Vishal Krishnaiah, a rising senior at Lowell High School in San Francisco, finished the last of his seven Advanced Placement exams earlier in June. He loves his public school for its academic rigor, “amazing” teachers, and wide array of opportunities. He could have gone to a private high school, but he wanted Lowell. Fortunately, he had the grades – and the entrance exam score – to get in.

But that’s changed now. As with several other high-profile selective schools around the country, the local school board has dropped the entrance exam to Lowell, which graduated a Supreme Court justice and a Nobel Prize winner, among notables. A temporary measure begun under the pandemic – selection by lottery with no exam or grade requirement – has become permanent, fueled by the board’s concerns about racism and too few Black and Latino students. 

Vishal says he understands the reasoning. “The school is overwhelmingly Asian and white and doesn’t exactly represent the population of our school district,” he says. But he worries about the effect of a lottery on the quality of the school and on students. It “breaks my heart” that some teachers are leaving or retiring, worried that without entrance requirements, Lowell will become like any other school. 

“If we eliminate merit in schools, how does that set students up in the future?” he says. “If you grow up, and everything’s random, and you don’t have to work harder, what will students’ perception be of the real world?”

From colleges and universities dropping the SAT to proposals in California and elsewhere to delay math “tracking” of gifted students until the 11th grade, America is wrestling with the meaning of merit in education. It’s a discussion spanning decades, but one that has become particularly noisy and accusatory in the wake of the pandemic and a national reckoning on race. Are grades and tests the best measures of individual achievement? Or should public schools take a more holistic approach that accounts for context and increases opportunities for underserved students?

America’s deep roots in meritocracy

“The American bias is very firm. Our history is as an individualist nation,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University in Washington. “Americans like the fact that education has become the prime determinant of economic success and cultural status. And the reason they like it, they say over and over again, is that it’s based on merit. You have to go to school, do the homework, pass the tests, make your way into a good college, and get a good job.”

The problem, he and others say, is that K-12 public education is not a fair system. According to Dr. Carnevale, a child from a low-income family with top test scores in grade school has a 30% chance of getting a good job by age 25. On the other hand, a child from a family in the top income quartile, who has low test scores in grade school, has a 70% chance of getting that good job. It’s even worse for low-income minority students, he says. 

“In this test score thing, you’re caught between Horatio Alger, and the basic reality of American life, which is that race and class matter a lot,” he says.

Critics of the current system point out that Alger’s writings were fictional and when it was coined, the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” literally meant an impossible task. Add in America’s history of racism – from laws making it illegal to teach enslaved people to read, segregated schools, and redlining, which kept Black and other minority families from owning homes in good school districts – and they say it’s past time for change. But supporters of the entrance exams, who are often immigrant families, counter that education has long been the ticket to the American dream and that removing the testing component from these schools is yanking a ladder to the middle class out from under their children.

One possible way forward for K-12 structural reform, says Dr. Carnevale, is to legally hold governments responsible for promises to graduate students “college or career ready,” a ubiquitous claim. He also praises President Joe Biden’s goal of universal pre-K and two years of free community college. In the meantime, he says, the nation is now witnessing “a direct populist rebellion” as school boards do away with entrance exams to selective schools in order to expand access for underrepresented groups. 

That’s true in San Francisco, Boston, Washington, New York, and northern Virginia, where officials have been under pressure for years to change admissions criteria to their elite schools. The pandemic, when many students could not gather for entrance exams and some districts’ grades became pass-fail, provided the procedural prelude to change. Nationwide protests after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by former police officer Derek Chauvin brought political pressure to a boiling point.

Boston has dropped the entrance exam at its three public selective schools for this year, while using grades and ZIP codes to allocate seats. At Boston Latin School, America’s oldest public school, the percentage of acceptance letters going to Black students increased markedly, from 6% last year to 17% this year. Latino admissions were up by 3 percentage points, Asians dropped by the same amount, and white students declined from 50% to 38%.

In Virginia’s Fairfax County, school officials dropped the admissions exam for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the top-ranked public high school in the United States. They switched to a “holistic review” based on grades, a “student portrait,” a problem-solving essay, and “experience factors,” such as students from underrepresented middle schools.

