discipline, the role of neoclassical economists thus goes beyond positive scientific inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Understanding the dominance and supposed self-evident truth of these ideas requires an examination of the role of intellectuals in capitalist society though, and here it is important to recall Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of organic intellectuals: “The intellectuals are the dominant group’s deputies exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. These comprise: 1. The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group… 2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline.”[6]

It is because of the above reasons that orthodox economics is in essence normative, and at its core vulgar and apologetic: it is more interested in defending and rationalizing the interests of the capitalist class and its hangers-on (the 1%) than in scientific impartiality and critical inquiry into the historically specific material and social relations of accumulation and production. Neoclassical economics is, in short, the economics of capital. The urgent need though is for a political economy of the working class (the ‘old’ proletariat and the ‘new’ precariat, which must come to comprise a hegemonic bloc), a theoretical foundation for the liberation of humanity, for a society where the free development of each individual is a condition for the free development of all. Although Marxist, neo-Ricardian, and post-Keynesian radical political economists integrate the social/class relations of capitalism into their theories, for orthodox economists to join their heterodox colleagues would require nothing less than a revolution in their way of thinking. It would involve, as Marx argued, going beyond the inverted reality of individual liberty and equality as they appear in the market, and confronting the inequality and unfreedom of the capitalist political economy.[7] No less important, it would involve seeking to understand capital not as a thing, but as a fundamental social relation of production and as the independent social power of capitalists over workers. Politically, it would entail abandoning the principles of neoliberalism (and their theoretical basis: rational expectations, etc.), resisting the commodification of the commons, and fighting for an economy geared towards the satisfaction of human needs and built upon the foundations of decency, justice, equality, decentralized planning, and workplace democracy.

In conclusion, the instinctive reaction of many Harvard students to the actions of those who walked out of class is regrettable, and indicative of the dismal state of “open” academic discourse at this institution. In opposition to The Harvard Crimson editors’ claim that Mankiw’s class provides the necessary academic grounding for the studying of economics as a social science, we should assert that the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, history, and philosophy are deeply interconnected, a reflection of the dialectical interaction between the economy, the state, politics, social/class relations, and ideology. To argue that economics is an objective science divorced from these spheres, and that anything outside the orthodoxy belongs to the realm of “social theory,” is precisely to understand economics as a vulgar bourgeois science, one that views capitalism’s crises as natural disasters, rather than as products of the system’s internal contradictions, and that considers capital-labor relations voluntary (in reality, for those who only have their labor-power to sell, it is an issue of work or die). Against this, it is necessary to approach social science with the courage to undertake  “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” not afraid of its own conclusions or of conflict with the powers that be.[8] To take a step in this direction means at once to take sides in regard to the burning question that confronts humanity in our time: socialism or barbarism.

Panagiotis Angelopoulos ‘12,  History concentrator, Economics as a secondary field

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Class Conflict: The debate over class-based affirmative action. By Peter Bozzo and Eric Smith.

Dunce Ex Machina: U.S. high schools failing to prepare grads. By Caroline Cox and Kaiyang Huang.

Tenure Tune-Up: Changes needed to modernize tenure. By Eric Hendey and Simon Thompson.

The Public University in the Recession: The UC and new modes of funding. By Aditi Ghai and Ken Liu.

Inflationary Spiral?: Assessing the threat of grade inflation. By Alastair Su.

The Cost of College: Why higher education is still too expensive. By Ioana Calcev.

DREAM Deferred: Failure to pass the DREAM Act highlights partisan gridlock. By Kathy Lee and John He.

Beyond the Liberal Arts: In expanding access to college, don’t forget vocational training. By Luka Oreskovic.

Oh, the Humanities: The struggle over curricular reform, at Harvard and beyond. By Candice Kountz.

The Limits of SAFRA: New reform measures won’t solve the problem of tuition rates. By Lily Ostrer.

The End of the Women’s College?: The decline of single-sex higher education. By Brian Burton.

UNITED STATES

Beyond Cap and Trade: How America can address climate change. By Matthew Bewley and Toni Campbell.

The Republicans’ Dilemma: The midterms leave the GOP facing key decision for 2012. By Alexander Chen.

