Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, California, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written extensively on the presidency, public bureaucracy, and the theory of political institutions more generally, most recently in Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government - And Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency (2016, with William Howell). He has also written extensively on the politics of American education, most recently in The Comparative Politics of Education: Teachers Unions and Education Systems around the World (Cambridge, 2017, edited with Susanne Wiborg) and Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools (2011).

In this ground breaking analysis, Terry Moe treats Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment that offers a rare opportunity to learn about the role of power in the politics of institutional reform. When Katrina hit, it physically destroyed New Orleans' school buildings, but it also destroyed the vested-interest power that had protected the city's abysmal education system from major reform. With the constraints of power lifted, decision makers who had been incremental problem-solvers turned into revolutionaries, creating the most innovative school system in the entire country. The story of New Orleans' path from failure to revolution is fascinating, but, more importantly, it reveals the true role of power, whose full effects normally cannot be observed, because power has a 'second face' that is hidden and unobservable. Making use of Katrina's analytic leverage, Moe pulls back the curtain to show that this "second face" has profound consequences that stifle and undermine society's efforts to fix failing institutions.