Profile in School Reform: Terry Moe

The politics of education, and why technology will render teachers unions obsolete.

Sitting in his book-lined office at the Hoover Institution, overlooking Stanford University’s handsome campus, education guru Terry Moe bluntly tells me, “Most political science has no impact on anything.”

Moe, by the way, has been a member of Stanford’s political science faculty for over twenty years, and is a political scientist by training.

But his unpredictable academic path—lined with history’s serendipitous accidents, mountains of empirical data, and, of course, painstaking work—is not one completely devoted to political science. Rather, Moe has achieved scholarly stardom with the work he has done on K-12 education: he is one of the leading experts on education reform in the country.