Do Americans Fear Muslims?: What the Ground Zero mosque taught us. By Neil Patel and Pragya Kakani.

Debating the Census: How we count matters most. By Jeffrey Kalmus and Rajiv Tarigopula.

Crashing the Party: Why the Tea Party makes this midterm different. By John Prince and Arjun Mody.

WORLD

Laboring to Govern: Election plunges Australian politics into uncertainty. By Cindy Hsu.

90 Miles Away and Closing: Policy changes suggest a new openness towards Cuba. By Isabelle Glimcher.

Paul Kagame’s Balancing Act: Rwanda’s reformer faces criticism. By Jimmy Wu and Joshua Lipson.

A World Without Nukes: Addressing regional conflicts is at the heart of disarmament. By Eliza Calihan.

BOOKS & ARTS

Review of Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education in War. By Taylor Helgren.

Review of Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World. By Raul Quintana.

Review of The Korean War: A History. By Henry Shull.

Review of The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons. By Paul Mathis.

Review of The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America. By Melanie Guzman.

Review of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. By Skyler Hicks.

INTERVIEWS

Gordon Brown: former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. By Felix de Rosen.

Margaret Spellings: former U.S. Secretary of Education. By Matthew Bewley.

Mark Rudd: former member of Weather Underground and current activist. By Alliance of Collegiate Editors.

Rebiya Kadeer: Uighur rights activist. By Alliance of Collegiate Editors.

ENDPAPER

Beyond Workers and Leaders: Higher education as citizen training ground. By Kenzie Bok.

Where is the next Maureen Dowd? ... Well, actually, Maureen Dowd kinda sucks, but you know what I mean.

In the last couple years, we at HPR have noticed a growing gender imbalance in the makeup of our staff. Of the 16 current members of the editorial board, only two are female. Among our new crop of writers, the divide is not much better: less than a third of the writers for the fall issue of the HPR will be women. Finally, only three out of our 16 new “online columnists” are female.

I noticed recently that the Crimson‘s new batch of columnists has a similar imbalance: two women and eight men. Getting curious, I started checking some other campus hubs of opinion-mongering. The Harvard Salient: eight out of 25 editors are female. Perspective: five out of 14. I know this bean-counting is kind of crass, but I think the issues it raises are important.

It’d be easy to dismiss any particular instance of gender imbalance as a fluke. “Sure, HPR has only two female editors right now, but there were more last year and there will surely be more next year.” And that statement is probably true, but that’s far from proving that men and women are equally represented, and have been equally represented, in the magazine.

It’d be even easier to say that, even if the gender imbalance is real, it’s certainly not the result of active prejudice or discrimination. Nobody in the HPR elections last year said, “Let’s not take her, she’s a girl.” And I’m sure nobody anywhere else said anything like that, either.

It’d be even easier still to say, well, if there aren’t women represented in the HPR or in the Crimson‘s columns, that’s probably because women just didn’t want to do those activities. And that might be true, but why would it be true? Would it be true because women by nature don’t like politics and don’t like expressing their opinions? That idea is anathema, to most of us anyway, and rightly so. (Obviously this is Rachel Wagley bait, and I look forward to her taking it.)

The other possibility, of course, is that there are social, that is nonbiological, reasons why women and men differ in the extent of their representation in the world of politics, journalism, and opinion-mongering. (By the way, New York Times: two out of 11. Washington Post: five out of 34.) We are all conditioned in various ways to think of certain social roles and personality types as distinctively masculine or feminine. As Ann Friedman writes in the American Prospect, “there are cultural, structural reasons why men are typically more assertive, more self-promotional, and more successful everywhere from the boardroom to the op-ed pages to the halls of Congress. This is much bigger than women’s individual behavior.”

If you accept that, and I do, the question becomes what we can do about it. Friedman disparages two pieces of advice that are often given: first, that women should act more like men, and second, that they should “try to get ahead by playing up what supposedly makes them different.” Either of those solutions might work for particular women in particular situations. But as broader solutions they draw our attention away from the real problem, which is not how women behave, exactly, but how those behaviors are perceived by peer-groups that are often dominated by men, and how those behaviors are inculcated in a society that still harbors certain assumptions about how women and men are and ought to be.

