Kennedy School Review

BY KHALED K. Last week, an 18-month-old baby was burned to death in an attack by Israeli settlers in Douma, a village in the West Bank that is under Israeli occupation. The settlers left graffiti that read ‘Revenge’ and ‘Long Live Messiah’. The incident made international headlines; however, it is far from unusual. Every week, […]

REVIEWED BY SAM WINTER-LEVY This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  In April 1897, just months after Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State and launched the Zionist movement, a steamer containing twenty-one dreamers docks in Jaffa. They are a delegation of upper-class British Jews, and they have traveled to […]

BY TYLER S. THIGPEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  The conversation that most haunted Marshall Chambers—former director of strategic initiatives for Barrow County Schools, a rural district in Georgia—happened in 2001 at one of the district’s high schools. Chambers, himself a graduate of Piedmont College in Demorest, […]

A global response will be the next test of civilization. BY DEREK PHAM In July 1979, Vice President Walter Mondale addressed 65 countries’ delegation heads at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. They had convened to discuss the Indochinese refugee crisis, which, earlier that year, had reached a breaking point. The then-five members of the […]

BY MICHAEL ALTER Pope Francis was resolute in his opinion about the toll climate change is exacting on the planet when he released his encyclical on Thursday, June 18. Francis laid out his feelings quite bluntly: “the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” While this […]

BY ALEXANDER W. SMITH Greece now stands at the edge of an economic and political precipice. By allowing the country to miss a €1.55 billion loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras demonstrated that he is no longer negotiating for Greece’s future. He is gambling with it. Greece’s effective default is […]

BY RUFINA PARK This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  On the surface, South Korea’s education system has notable merits. In the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which measures the cognitive skills of fifteen-year-olds from sixty-five participating economies […]

A proposed plan for the development of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, misses the opportunity to create affordable housing. BY SHANOOR SEERVAI You can judge a city by how its poor live, architect Kamu Iyer writes in his recent book tracing Mumbai’s development since the 1940s. By this measure, India’s financial capital fares dismally. The price […]

BY WILLIAM WERKMEISTER In 2007, I became the crime victim of a drug addict offender. My case involved a “drug court,” a radical new form of justice, known to very few Americans, but financed to a significant extent by our federal, state, and local tax dollars.  Drug courts are specialty criminal dockets that handle substance-abusing, […]

BY JOSHUA C. FIVESON This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  In September 2013, the most active branch of the Al-Qaeda terror franchise—Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP— kidnapped a British-born American citizen. His name was Luke Somers. Raised in the United States, Somers pursued a degree in […]

BY ANDREW DEYE This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  POLICY ISSUE OVERVIEW The United States, once a global leader in infrastructure competitiveness, now ranks 16th.1 The decline shows no signs of abating as federal, state, and local funds for infrastructure remain constrained, and government resources remain centered on […]

BY LUCY BOYD “[Charter schools] have become the leading edge of long-cherished ideological crusade by the far right to turn education into a consumer choice rather than a civic obligation.”  – Diane Ravitch, a leading author and academic on the American education system. “The only threat charter schools hold is to the myth that poor […]