Word: fourth
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...Obama Administration, the Department of Education offers one of the most comprehensive looks yet at the achievement gap between white and black pupils, based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP (pronounced nape) is a federal standardized test - known as "the nation's report card" - administered to fourth- and eighth-grade public-school students in reading and math. The state-by-state results show clear evidence of a continued problem: black students trail their white classmates in every state. But the report also offers some encouraging signs: overall scores have risen, and racial disparities are gradually shrinking...
Highlight Reel: 1. The bad: Black students trail white students in reading and math in every state. The average overall gap in fourth and eighth grades was 26 points on the 500-point NAEP. Some areas saw an even larger disparity: Massachusetts, for instance, had a 40-point gap in eighth-grade math. (See pictures of a public boarding school...
...good: Scores for all students have risen since the NAEP was first administered, and the achievement gap narrowed by an average of 7 points from 1992 to 2007 (the date of the most recent test). Black fourth-graders have gained meaningful ground in math and reading since the test was first administered, in the early 1990s, while eighth-graders have made slight progress...
...risk and peril," says the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce's Naville, who points out that both countries have "a lot at stake" in each other's economies. Switzerland is the U.S.'s 15th largest export market and, with almost $149 billion spent in 2008, its fourth largest recipient in terms of direct investment. Switzerland, for its part, invested nearly $195 billion in the U.S. last year. (See the top 10 tax dodgers...
...Turkmenistan, with the world's fourth largest reserves of natural gas, would be an ideal source for Nabucco, but it would need a pipeline under the Caspian Sea, where there is as yet no seabed agreement. At the signing ceremony on Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also talked of supplies from Iraq and Iran, but political tensions and security concerns make them distant prospects. Even security in Turkey is an issue: last year Kurdish separatists attacked the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, halting supplies for 19 days. (Read: "New Turkish Law Curbs Military's Power...