Those two pieces of advice might, in fact, set women up for a fall. If women play up the supposedly “feminine” sides of their personalities, might they not be passed over in fields dominated by men and associated with “manly” qualities? Conversely, if women try to mimic men, might they not suffer a backlash and “be declared uppity bitches,” in Friedman’s terms?

Unfortunately, this doesn’t leave us with many concrete things we can do to change the situation. Friedman ends her column by exhorting us to stop telling women “how to get ahead in an unjust system” and start to “change the system itself.” How does one change such a system? Isn’t it by changing the behavior of many individuals? I don’t know, but I’d love to get a conversation started about this question.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

It’s Relay for Life time again, so I’ve been thinking a bit about how charities raise money and which charities I’d like to support with a college student’s meager donations. More than twice as many Americans participate in Relay each year (3.5 million) than get cancer each year (1.5 million); Relay has become so widespread that participants can raise money for “Relay for Life” without ever mentioning cancer (of course, more than 3.5 million are affected with cancer each year, but I don’t think that that diminishes my point about Relay’s popularity).

I often wonder how limited the overall pool of charitable donations is. Does Relay compete for funds with other charities, or does it get people who would otherwise buy a burger give $20 to cancer research? I haven’t done enough research to answer that question, but based on the chart on page 53 of this NBER report, I suspect that only the very rich make huge changes in their giving based on the solicitations they receive (the giving rates for the other income groups are much steadier). As Relay is decidedly middle-class–it takes place at tracks all over the country, not the Plaza–I fear that it displaces other charitable giving rather than increasing the total.

For my part, I prefer to give my peanuts to worse-promoted charities or ones with a bit more personal meaning; events, as fun as they are, don’t sway me all that much. And I do like that Relay is pretty low-cost for the charity in its event and its solicitations. How do you choose where to donate on a tight budget?

*I hope that I haven’t made fundraising seem futile; certainly there is some elasticity to effort and creativity in fundraising.  If you’re mad at me for not being too kind to Relay, you can show me by donating here to my friend Fabian. I hope that the following isn’t hypocritical: if I’ve inspired you to donate to underpromoted causes, but you don’t have ideas for which to give to, I like (a) giving gift cards to the homeless; (b) the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America; and (c) the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter.  And the Harvard Political Review.

Photo Credit: Flickr (Jeffrey Simms)

It was awesome.  It was everything I thought about the Tea Party and more.  There were Birthers.  There were signs calling for state nullification.  I think signs calling for “Civil War 2012″ were trolling, but who knows. I’m pretty sure the “MIT Nukular Engineers for Palin!!!1!” were trolling.  The guy dressed as Hitler rocking an Obama armband? Not trolling, he was very real and had a beautiful mustache. Which was not real.  It was very evident who the Tea Partiers were, namely old white people wearing American flag apparel.  This being Boston, however, roughly a quarter of the attendees were liberals like myself who had just come to check out the scene; or to troll. My favorite was the dirty hippie carrying a massive sign saying “Fake America Welcomes You, Sarah”. He was chill.

The speech itself was nothing more or less than I expected.  She didn’t do the usual pandering to the crowd by giving local flavor; I somehow doubt anyone would really believe Sarah Palin saying how much she loved Boston.  But of course she invoked the actual Boston Tea Party and taxation without representation.  The applause lines were more or less standard boilerplate (I didn’t have a notebook, so these might be slightly off): “We know how liberals love to say “Yes, we can.” But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.  This November, the American people will tell you “No, you don’t”.  She dissed the “lame-stream media”.  And of course, she got a chant going of “Drill, baby, drill”.  Having seen her say it in action, both me and my companion agreed it was highly sexual, and on purpose.  The first thing her follow-up speaker said was “Conservative women; they’re smarter than you and way hotter than you!”

