Word: nationalities
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Your article properly identified Republicans as civic saboteurs. But it did not adequately characterize the wan centrism of Democrats. With our nation in desperate, urgent need of major reforms, we are faced with a political choice between the status quo or doubling down on ruin...
...charter schools, standardized testing and merit pay, Ravitch now uses Death and Life to proclaim her ardent opposition to the seemingly unstoppable engine of the education-reform movement, which she believes is too quick to demonize teachers and unions in its attempts to improve the quality of the nation's schools and close the achievement gap. With scathing looks at the influence of private money in public schools and the national obsession with testing over learning, Ravitch's critique is an essential one--passionate, well considered and completely logical...
Democracy is messy everywhere. In Iraq, it is both messy and dangerous. The country has now had more practice at choosing its own leaders in relatively open elections than perhaps any Middle Eastern nation besides Israel and Lebanon. In 2003, many U.S. architects of the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein hoped the events would be followed by a democratic ripple effect throughout the region. That has not yet happened. The politicians who came to power after the country's first parliamentary election five years ago have been unable to resolve core issues - from deciding...
...rather than letting only the political parties stuff the lists of candidates - anyone and everyone seems to be running for parliament. There are about 6,000 candidates for 325 seats, and some 86 parties taking part in the election. The sectarian and ethnic political parties whose leaders tore the nation apart are still the country's most powerful, but they have joined in loose multiethnic and multisectarian coalitions. "Obviously there are still going to be candidates who just parrot what their leader says, but that's not going to be as effective this time," says an official with...
With so many foreign powers playing politics in Iraq, the future of the nation will depend on the skill, maturity and willingness of its leaders to compromise. Plenty don't think they are up to the task. "They are going to push us back to civil war," says Daha Arwai, the head of a charity that looks after the children and widows of men murdered by militias. Will Iraq's leaders prove her wrong? Joe Biden is convinced they will - but then, the Vice President is one of life's sunny optimists. Most others, watching Iraq, have their fingers very...