In December, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the elimination of screening for all selective middle schools for at least a year. But the crown jewels of the New York City public school system, eight selective high schools such as Bronx Science and Stuyvesant, still require an entrance exam, per state law. 

Black and Latino students speak out

A coalition of city high school students, Teens Take Charge, filed a civil rights complaint in November demanding that the city drop “racially discriminatory” admission screens at all public schools – including standardized test scores, grade-point averages, and attendance and punctuality records. The percentage of Black and Latino students admitted to these schools keeps declining – to 9% this year. Nearly 54% of the students admitted are Asian American, and 28% are white. 

Gabrielle Cayo, a sophomore at Brooklyn Technical High School who is a debater and helps run the Black Student Union, recalls taking an entrance exam prep course with mostly Black and Hispanic students. The material wasn’t based on their middle school curriculum and was completely new to the majority of students. She was the only person from the program to get into Brooklyn Tech, she said at a May Zoom event with Black and Latino students in the exam high schools. “I didn’t see any faces that looked like me at the school my first day, and I saw that numbers were lower than ever, which made me extremely disheartened.” 

Sarai Pridgen, a senior at Stuyvesant, came from a private middle school in Brooklyn Heights. But in doing community service in middle schools in underserved areas, she met families who had never heard of Stuyvesant or the test. Families asked in Spanish about the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test: “What is the SHSAT? What is Brooklyn Tech?” “I don’t think this is an equitable system that’s working, and I think that the admission results speak for themselves,” she said.

Students at the Zoom event pointed to pervasive racism at the schools, like use of the N-word, questions about their academic integrity, and the humiliation of being singled out for promotion photos. And then there was the case of the student who wore a KKK mask to class. The isolation and trauma were not worth it, said one student tearfully, while another said more diversity would decrease racism.

These accounts sound remarkably similar to those voiced about Lowell. As the Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP, puts it: “For Black people in this town, and in urban communities across this country, the competition has not been fair. It’s been crooked.” In a school of 2,700, he says incredulously, Lowell has just 45 Black students.

“We’re either going to act like we’re a nation under God with liberty, and justice for all, or not.” Equality of opportunity – that’s the issue, he says. “Let people prove themselves.” 

A counter-rebellion

But counter lawsuits are flying. The Coalition for TJ, a group of more than 5,000 parents, students, and others connected to Thomas Jefferson High School, is suing the county school board alleging discrimination against Asian Americans – who made up 73% of the most recent freshman class. They advocate instead for race-blind, merit-based admissions. Elsewhere, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering taking up a case alleging that Harvard University’s affirmative action policies penalize Asian students while boosting Black and Latino students. The university says it considers applicants individually, based on many criteria. It has urged the high court not to abandon precedent that allows admissions screening based partly on race to achieve a diverse student body. 

In San Francisco, a lawsuit is challenging the process behind the school board’s decision to drop Lowell’s exam and grade screens and instead admit students according to a ranked-choice lottery used citywide. But the word “process” belies the outrage felt by those opposed to the change. 

Courtesy of Lee Cheng

Attorney Lee Cheng is part of the Friends of Lowell Foundation, which was formed to restore merit-based admissions at the oldest public high school west of the Mississippi.

“Merit is not being redefined. I think merit is being defamed,” says attorney Lee Cheng of the Friends of Lowell Foundation, which was formed to restore merit-based admissions at the oldest public high school west of the Mississippi. The lawsuit is being brought on behalf of the foundation and two other groups. As one of the founders of the American Asian Legal Foundation, Mr. Cheng helped to eliminate race-based quotas at Lowell in 2000.

Tests and grades are imperfect measures of merit, he admits. But he says they are the most objective measures that show individual talent and a willingness to work hard, while more holistic criteria, including personality, are more subjective. He has less of an issue with a lottery, but Lowell’s is a “stacked” lottery that takes into account siblings, disadvantaged areas, and a particular middle school.

And while the lottery looks neutral on its face, he says the clear intent of the board is to reduce the number of Asian children, who account for more than half the student population. “That’s racist and should be illegal.” If the National Basketball Association decided to reduce the number of Black players because there are too many, there would be a hue and cry, he posits.

