Stanley N. Katz directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.

In a January speech at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, laying out his policy for higher education, President Obama opened by noting his agenda: "How can we make sure that everybody is getting the kind of education they need to personally succeed but also to build up this nation—because in this economy, there is no greater predictor of individual success than a good education." Although the United States still has "the best network of colleges and universities in the world," he said, "the challenge is it's getting tougher and tougher to afford it." Thus his primary policy concerns were high tuition and student debt.

At Ann Arbor, President Obama captured the spirit of the megafoundation program for higher education. Should we be worried about that confluence?...

This is truly the era of the megafoundation....

They are new foundations, and they are behaving in novel ways, departing from the more reflective, more patient, and generally less aggressive behaviors of the classic 20th-century foundations.

In the past, our large philanthropic foundations, Rockefeller and Carnegie particularly, were what I have earlier characterized as "learned"—much of their grant-making was devoted to trying to understand the underlying causes of the problems that concerned their boards, and the means they used toward that end was investment in research. They had a long-term strategy, hoping to find deep solutions to big problems, and they tended to support investigators who had strong research programs of their own design. Think of the Rockefeller investments in public health, both abroad and in the American South, and the large and long-term Carnegie financing of Gunnar Myrdal's study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy.

In the 1990s, however, a mood of impatience and frustration with that approach emerged. Strictly speaking, a private philanthropic foundation must donate at least 5 percent of its assets each year or pay an excise tax, and most foundations give at a rate higher than 5 percent. The larger the foundation, therefore, the greater its required annual payout. But it is not just a question of total giving. The larger the foundation's assets, the larger its average grants tend to be, partially because big foundations tend to think big. That has been notably true of the Gates foundation, which tends to make a relatively small number of very large grants. While the traditional foundations worried about what they termed "scatteration" (the multiplication of small grants), they always made a considerable range of grants. And they were seldom in the position to make the sort of overwhelming "bets" the Gates foundation can....

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of history at the Honors College at the University of Houston. The author of “Albert Camus: Elements of a Life” (Cornell University Press, 2010), he most recently a contributor to “The Occupy Handbook” (Little, Brown).

Now that France’s nightmare seems to be ending, its many interpretations have begun. As I write, a Frenchman of Algerian descent has claimed responsibility for the horrific murders of French soldiers and a teacher and children at a local Sephardic Jewish school. He identified himself as a member of Al Qaeda, reportedly traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even though he’s only 23, has been under surveillance for years. He justified his systematic killing spree as revenge for the deaths of innocent Palestinian and Afghan children.

These reports seem to contradict the interpretations that followed in the wake of the shootings in Toulouse on March 19, that these murderous acts made sense only when placed in the context of French politics. I still believe that’s the right way to understand this horror.

With just five weeks left before national elections, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party seemed condemned to a second-, or even third-place finish. Burdened by a comatose economy and his second banana role to Germany’s Angela Merkel, Sarkozy has watched his popularity tank. (And not just in France: According to a Europe-wide poll, the French president is the least liked leader among Europe’s five most important economies.)...

Mark Schmitt is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former editor of The American Prospect.

...The early second terms of popular presidents are very often cool and productive periods. After Bill Clinton survived an anger wave in his first term, 1997 was a calm year in which legislation such as the State Children's Health Insurance Program was passed, and it also brought a surprising turn toward greater public trust in government. The same could be said of the two years after Ronald Reagan's reelection, which included enactment of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. George W. Bush, who gave up on his major second-term initiative, Social Security privatization, within a few months, is the notable exception to this rule....

The best counter-example to such a return to the mean would be FDR’s second campaign, exemplified by the “I welcome their hatred” speech at Madison Square Garden, which fully captured the tone of an angry, still-suffering nation in an ever more direct way than he had in 1932. Roosevelt went on, in his second term, to govern even more ambitiously and aggressively than in the Hundred Days, including waging war on uncooperative members of his own party. This, of course, is the model that many liberals would encourage on Obama....

I recently wrote two review articles for the New York Review of Books about the teaching profession. The first was a review of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, about the exceptional school system of Finland, which owes much to the high professionalism of its teachers.

The second of the two articles was a review of Wendy Kopp's A Chance to Make History, and it focused on her organization, Teach for America.

I expressed my admiration for the young people who agree to teach for two years, with only five weeks of training. But I worried that TFA was now seen -- and promoting itself -- as the answer to the serious problems of American education. Even by naming her book A Chance to Make History, Wendy Kopp reinforced the idea that TFA was the very mechanism that American society could rely upon to lift up the children of poverty and close the achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups.

Wendy Kopp responded to my review of her book with a blog called "In Defense of Optimism." She wrote that:

... over the last twenty years we in the United States have discovered that we don't have to wait to fix poverty to dramatically improve educational outcomes for underprivileged students. In fact, there's strong evidence that one of the most effective ways to break the cycle of poverty is to expand the mission of public schools in low-income communities and put enormous energy into providing children with the extra time and support they need to reach their potential.

Now I certainly agree with Kopp that schools are enormously important, and that it's vital to have talented educators working in them. We both want to see the day when every child has access to an excellent education. She believes that the teachers and the leaders produced by TFA have figured this out. I disagree. I think that the lesson of Finland and other high-performing nations is that we must improve the teaching profession, so that career educators receive the respect and working conditions they need to succeed, and we must also reduce poverty.

If it were true that we now know how to break the cycle of poverty, poverty would be declining. But poverty is growing in the United States; child poverty is more than 20 percent and rising. Among the world's advanced nations, we are number one in child poverty. It's facile to blame schools and teachers, but more realistic to recognize that poverty is a reflection of economic conditions. Schools cannot create jobs, provide homes for the homeless, or change the economy.

