Word: evening
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...past few years, reformers have embraced a disarmingly simple idea for fixing schools: Why not actually flunk those students who don't earn passing grades? Both Democrats and Republicans have begun attacking the practice of "social promotion"--shuttling bad students to the next grade, advancing them with peers even if they are failing. Make F truly mean failure, the movement says...
...forward-looking plan that Zacarias, 70, didn't have the clout to enact. He wasn't popular enough--the school board recently bought out his contract after a bitter power struggle--but even fellow reformers think his plan was too much, too soon. Says board member David Tokofsky: "You've got the unions who want their say. And, of course, there's the facilities issue: Where do you send all these eighth-graders if you can't send them to high school?" The district now says it will stop advancing low-achieving students only in two grades (second and eighth...
Free trade is always a hard sell. In all of social science, the proposition that comes closest to being scientific, in terms of being theoretically provable and true in real life, is that a society benefits from allowing its citizens to buy what they wish--even from foreigners. But people resist this conclusion, sometimes violently, as in Seattle last week...
...trade or to take to the streets to defend their right to a cheap sweater. Or suppose the U.S. slaps a tariff on foreign sweaters and the foreign country retaliates by raising a tariff on something we're selling them--the people who would lose their jobs aren't even identifiable for sure, though for sure they exist. Likewise the people who lose jobs because shoppers who have to pay more for sweaters have less money to spend on other things...
Part of the explanation is the special nature of our current prosperity, which is widening the income gap rather than narrowing it, as in the past. Part is the growth of global economic forces that are actually impinging on national sovereignty, even though it's the paranoid hysterics who say so. But the WTO isn't responsible for either of these trends, both of which are probably inevitable and neither of which undermines the basic case for free trade or for an organization empowered to promote trade through binding arbitration of trade disputes...