San Francisco’s Asian American community is particularly upset about tweets from one Black board member, who referred to Asians as “house N****rs.” They are stunned that, in the resolution about Lowell admissions passed by the school board, Asians are not included as people of color and appear to be lumped in with a “culture of white supremacy.” A wide diversity exists among Asians, who come from many countries and cultures. Neither are they all rich. Between 35% and 40% of the Asian students at Lowell qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches. It’s a similar story in New York.

“How will poor Asian American kids access Lowell?” asks Mr. Cheng, who describes his own journey to Lowell. He was a “latchkey” kid, both of whose immigrant parents worked. English was not his first language. He studied hard, and his reward for finishing his homework was watching a half-hour of news with Walter Cronkite. His father took him to take the entrance exam, with no test preparation. Later, to get into Harvard, he bought a Barron’s SAT prep book for $10.95. He got one of the highest scores in the city.

“It’s just a lie that nonwhite kids and kids who don’t have a lot of money ... can’t succeed.”

One Lowell parent, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, worries that the quality of the school will diminish without application requirements. Students must audition to get into the city’s public school for the arts. Why should a school for academics be any different?

“They think you get the best education at Lowell, so everyone wants an equal shot. They see it as an equity issue. I do not,” says the parent. “Any student with a certain aptitude should be able to go to Lowell. It has nothing to do with race.”

Allocating a scarce resource

And that gets to a common observation: Demand for public magnet schools exceeds the slots. “It’s basic resource allocation,” says Gregory Vincent, a civil rights attorney and educator at the University of Kentucky College of Education in Lexington. “What is the most effective, equitable way to allocate a scarce and valuable resource?” 

This would be an issue even if it were all one group, says Dr. Vincent. Adding the racial dimension “exacerbates” it. With a limited number of slots, changing admission criteria is going to mean that some groups will gain while others will lose. “But there are losers now. There are Blacks and browns not getting in.” 

Dr. Vincent, who is Black, is himself a product of a selective high school: Bronx Science. He was identified as gifted and talented in the third grade and kept on track by strong parental involvement. As the former vice president for diversity at the University of Texas at Austin, he played a crucial role in defending the university’s diversity practices, which were upheld by the Supreme Court in 2013. The San Francisco Board of Education has tasked University of Kentucky’s Education and Civil Rights Initiative, which Dr. Vincent directs, to do an equity audit at Lowell and come up with an action plan to address “exclusion” and “toxic” racism.

When asked what merit looks like, Dr. Vincent cites the Olympics. There’s a minimal score needed to compete, but every country gets to send representatives. The United States can only send a limited number of runners, even though these runners might be better than many runners sent by other countries. 

“Merit is defined by what you are trying to achieve,” he says. If the goal is to have “the best of the best of the best” in a school, that’s a narrow goal. If it is to have a greater representation of students, that’s a broader goal. He thinks it’s possible to achieve both excellence and diversity, and favors a holistic approach to admissions, rather than falling into “the trap that tests tell you everything.” 

It’s not clear what dropping entrance exams at selective schools will mean for the schools, students, or the quality of education.

“It’s a very difficult question. It puts people at odds with each other. People with good intentions and a sense of fairness,” says Dr. Carnevale at Georgetown. 

But one way or another, he says, the country needs to work through this. It will have to find a way “not to deny anybody the fruits of their labor, and at the same time, provide opportunity for those who are less advantaged.”

The former head of the royal court in the dock, a jilted former crown prince called to the witness stand, a member of the royal family in prison garb – Jordan’s coup plot trial has all the ingredients to live up to its billing as the “trial of the century.”

But as the military tribunal surrounding an alleged plot to undermine King Abdullah continues its closed-door sessions, something is being broken: a decades-old taboo against discussing the royal family in public.

“It is like a period soap opera, but we are watching it live,” says Muna, a 20-something accessories vendor, alluding to a gush of leaks, rumors, and comments about the trial from the government, foreign intelligence agencies, and lawyers.

With the royal family suddenly under the spotlight, revelations about its own divisions are making the public question the family’s stature as a stabilizing pillar of the country.

“The stability of the country has long been tied to the stability of the royal family,” says Jordanian political analyst Amer al-Sabaileh.

“Now a taboo has been broken. Someone has opened the door of the Hashemite family to the public debate, and if it is not managed now carefully, we will witness people questioning the model of governance in Jordan.”

