The most important determinant of educational quality is teacher quality. Yet, as a recent study of school principals’ permissiveness in teacher evaluations and a cheating scandal in Atlanta show, this performance is difficult to measure. The best way forward is to move the evaluation of teachers outside the schools entirely, with standardized tests administered by an independent agency. This would be supplemented by classroom assessments based on unobtrusive videotaping, also judged by outsider

Katy Perry may have been banned from China’s music websites, but her “Teenage Dream” now has its Asian counterpart. Newly confirmed in office, President Xi Jinping, has chosen “Chinese Dream” as his signature phrase to describe the direction of his administration. Although it is early, and the phrase could be altered or abandoned, Xi invoked it both on becoming leader of the Communist Party of China and in his final rhetorical salvo as he assumed the presidency. Certainly, as I saw in my recent

As Haruhiko Kuroda walks into his first policy meeting as Bank of Japan governor, he must be in a Mario Draghi state of mind. Think of Kuroda’s predecessor, Masaaki Shirakawa, as Japan’s equivalent of former European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet. Shirakawa was a respected economist whose doctrinaire ways caused him to stumble when unexpected things happened, such as the financial crisis in 2008. Just as Trichet’s worldview was out of sync with the times (he actually raised interest

Money laundering by large international banks has reached epidemic proportions, and U.S. authorities are supposedly looking into Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Governor Jerome Powell, on behalf of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, recently testified to Congress on the issue, and he sounded serious. But international criminals and terrorists needn’t worry. This is window dressing: Complicit bankers have nothing to fear from the U.S. justice system. To be on the safe s

Who do they think they are, these upstart economies, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa? That might sum up the feeling in the U.S., Europe and Japan as the BRICS nations consider a new development bank that might challenge the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The move brings to mind Alice Amsden, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who died last year, and her 2001 book, “The Rise of ‘the Rest.’” The richest nations can stew about this turn of events, as thos

Ernest Hemingway pieced together the quintessence of the Spanish Civil War in his captivating novel “For whom the bell tolls?” The novel’s protagonist, a young American, gets embroiled in the war while serving in the International Brigade, chronicling senseless inhumanity of man to man as society’s fabric is shredded.One of the most memorable passages of the novel is “For what are we born if not to aid one another?” The novel has many themes, and one is the dependency of society’s individuals on

The substantive case against gay marriage collapsed in the Supreme Court last week. Legally, Supreme Court watchers say, advocates won’t win the sweeping victory they once anticipated as they made arguments last week. The court is likely to overturn a California law that precludes same-sex marriage, on technical grounds. The 17-year-old federal Defense of Marriage Act defining marriage as between a man and woman, and thus denying federal spousal benefits to gays and lesbians, almost certainly wi

BERKELEY ― In the 12 years of the Great Depression ― between the stock-market crash of 1929 and America’s mobilization for World War II ― production in the United States averaged roughly 15 percent below the pre-depression trend, implying a total output shortfall equal to 1.8 years of GDP. Today, even if U.S. production returns to its stable-inflation output potential by 2017 ― a huge “if” ― the U.S. will have incurred an output shortfall equivalent to 60 percent of a year’s GDP.In fact, the los