Word: benchmark
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom and his scholar wife Abigail. The couple are the latest in a string of former liberals come round to denounce affirmative action. But unlike more polemical authors, the Thernstroms pin their arguments to seven years of research, modeling their approach on Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 benchmark racial survey, An American Dilemma. Their prose is cool, not overheated, and their 704-page book is stuffed with tables, charts and graphs tracking black progress over the past 60 years...
Already, prepublication, the book is causing a stir. Christopher Edley, President Clinton's point man on the "mend it, don't end it" approach to affirmative action, published a rebuttal in Harvard magazine in July. Kirkus Reviews has declared the book "likely to be seen as the benchmark scholarly study of America's current anguish over the race question." The New Republic is planning an excerpt...
Already 18 states have high school exit tests. National tests, endorsed by Bill Clinton and George Bush before him, will begin in 1999 with fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. The tests are supposed to serve only as a benchmark to assess educational progress, but they could one day lead to nationwide graduation standards. Now Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and IBM chairman Louis Gerstner Jr., co-chairs of last year's Education Summit, are adding to the pressure, enlisting companies to pledge that they will look at young applicants' academic records, including exit-test scores, rather than rely only...
...defending national champions, the Black and White had a lot to live up to this season. Every benchmark has been passed heading into next weekend's national championships in Camden, New Jersey...
...sorts of questions festering in my head: How would people have reacted if the spirit Major Nelson who stumbled upon in the in the pilot episode of "I Dream of Genie" ended up being gay? Is the open homosexuality of a sitcom protagonist really the kind of cultural benchmark that merits a lead New York Times editorial? Is the decision of the people behind one television series a sign of the New American Openness...