Insulting the monarch is punishable with jail time and a fine under a lèse-majesté law; other royals were seen as “off-limits,” as potential targets of indirect criticism of the royal family and the monarch himself.

Now that convention is being turned on its head, and Jordanians ask: If the papers can talk about the royal family, why can’t we?

“We are seeing a divide within the royal family itself play out in public,” says Oraib Rantawi, director of the Amman-based Al Quds Center for Political Studies. “This hurts the image of stability of the political regime.”

Shakespearean plot

The alleged plot, purportedly disrupted by Jordanian security services April 3, already had the ingredients of a Shakespearean play: former Crown Prince Hamzah, half-brother to the king, channeling public discontent to present himself as an alternative for the throne; the king’s right-hand man suspected of betraying him.

It has external intrigue, with security services’ leaks to journalists suggesting outside involvement, indirectly pointing the finger at the Saudis, perhaps, or former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

While no disclosed evidence has yet proved external involvement, the real sensation for Jordanians is the juicy details: Prince Hamzah saying “I don’t care about Jerusalem,” indicating a willingness to surrender Hashemite custodianship of Al-Aqsa; the prince mocking the monarch’s early-to-rise routine; nicknames for the former royal court chief.

Jordanians are dissecting and debating each and every word, and the trial is sending shock waves through the country.

The Hashemites have long shown a united front, unlike the game of thrones that is the hallmark of other Arab monarchies.

Jordanians cite the peaceful transfer of power in 1999, when then-Crown Prince Hassan stepped aside after 35 years in his post, allowing his brother, the late King Hussein, to pass the throne on to his son, the current monarch Abdullah. 

The same arrangement placed Prince Hamzah as crown prince as part of a compromise, before he was replaced in 2004 with Abdullah’s son, Hussein bin Abdullah.

Yousef Allan/The Royal Hashemite Court/AP/File

Jordan's King Abdullah addresses Parliament, in Amman, Dec. 10, 2020.

Projecting such unity while other Arab states witnessed military coups, uprisings, and sectarian violence made even the most critical Jordanians see the royal family as a pillar of stability in a troubled region, envied by non-Jordanians.

Yet with the alleged bungled coup, sensational police investigation leaks, and an apparent state-sponsored smear campaign against Prince Hamzah, Jordanians are learning that the Hashemite monarchy is not as steady as it seems. In fact, it may be just as vulnerable to internal upheaval as neighboring ruling families.

Many sides, many opinions

The trial is also dividing Jordanians, already riven by socioeconomic class and urban-rural fractures. Siding with the state’s narrative are so-called saheej, or loyalists, and conservatives.  

Prince Hamzah’s supporters include marginalized tribes – sidelined by the rise of a new Amman-based economic elite – and young democracy activists, the so-called hirak, who say they have been shut out of politics and the national conversation.

“We did not turn our backs on the state; the state turned its back on us,” Dahham Methqal al-Fawwaz, son of an influential tribal leader, says of tribes’ relations to the regime. “This has forced some to look for alternatives, and this is a real danger.”

With national unemployment creeping to 30% – 50% among youth – amid a debt crisis, inflation, an economy decimated by COVID-19, and a historic drought year looming, analysts warn that the saga has opened the door to disaffected groups backing rival royals to further their cause.

“What we don’t want is the royal family to become a tool for frustrated and angry people to link their grievances to royals, backing certain members of the family because they think they support their cause,” warns Mr. Sabaileh, the analyst.

“Jordan is already fragmented on the socioeconomic level. This could lead to fragmentation at the psychological level.”

Even the closed court sessions are dividing Jordanians: For some, the secrecy is proof of Saudi or Israeli involvement in the sedition plot; for others, it is a damning indictment of a state-arranged political theater with little evidence.

“The trial is only reviving the debate: the rumors and polarization about who is right, who is wrong, what happened, really happened, and who is to blame,” says Mr. Rantawi.

Public enemy No. 1

Also shining the spotlight on the royal family is the main suspect: former royal court chief Bassem Awadallah.

The charge sheet alleges Prince Hamzah approached Mr. Awadallah last summer to gain external support for his quest for the throne. Mr. Awadallah was an adviser to Saudi Arabia when the crisis erupted.