I was actually expecting more whining about the media and about how they hate on her, she managed to keep her speech more or less on-target and tossed out a lot of red meat. There was a lot of God stuff, which actually sounded something of a dissonant note.  I didn’t see a single sign out there with religious overtones, they were pretty much universally about spending and debt and so forth.  She also obviously didn’t articulate any sort of positive platform (other than “We should use the rich energy resources God has given us”), but devoted her speech mainly to harshing on the President.  Her lines that weren’t about how awful liberals were all concerned how awesome America is, and about how God has chosen us to be a shining city on a hill, etc.  There really was a lot of God stuff; even if it’s not the Tea Party tune exactly, that’s kind of her brand (and likely also something she really believes).  Scott Brown was not mentioned, having recently turned down an invite to speak at the event.  The crowd ate it up, even the long-stale lines about government being the problem (not the solution).  And when Sarah’s speech was done, hordes of flag-wearing seniors swarmed back across the Common to Park Street station to enjoy the benefits of subsidized mass transit from the People’s Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Wendy Kopp is the founder and president of Teach for America, the national non-profit teaching corps. She also serves as CEO of Teach for All, an organization that works to introduce Teach for America’s methods around the world.

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW: What are your thoughts on charter schools and do you think is it feasible to implement them on a wider scale?

WENDY KOPP: I think what we are seeing in charters are the possibilities when you enable people who are pursuing incredible results for kids and give them flexibility over where the resources go. We’ve seen many driven TFA alums move into charters because they feel it gives them greater freedom and flexibility to meet the needs of their kids.

And I think the question, as we think about the scalability of charters, is really whether we can move to a situation where we have whole systems of charters. We’ve seen in the last few years school systems actually try to replicate that approach within their system by giving principals greater flexibility and freedom over where their resources go in exchange for greater accountability for results, so I think we’re learning a lot from charter schools that we can apply more broadly within school systems.

HPR: Recently, in Rhode Island, all the teachers at an underperforming school were laid off. Is that the way that teacher accountability should be enforced?

WK: This is such a tough dilemma. There are schools in our country which have literally single-digit graduation rates, schools where that has been the case for years and years and years. You can’t just leave the kids in schools that are completely dysfunctional. But systems have really struggled to figure out how to turn these failing schools around. So, as a matter of policy, there are a lot of people trying to figure out how we can turn that small handful of dysfunctional schools around.

And I think in this case, asking all the teachers to reapply, bringing in a new leader, and giving that person flexibility over who to hire might be an appropriate solution. When you talk to any successful principal and ask them what the key to success in their school is, they’ll say that it’s their teachers. And what you realize when spending a lot of time with good principals is that they spend an enormous amount of energy working to surround themselves with good people. So I think that one path in turning around the schools is to bring in new leadership and give them the flexibility they need to determine who is on their staff.

HPR: How do you propose that the American school system find talented, energetic teachers?

WK: I think that our school systems need to do what any successful organization does: recruit talent aggressively in order to find enough people with the personal characteristics necessary to succeed, and then invest in their training and development over time. Ultimately we need our school systems to develop the same kind of “people development” human capital systems that successful companies or other successful organizations have built.

HPR: Are standardized tests good benchmarks for measuring the quality of a teacher?

WK: This is another incredible dilemma. Ultimately, I think we need clear, rigorous standards towards which our teachers can teach. We do need strong assessments, both to inform teachers of what their students don’t understand so that they can teach more effectively, and to hold teachers accountable, and to hold their schools accountable. At the same time, you need a balance because the last thing I want to do is convey that I think meeting low-level standardized tests is all we need to do.

In terms of how teachers should be evaluated, I think we should give principals flexibility in determining who is on their staff. If we hold principals accountable for school-level results, give them more freedom over who they hire and how they retain their teachers, and invest in the development of principals, I think we’ll move toward a better system. And different principals will want to approach that in different ways.

HPR: Another issue that’s been in the news lately is national education standards. Should the same curriculum be mandated for Boston and for Houston?

WK: I think it would conserve a lot of resources if we all came together around a common set of standards because then we could do a lot better at capturing and evaluating what the best practices are, across different contexts. We could make investments in truly sophisticated standardized tests once, rather than fifty times. I think we could gain a lot by coming together around common standards.

Meredith Baker ’13 is a Contributing Writer. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Photo Credit: Flickr Stream of Hekerui