Word: dixon
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...Last year Spencer Bibbs and neighboring A. A. Dixon Elementary became national guinea pigs as the first schools to lose kids to state-sponsored vouchers, thanks to Governor Jeb Bush's "A+ Schools" program, the model for his brother's national voucher plan. (As governor of Texas, George W. Bush tried but failed to get the legislature to pass a similar program.) Students at both Pensacola schools were offered as much as $4,000 in state aid to pay for private-school tuition. Under Bush's national proposal, failing schools that do not improve for three years would lose their...
...warned that the loss of $2 million in state aid could devastate the district schools. While Spencer Bibbs did have to drop three reading specialists, the voucher threat inspired the district to make improvements, including extending the school year to 210 days. Today neither Spencer Bibbs nor A. A. Dixon is on the state's failing list...
...lucky streak. So this is where we tell you how disillusioned she was by the moviemaking process. It's true that Reuben, the black one-eyed Vietnam vet in the book, became the white burn victim Eugene in the movie (first choice Denzel Washington was busy); that scriptwriter Leslie Dixon (Mrs. Doubtfire, The Thomas Crown Affair) fiddled with characters; that Leder moved the setting from Atascadero, Calif., to Las Vegas. ("I thought the land of lost hopes and lost dreams was the place for this movie," she says.) But Hyde shrugs off the changes: "The heart of the story survived...
These antique movie references are not coincidental. Surely Mimi Leder, the director, and screenwriter Leslie Dixon had them in mind. They are, however, of interest largely to students of cliches and their maddening persistence in popular culture. Leder and Dixon are more up to date. Theirs is an epic of au courant abuse and unlikely but inspirational redemption...
...lyrics of "Sultans of Swing" are absent. Most of the songs are fairly transparent paeans to episodes of America's folk past, never mind Knopfler's British extraction. The title track features Knopfler and guest James Taylor in a mock-up of a very awkward conversation between Mason and Dixon of Mason-Dixon line fame, but the song holds together if you don't pay attention to the lyrics. Unfortunately, Knopfler seems to have lost the ability to choose exactly the right words for a situation that he displayed so brilliantly in that other Straits staple "Romeo and Juliet...