But Jordanians remember Mr. Awadallah from when he was the key adviser to King Abdullah and architect of controversial neoliberal economic reforms and privatization that empowered a new elite in the country.

For much of the past 15 years, Mr. Awadallah was both the most powerful non-royal in Jordan and its most reviled.

Protesters have called for his trial for alleged corruption since the 2011 Arab Spring. The palace until now had protected him.

Seeing Mr. Awadallah tried in a closed-door trial – with nary a mention of corruption – has increased public skepticism and resurrected 15 years of frustration over the direction of the country.

“We want to see Awadallah on trial for his economic crimes, for destroying the middle class and enriching his inner circle, not this,” says Abu Aboud, an Amman government clerk who works three jobs – a hardship for which he blames Mr. Awadallah’s reforms. 

“If they had tried Bassem Awadallah for corruption 10 years ago, and we would have known that there is truly a rule of law in Jordan, we would have stopped our protests and kissed the foreheads of our leaders,” says Zeid, a 30-something who is unemployed and took part in economic protests from 2012 to 2018.

“But now he is being tried in a show trial while the rest of the corrupt get off free? It makes me feel a burning injustice.”

Reforms?

This month King Abdullah launched a royal reform committee to “open up the kingdom’s political life” – an initiative set in motion prior to the crisis.

The hand-picked committee of 92 Jordanians from across the political spectrum is tasked with amending electoral laws to empower Parliament, which in recent years has been reduced to a rubber-stamp body.

It is an official recognition of Jordanians’ need to express their discontent through the ballot box as the country weathers economic and health crises.

“After these crises, we need political reform shock therapy to bring back people’s trust and revive their involvement in politics,” says Mr. Rantawi, who also serves on the committee.

Yet as committee members meet this week and debate the electoral system in Jordan, their deliberations are being overshadowed by the trial and speculative talk of the day.

“Everyone agrees on the regime, and no one wants to see sedition,” says Mr. Fawwaz, the tribal leader’s son. “But until there is real reform on the ground to give us hope, Jordanians will fantasize about alternatives.”

Taiwan Ministry of Defense/AP

A Taiwan Ministry of Defense photo of a Chinese PLA J-16 fighter jet in an undisclosed location. China sent a record 28 fighter jets toward the self-ruled island of Taiwan on June 15.

The response that mattered most after last week’s European summitry between President Joe Biden and America’s allies came roughly 48 hours later and 10,000 miles away.

It was the roar of 28 Chinese bombers and fighter jets crossing the narrow strait off China’s coast and breaching the air-defense zone of the island democracy of Taiwan.

That was Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s answer to the allied criticism of his economic, security, and human-rights record, and its meaning was clear: “China has become incomparably more powerful, self-assured, internationally assertive, and ambitious during my nine years in power.” Or more bluntly: “Don’t dare lecture us.”

China is the United States’ only true rival world power and by far its most daunting foreign policy challenge. It poses a conundrum that the Biden administration will be trying to work out ahead of the president’s next big geopolitical encounter, likely to come this fall: a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Xi. And the puzzle shows no signs of it getting easier to solve.

Mr. Xi has vowed to reunify Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province, with the mainland. By force, if necessary. 

The hope remains in Washington – and among its allies – that all sides will want to avoid the nightmare scenario of military confrontation. But the very fact that such a scenario is no longer unthinkable is a reminder that China’s hardening stance on Taiwan is part of a more fundamental shift under Mr. Xi.

His stated aim is the “revival of the Chinese nation” to a point when China would take the dominant geopolitical role currently played by the democratic market economies of the West, which he believes are in inexorable decline. 

Mr. Biden has called Mr. Xi’s domestic rule authoritarian, and it’s certainly that. But in recent years it has become nearly totalitarian, demanding total fealty to the Communist Party and to Mr. Xi himself – underpinned by the world’s largest and most pervasive system of electronic surveillance and control.

Internationally, he has greatly expanded Chinese influence, partly by leveraging an increasingly powerful economy, the world’s second largest, which gives Beijing a major role in world trade and finance. He has also championed a $1 trillion overseas infrastructure program called Belt and Road, involving a mix of funding, loans, and construction projects that give China new political sway, and financial influence, in dozens of developing countries worldwide.

