Word: mayors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...merit, since he had no base of support in the army, party or bureaucracy. "Everyone knew Zhu, not just for being efficient and honest, but primarily because of his rightist background," says Zhu Xingqing (no relation), a journalist in Shanghai in the 1980s when Zhu was mayor...
...opened Shanghai to foreign investors during his three years as mayor, starting a boom that lasts to this day, and displayed his no-nonsense approach to the business of doing business. According to Gareth Chang, who was head of a McDonnell Douglas joint venture in Shanghai, Zhu cut official banquets from 12 dishes to four because "first of all, most of us couldn't eat that much, and second, he thought the longer meals were a waste of time." In 1991, Zhu was recalled to Beijing, where he became Vice Premier and successfully curbed China's rampant inflation. Last year...
...reforms came abruptly, grabbing attention like fingernails scratching a chalkboard. As Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer stepped into his new role as czar of the city's public schools last week, he began the dirty work of dismantling one of the nation's most ineffectual public bureaucracies. Armed with a new state law giving him authority over the city's 265 public schools, Archer swiftly demoted the city's elected school-board members to unpaid advisers and stripped them of such perks as corporate credit cards, cell phones, pagers and even office keys. He suspended all new employment contracts...
...required here: only half of Detroit's high school students graduate, most basic supplies--from textbooks to toilet paper--somehow have trouble making it into schools, and teachers routinely walk out on strike. While Archer has succeeded in reducing crime and luring Big Business since taking over as mayor in 1994, he says the city's decades-long flight of middle-class residents can't be reversed unless the city's schools get better. "Any mayor in the country will tell you that the No. 1 issue facing cities isn't crime or jobs anymore, it's public education," Archer...
While these mayors can't yet proclaim victory, the health of public education in many cities has been so lousy for so long that even modest progress gets hailed as a breakthrough. In most takeovers, city hall has delivered a fiscal and academic accountability that pulls budgets out of the red while improving, albeit modestly, overall student achievement. "Principals, teachers and administrators were there for life and couldn't be removed or forced to change," says Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. "We have shaken things up when necessary...