Word: chicago
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pass the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills before they could go on to high school. Of 172 students, three-quarters flunked. After realizing the impracticality of flunking so many (and withstanding a shower of complaints from furious parents), the school board put off its promotion plan for another year. Chicago's policy, meanwhile, has failed to put a dent in the city's number of poorly performing students. Last month school officials said that 30,424 third-, sixth- and eighth-graders failed to score well enough this year to avoid summer school--an increase of 10% over last year...
Despite all that, the war on social promotion will probably continue, part of a politically popular get-tough approach that emphasizes accountability in schools as the best way to get them in shape. To its credit, Chicago has poured $50 million a year into programs that directly target retainees. But that money could just as well be spent on things like smaller classes, individual tutoring and improved teacher training without also flunking massive numbers. "Retaining students," Chicago education researcher Suzanne Davenport says, "is a blame-the-victim solution." But it will last as long as politicians continue to believe they...
Should there be some sort of penalty for promiscuous use of the Holocaust? Or does it exert such a hold on us that merely suggesting its limits as a model seems a sacrilege? Novick, a University of Chicago historian and a self-described secular Jew, is no Holocaust denier. But he is a ferocious chronicler of the way various agendas and accidents have conspired to make the Shoah ever more central to our consciousness. And he wonders whether this attention "is as desirable...as most people seem to think it is." It's a controversial thesis, made more...
Over the last decade, a spray of new museums of contemporary art has popped up to grapple with that challenge. Miami opened one in 1996, the same year Chicago expanded its version. Last year architect Will Bruder carved one out of a multiplex cinema in Scottsdale, Ariz., and MoCA Denver moved to a 10,000-sq.-ft. permanent home. Cincinnati recently announced that the dynamic female architect Zaha Hadid would design its contemporary arts center. And just last month the biggest of them all, Mass MoCA, opened in North Adams, Mass. Its name is doubly apt: housed in an abandoned...
...unproduced show in his trunk for more than 40 years. The young composer wrote Saturday Night in the mid-'50s, but a planned Broadway opening was scuttled when the producer died. It was mounted for the first time by a small company in London in 1997. Now Chicago's Pegasus Players has given the musical (with two new songs added by Sondheim) a spirited, overdue U.S. premiere...