And he has added military muscle to his foreign affairs toolbox, reorganizing and modernizing the country’s land, air, and naval forces, and developing cyberwarfare capability.

The significance of Taiwan is that it’s an issue where domestic and international, military and political, elements all intersect.

AP

Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu (right) bumps elbows with a group of U.S. senators upon their arrival in Taipei on June 6. They were visiting to discuss U.S.-Taiwan relations and other issues on a trip that angered China, which claims Taiwan as its territory.

For Mr. Xi, it is both a domestic and international cause. Central to his vision of national revival is the nonnegotiable assumption that Taiwan’s people – ethnic Chinese – are part of “One China.” And it’s a priority with new importance for Beijing since Taiwan’s establishment of a thriving democracy in the mid-1990s.

Experts differ over whether Mr. Xi is ready to reckon with the international political and economic costs China would pay for invading Taiwan – and, indeed, whether his military modernization has reached the point where he can be fully confident of succeeding.

But no one believes the U.S. response to the last major Taiwan crisis – in 1996, when two aircraft carrier battle groups persuaded Beijing to back down from efforts to influence the island’s first full democratic election – would be a sufficient deterrent now.

It’s not just that China’s military now has “carrier-killing” missiles. It’s the political shift. Any illusion that Mr. Xi’s “One China” policy is mere rhetoric has been shattered by the crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. Just last week, police there raided the offices of its main independent newspaper and arrested its top editors. The authorities also froze the paper’s funds, forcing the paper to close at the end of this week.

President Biden’s short-term hope is not so much to mount an effective response if China does move against Taiwan, though U.S. planners have long been working through the options. It is to deter China from taking military action and avoid such a confrontation in the first place.

With this in mind, Washington has begun redirecting military assets toward the Asia Pacific region. Politically, it’s also been strengthening ties with Asian allies and seeking a shared China policy on issues ranging from trade to human rights.

But Mr. Biden’s fundamental China policy aim seems broadly similar to what motivated his talks last week with another U.S. adversary, Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

There, Mr. Biden’s declared goal was to restore “predictability and stability” to relations with Moscow, by setting out agreed rules of the road, being explicit about where Washington opposed Russian actions and also exploring areas where the two countries could act together.   

That’s a difficult enough task with Russia. It is likely to prove even more daunting with Xi Jinping’s China.

AP

New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams mingles with supporters during his election night party June 22.

In more than 100 countries, the homicide rate has been falling over the past 13 years. Not so in the United States. In the past 18 months, starting before the pandemic, the murder rate has risen 25% to 30%, mainly in big cities, with warnings of a violent summer. The reasons remain unclear but combined with last year’s movement for racial justice and police reform, it could be creating a new political dynamic. More voters and their leaders might be listening for nuanced solutions rather than highlighting differences in how to curb gun deaths.

One example is President Joe Biden’s latest package of crime-fighting measures announced on Wednesday. Unlike his plan in April that focused on gun control, this one goes further by helping local communities in hiring more police, creating more jobs for teens this summer, providing more assistance for those leaving prison, and improving “community-based intervention” for potential perpetrators of gun violence – as well as implementing more steps to rein in the sale of guns.

That sort of balanced, hard-and-soft approach was reflected in Tuesday’s primary in New York City to select a Democratic candidate for this fall’s race for mayor.

The largest vote-getter, Eric Adams, is a former police captain and a Black leader who wants to boost tools for policing while also reforming the police department in the nation’s largest city. Shootings in New York have gone up 68% this year, making crime the most important issue in the June 22 contest among 13 candidates in the primary. Some candidates sought to reduce funding for police. Others were pro-police.

Mr. Adams proved popular with a centrist approach. “We want safety and justice. We don’t have to surrender the safety we deserve for the justice we need,” he says.

Perhaps the national debate over gun violence has turned. “America has to figure out what it in fact wants, because right now there’s a lot of confusion,” Bill Bratton, a former police chief in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, told CNBC.

As mayors of big cities cry for help to stem a wave of gun crime – Minnesota’s National Guard is on standby to assist Minneapolis police – the old political divisions over finding solutions just won’t do. Most other countries have reduced their homicide rates. The U.S. certainly can.