School board elections are usually placid affairs, but that wasn't the case in the recent Los Angeles election. Would-be kingmakers, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and media magnate Rupert Murdoch, spent nearly $4 million to defeat incumbent Steven Zimmer. Zimmer's sin was to question the untrammeled growth of charter schools and the over-reliance on test scores in evaluating teachers. Faced with a tsunami of junk ads, he exhorted the voters not to "believe the lies of March."…

As an Alaskan, I'm no stranger to guns - there was actually a shooting range in the basement of my elementary school (to be fair, it was closed during school hours). I've never had very strong feelings about the gun issue because I can see merit in both sides of the debate. That said, I think some gun rights advocates have completely lost their minds. Last week, the Alaska House of Representatives, with bipartisan support, passed what's…

Fatimah Simmons (MPP '11) helps young women from low-income communities to become civically engaged and politically involved. She is the program director for Ignite, which sponsored the Tomorrow’s Women Leaders Today conference, drawing 150 promising young women from throughout the Bay Area. Read more about the conference and Ignite's exciting work here.

by Helen Walters Kicking off the TED conference would be a daunting prospect for most, but Jennifer Granholm has tackled both nastier challenges and less friendly audiences in her time. After all, she is the former governor of Michigan, a state that, as the blurb to her book A Governor’s Story: The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future puts it, was “synonymous with manufacturing during a financial crisis that threatened to put all America…

You have a science and urban planning background. How did you come into the world of public policy? I know that because of my background, it might look like I “stumbled” into public policy — but that couldn’t be further from the truth. From the very start of my time as an undergraduate, I intentionally sought out an interdisciplinary education specifically because I have always been interested in environment and development policies. I realized early on…

Ever since President Obama's emphasized universal early childhood education in his State of the Union address, the chattering class has gleefully proclaimed its potential to be a game-changer for America. There is no doubt early childhood education leads to short-term academic success and perhaps long-term student sociability - but the same studies cited by advocates show that universal preschool is no magic path to help a student navigate 13 years of substandard K-12 education. The president mentioned a cost-benefit analysis…

The aerospace industry is worried. Its most important customer, the Department of Defense, might have to cut more than $40 billion from its budget this year because of automatic spending cuts, otherwise known as the sequester, which - without congressional action - will begin Friday. Such cuts would be "catastrophic for our industry and our nation," Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens said last year. Lawmakers agree. "I implore you, no, I beg you, to stop this from happening," Rep. Buck McKeon,…

Calling her fiscally “brilliant” SF Mayor Edwin Lee named Carmen Chu (MPP ‘03) as the city’s Assessor-Recorder. “Carmen’s exemplary budgetary skills as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee of the Board of Supervisors have benefited the entire city,” says Mayor Lee. The assessor-recorder administers the property assessment system of the City and County of San Francisco. Read the full story here.

Professor Robert Reich discussed why raising the mimimum wage is a "no-brainer" with NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Our leaders often peddle the role of family. Yet with the specter of a federal government shutdown, Washington has put our most vulnerable citizens on life support. While the White House expands preschool, Washington shrinks Head Start. California's poorest kids deserve better. A brain child of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Head Start has served more than 30 million low-income preschool children since 1965. Head Start cuts, which will trim the number of slots by about 7 percent, will do damage.…