Word: badness
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...Ground) Platt and William Hung before him has led to the charge that reality TV invites us to laugh at little people for sport. The fame of Jersey Shore's tanning-bed casualties and others brings the critique that reality TV celebrates violence, sluttiness (male and female) and other bad behavior...
Reality shows showcase plenty of bad behavior, but they also presume a heavy moralism on the part of the audience. Survivor is known for its self-rationalizing, situational ethics. Anything you do to win can be justified as playing the game. But part of the reason fans become involved in the show is that they get invested in the good guys and bad guys. (Read more about television on James Poniewozik's blog...
...known for a long time that there are too many bad schools in the U.S., dropout factories that shove barely literate children through the system. Because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) - the George W. Bush - era education law that forces every school to report whether it makes "adequate yearly progress" toward nationwide math- and reading-proficiency standards - we can now point to exactly which schools are the lowest performing and the least improving. With that information in hand, the question becomes, Well, what do we do about it? (See TIME's special report on paying for college...
...closings are now acknowledged to have been largely unsuccessful. An October 2009 study by the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research concluded that most students from shuttered schools did not see any improvement in education quality, mainly because they ended up at schools that were as bad as the ones they had just left. Several turnarounds - same kids, new adults - did show noticeable gains, however, according to a recent Chicago Tribune analysis of city schools. But on the whole, the experiment was a mixed...
...only one who thinks so. After all the bad press in the early '00s - the company has been blamed, with some justification, for the global rise in obesity - McDonald's is enjoying a heady resurgence. Each day, it feeds some 26 million Americans, 2 million more than it did in 2006. In the past five years, the McDonald's Corp. share price has jumped from below $30 to above $60. (See the 10 worst fast-food meals...