Were all those standardized tests for nothing?

Sanford School of Public Policy Professor Jacob Vigdor, co-author Thomas Ahn and a panel of education practitioners explored this question Wednesday at an event in Washington, DC, sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute.

In a nutshell, there are two important lessons to learn from the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Sanford School of Public Policy awarded degrees to 301 graduates on May 11, the largest ever for the school.  The class of 2013 included 203 undergraduates, 55 Master of Public Policy graduates, 38 Master of International Development Policy graduates from 16 countries and five PhD graduates.  Professor Bruce Kuniholm presided over the ceremonies for the last time as the founding dean of the Sanford School.   

Last week Nation Multimedia Group hosted a debate between Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Kittiratt Na-Ranong and former finance minister of the Abhisit administration, Korn Chatikavanij. The debate was billed as "competing visions on the nation's future".

Discussion of the Boston bombing case is now into full 20-20 hindsight mode trying to figure out why we did not prevent Tamerlan Tsarnaev from executing the attack when the government had been alerted to his potential radicalization two years ago. There are probably important policy lessons to be learned from this incident -- but it is far too easy for politicians and commentators to lay blame on keystone cops who shirked their responsibilities and bureaucrats who refused to share information with each other.

Virtually every college with a dormitory gives its students the chance to play sports. Doing so enriches the educational experience by teaching important life lessons. And it’s smart marketing to boot, because a lot of students want to play sports in college. So I doubt if many colleges will emulate a decision by Spelman that was surely driven by serious financial strain.

With the Friday arrest of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing investigation has entered a new phase. Yet to be uncovered are the motives of the bombers—the other suspect, Dzhokhar's older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed during a gun battle with authorities—and their possible connection to foreign groups that use terrorism to advance political agendas.

Words can’t describe the events that transpired on Monday afternoon in Boston. What began as a beautiful, jovial, and exciting day, quickly transformed into chaos, confusion, and utter horror. While I will never understand or know what it was like to be there when those first two explosions occurred, the atrocious nature and closeness of this event impacted me in a way that I know at least 26,000 other people share.  I was one of the runners.

While the horrific bombing at the Boston Marathon has brought concerns about terrorism back to the forefront of national attention, it is worth remembering that terrorism inside the United States is exceedingly rare. Over the past 40 years, just over 3 people on average have been killed by acts of terrorism per year (remove 9/11, and the average is 1.4 deaths per year).

Everyone agrees that we don't want criminals to get guns. And in the debate over gun control, the vast majority of the public also agrees that requiring background checks for all gun transactions -- even private sales at gun shows or between acquaintances -- would achieve this end.

Patrick Oathout and Jacob Tobia, juniors at Duke University, are among 62 students selected this year as Truman Scholars.

Immigration reform legislation -- once it emerges -- is likely to be complex with dozens of hot button issues that will receive most of the attention. Close scrutiny should be addressed, however, to an obscure border security issue -- the biometric exit system -- that will not stir the emotions of many, but could cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

Bill Adair, creator and editor of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning website of the Tampa Bay Times, has been appointed the Knight Professor of Computational Journalism at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

Senior Ian Harwood chose to write an honors thesis as a way to prepare himself to effect social change.

“Money talks” has long been a truism in politics, but can ordinary citizen be heard by politicians and hold them accountable for policy? A panel of political scientists and practitioners discussed the question at the Sanford School of Public Policy on Wednesday night.

Since I posted about the myths promulgated by critics of the Iraq war, it is only fair that I follow-up and demonstrate that I do know that (a) war supporters did not have a monopoly on truth either and (b) there are plenty of worthy debates about Iraq that could inform current policy challenges.

When you cut through the bluster and controversies surrounding the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks case, it raises a difficult unresolved question that has great significance for our democracy:  How can the government be held accountable for its national security policies (and mistakes) in a world where there are far too many secrets, and those who disclose those secrets to the press are violating the law?

A bipartisan Senate proposal on immigration reform has drawn praise, including from President Obama. But a key feature of the proposal -- how to handle the 11 million foreigners living in the country illegally -- has provoked a familiar objection: Why grant U.S. citizenship, that most precious of rights, to those who broke the law to get here?

Philip Bennett, the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, will step down from his role as managing editor of FRONTLINE when his contract expires in May, the program announced today.

The bet, as of last weekend, was that it would take effect. According to the latest poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre from February 13-18, 49 per cent of the respondents were in favour of Congress taking action to delay the automatic spending cuts, while 40 per cent would let the sequester go into effect.

The PBS program FRONTLINE earned the George Polk Award for Documentary Television Reporting for “Money, Power and Wall Street,” a four-part investigation into the global financial crisis that aired in 2012, Long Island University announced.

Six-term U.S. Senate veteran Richard Lugar used his first speech since leaving office last month to address the nation’s ”out of control” partisanship, criticize Congress for failing basic tests of governing and call on President Obama to sit down with political foes for potentially healing dialogs.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians are branded as criminals for committing offenses as minor as fishing without a license or driving with an expired license tag. They lose wages while they spend time in court. Employers lose out when their employees miss work.

Now that President Obama has put climate change back on the table in his second inaugural address, a new national poll finds growing public support for regulating greenhouse gas emissions and requiring utilities to switch to lower-carbon fuel sources.

The flood of money in political campaigns unleashed by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision has had a corrupting influence on both elections and governance, a panel of politicians and activists said Thursday. The event, “Big Money vs. Grassroots Democracy: Empowering Citizens to Take Back Their Government” was part of symposium on the issue taking place at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

Former GOP Sen. Richard “Dick” Lugar, who represented Indiana for 36 consecutive years, will discuss the nation’s divisive political climate on Tuesday, Feb. 12, at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

THIS TALK HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FEB. 20.

Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, will explore the Obama administration’s decision to focus U.S. foreign policy more on the Asia-Pacific region during a talk at Duke University.

Health and education continue to be India's Achilles heel. Only through improving these services for the bulk of the population will it be able to get rid of mass poverty. India has the largest concentration of poor people in the world. The 12th Five-Year Plan figures show poverty declining from 45 per cent of the national population in 1993-94 to 37 per cent in 2004-05, at 0.8 percent per year, slower than the rate of population growth.

When David Steinberg founded the nation’s first gun-control lobby — the long-forgotten National Committee for a Responsible Firearms Policy — he was spurred by more than the shooting of an unarmed teen in his northern Virginia neighborhood.

In the coming weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court may land the final blow to what's left of race-based affirmative action in higher education. If the type of questioning raised during case hearings in October are an indicator, the Court may rule that the University of Texas at Austin's admissions policies violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and that the plaintiff, 22-year old Abigail Fisher, was a victim of what affirmative action opponents long have framed as "reverse discrimination."

The massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., has revived interest in gun regulation—a topic that was almost entirely ignored during the presidential campaign. During President Obama’s first term, there were several other mass shootings, but the only Congressional action was a new law to permit tourists to carry guns in national parks. Now Vice President Biden has been asked to develop a plan that includes new regulations.

The most important thing Republicans need to understand about U.S. foreign policy today is that Republicans are out of power and Barack Obama is in power.