Word: dropout
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to a January report from UCLA's Civil Rights Project, African-American and Latino schoolchildren are more segregated than they have been since the time of Martin LutherKing Jr.'s death, in 1968. In the 2006-07 school year, nearly 40% attended schools--many of them subpar "dropout factories"--where students of color made up 90% to 100% of the student body...
...were watching the same thing we were, because the flashing and dancing light against their windows matched what was on our screen. During the bygone era of the "family dinner hour," more often than not it was the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. He was a modest college dropout from Missouri who explained our world each night. Wars (cold and hot), Watergate, the race to the moon and a dark day in Dallas. He held our hand when we needed it. We loved him because he was one of us. He was the voice of America...
...While he has since dialed back the scope of the project (the Education Department now expects the funds to tackle 1,200 or so schools), the objective remains the same. "My goal isn't quantity but quality," Duncan told TIME in July. "That bottom 1% are made up of dropout factories, where 50, 60, 75% of kids are dropping out. Change around the edges isn't going to get us where we need...
While it's difficult to argue with the larger philosophical goal -let's fix the U.S.'s dropout factories - some critics say the evidence of success in turnaround strategies just isn't there. Worse, it isn't even that clear what makes a turnaround a turnaround. "There's no agreement on how bad a school has to be in order to qualify," says Andy Smarick, a former deputy assistant education secretary who is a visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-reform think tank. "There's no agreement on how long it has to sustain that level...
...Americans have experienced as swift a rise and dramatic a fall as Bernard Kerik. A high school dropout who was abandoned by his mother as a toddler, Kerik became commissioner of the New York Police Department and nominee to head the U.S. Department of Homeland Security before his checkered past caught up with him. On Thursday, Nov. 5, the gruff, muscle-bound 54-year-old pleaded guilty to tax fraud, making false statements and other felonies in a federal courthouse in suburban New York. The man who once oversaw the nation's largest municipal jail system - and whose name once...