Word: dismalness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Affliction is about a dismal town in New Hampshire and its effects on one of the inhabitants, Wade Whitehouse, part-time well digger, snow-plow operator, police officer and school-crossing guard. He has lived in a trailer ever since his wife left him for a man with better prospects. Smoldering with resentments, he lets routine things slip his mind. "Sometimes you just forget who you are. Especially when you're sick of who you are," he tells his brother Rolfe...
...such a dismal setting, it is easy to overlook someone like Mickey Leland, who was not molesting children or lining his pockets or taking funds from the public coffers for pork-barrel projects back home...
...That dismal overall assessment, however, masks the success that many states have had in boosting the quality of their schools. Since A Nation at Risk, as many as 16 states have adopted major legislative packages calling for sharp spending increases and radical restructuring of their schools. How some of these states moved education to the top of the political agenda -- and what they are doing to keep it there -- provides telling lessons for others. A look at three case histories...
WILLIAMS talked about educational reform. He talked about the "dismal performance" of our high school students. He said that it was important to have a "reinvolvement of the public in education...
...could drive Solidarity underground, it could not make the country's hopelessly inefficient factories produce more or put food on empty grocery shelves. For more than seven years, Jaruzelski tried to carry out economic reforms while refusing to negotiate with Solidarity or democratize the political structure. The results were dismal: industrial production fell steadily, while the foreign debt climbed to $39.2 billion and inflation crept toward 100%. When public discontent erupted in a series of nationwide strikes last spring and summer, the government finally abandoned its half-a-loaf strategy and in desperation steered into one of the most astonishing...