Kopp is right that TFA has become a training ground for leaders. Some of its alumni have moved into high-level positions, like Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the public schools of the District of Columbia, who now works closely with the nation's most conservative governors to strip teachers of due process rights and to promote charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit education corporations. Another TFA alum, John White, Commissioner of Education in Louisiana, advances the same hard-right agenda for Governor Bobby Jindal.

In my reviews, I contrasted the five-year preparation of teachers in Finland with the American hodge-podge approach to the recruitment and training of teachers. In the U.S., states offer many ways to become a teacher, and our non-system has produced low standards for entry and a revolving door, with 40-50 percent leaving in their first five years of teaching. Finnish teachers are highly respected and seldom leave their profession.

Kopp dismisses Finland as a model because less than 4 percent of its children are poor. But that's part of the story of their success and should not be waved aside as unimportant. Teacher professionalism is also part of Finnish success. In this country, our public school teachers are constantly criticized and disrespected, and few are recognized for their dedication and hard work despite budget cuts, growing class sizes, and a hostile media. So long as the attacks on teachers continue, so long as the politicians continue defunding the schools, and so long as our society continues to tolerate high levels of child poverty and intense racial segregation, we will continue to have low-performing students and "failing" schools.

We will have to learn to hold two ideas in our heads at the same time: We must both reduce poverty and improve our schools. We cannot fix our schools without strengthening the teaching profession and addressing the social conditions that shape their outcomes.

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of History at UC-Irvine, wrote China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University in 2010. He is an Asia Society Associate Fellow.

The fall of Bo Xilai, the flamboyant and controversial Chongqing leader, qualifies as one of the big Chinese news stories of 2012. It does so first because it may signal the end of the short strange career of the so-called “Chongqing Model” associated with him.  This is a hard-to-pin-down catchall term for a cluster of policies and campaigns Bo introduced while in charge of the city.  The “model” involves a mixture of appeals to Mao era ideals of social equality, innovations in urban planning, dramatic moves against figures accused of being part of organized crime syndicates, and strategic use of symbols from the revolutionary past.  It may be best known for the mass singing of “red songs” that Bo promoted in Chongqing last year, which started a widespread trend.

In addition, and perhaps more importantly, Bo’s ouster removes any lingering doubt on a key question: whether fissures within the Chinese political elite continue to be significant.  The current leadership group has been striving for years to convince audiences at home and abroad that its members are all on the same page.  Factional divides are seen as anathema to this stability-obsessed group, whose members blame competition and tension among party leaders for wreaking havoc on the country in the Mao years and providing the space for the massive multi-class and multi-locale protest movement of 1989 to grow.  But the steps taken against Bo, who has been associated with “left” and “conservative” (in China, oddly, the two can go together) and “princeling” (his father was a key figure in an earlier generation of officials) factions, provide clear evidence of the persistence of various kinds of divides — even if it turns out that, by the time he fell, Bo had so few supporters left in the inner circle that his fall was the result of a unanimous decision by a core group of top leaders.

In light of this, it’s no surprise that, within hours of word breaking that Bo had been stripped of his post as Chongqing’s Party Secretary, the development was being dissected by every major international news organization.  And no surprise that the news was spawning copious comments, scores of rumors, and plenty of jokes on the Chinese internet, mostly via short posts on Weibo, the Twitter-like site that, despite efforts by government censors to neuter it, serves as the closest thing to a freewheeling PRC public sphere....

Kirsten Swinth is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. Her work focuses on women, work and culture. She is working on a book on care and competition in postindustrial America and the making of the working family. This column was written in association with The Op-Ed Project.

(CNN) -- "I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession," Hillary Clinton famously snapped on the campaign trail two decades ago Friday. Mostly, we remember the comment as a moment in the perpetual mommy wars, but I tend to think about it as a moment in the history of chocolate chip cookies....

In 1992, Clinton's comment drew scorching responses from at-home mothers and cheers from fellow working moms. Such polarized reactions should be set in the context of Clinton's own life. Among the few women in her Yale Law School class, Clinton fought hard for professional success. Her remark was not merely a political misstep, but a generational declaration: a reflection of gut-level struggles women had made for workplace opportunity, even as mothers....

An idealized image of mothering stays powerfully with us: children arriving home from school, met at the door with warm chocolate chip cookies and a motherly embrace. That image evokes devotion, time and, most importantly, love. It is middle-class parenting unstressed by the demands of labor, whether paid or unpaid (the pans and trays awaiting washing are generally conveniently left out of the picture)....

[Working mothers] would do well to listen to another first lady, Michelle Obama, who as a black woman is well schooled in the multiple roles that black women, whether middle class or poor, have long fulfilled. Black mothers historically have believed they are dedicated mothers, even while earning money for their families. No one assumed that Obama, in her lawyer days before the White House, devoted herself to cookie making, but we knew she was a good mother....

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" (Times Books) and of the new book "Governing America" (Princeton University Press).

Nobody likes politicians.

Ever since Jimmy Carter won his way to the White House in 1976 by assuring voters that they could trust him in contrast to the more experienced opponents he faced, both Republican and Democratic candidates have tended to boast about every part of their resume that can distinguish themselves from the Washington status quo....

This year, the story is the same. Although President Obama is boasting of his accomplishments in the White House as the nation's leader, he is also using Congress as a foil to lambaste the way that the "real" insiders in the capital do their business. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have tried to transform themselves from pillars of the congressional Republican establishment into conservative mavericks, while front-runner Mitt Romney talks frequently about how he would bring the skills of a CEO to Washington.

The problem is that doing well in Washington requires a very different kind of skill set than the ones that business executives or mavericks bring to the table. Each of these claims is flawed -- as Obama himself discovered -- given the world in which presidents must operate....