Word: levelism
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...cite the exponential number of girls in schools, some 2 million today compared to zero in 2001, as proof of success. But those schools are meaningless if there are no good teachers. In many rural parts of the country, teachers, if they can be found, often have a reading level only a few years beyond that of their students. That's not enough to build a functioning economy, a civil sector or a stable government, let alone an army capable of fighting an insurgency. (See pictures of U.S. troops in Afghanistan...
...next grade. He has shuffled dozens of principals, often from relatively high-performing schools to less than stellar ones, and he may extend the school day. In the next 18 months, he wants significant gains in the percentage of fourth- and eighth-graders who perform at grade level in math and reading. By 2015, he wants 90% of all students to complete at least one Advanced Placement course before graduating. "Those are very ambitious goals," he admits. And ultimately they may be hindered by politics: Detroit's elected school board charges he is overstepping his financial portfolio and must relinquish...
...some of the study's oversimplifications turn out to be wrong, as they well may - if hurricane activity increases or sea level begins rising faster than expected or a new real estate boom puts more property in harm's way - the damage estimates could rise...
...projecting changes in population, property values, building codes or zoning regulations," says lead author Ross Hoffman of Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc., a private firm that does climate and ocean modeling, among other things, for companies and government agencies. "We're simply asking, If nothing else changed but sea level, what would the effect be on property damage...
Even oversimplified, it's an extremely complicated thing to figure out. Take sea level, for example. Most studies on climate change talk about the average rise worldwide. But things can look very different when you zoom into specific stretches of coast. Ocean currents can make local sea level higher or lower than the world average. So can the continuing rebound of land from the weight of glaciers from the last ice age, even though they melted more than 10,000 years ago. Factors like the extraction of oil and gas, like in the Gulf of Mexico, can also make...