Word: opt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Thatcher plan also offers a radical choice for which there is, as yet, no U.S. equivalent. Individual public schools may "opt out" of local school systems and instead receive funding directly from the national government. With this declaration of independence, a school's headmaster and a governing body that includes parents become responsible for most decisions, from hiring teachers to spending priorities. Because opt-outs do not lose a portion of their budgets to district-authority overhead, they often have money for more books, new facilities and additional teachers...
...opt out, a school must first secure the consent of a majority of its students' parents. In the two years since Thatcher's plan went into effect, 102 schools have cut their ties; 11 are on the verge of final action; 88 more await government approval. They are the first patches in a quilt of autonomous schools -- which are tax supported and tuition free but in effect can operate as if they were privately run -- that the country's Conservative government hopes will blanket the country...
...opt-outs live up to the Thatcherite vision of efficiency and competitive excellence? Two years ago, Hendon, a public secondary school in north London, faced dissolution and the merger of its dwindling student population into a nearby school. Today, as an institution that opted out, Hendon, with 850 students, gets two applications for every available place. (Students with hearing problems and learning disabilities are given priority.) Since it changed status in 1989, Hendon has doubled spending on books and teaching materials and quadrupled its payout for classroom equipment and furniture. Money that once disappeared into bureaucratic coffers has hired more...
Foes of the program warn that successes like Hendon do not reflect the real impact of the program. Schools that opt out disrupt county planning efforts and drain from districts money that traditionally has been applied to a wide range of services, including the provision of child psychologists, substitute teachers and special-education instructors. Says Margaret Maden, the chief education officer of Warwickshire: "Opting out takes money from the system as a whole and affects the schools that are left...
...first Gorbachev and the reactionaries tried to co-opt each other. One of Gorbachev's aides, fluent in the earthy idiom of American politics, paraphrases a favorite line of Lyndon Johnson's: "Mikhail Sergeyevich felt it was better to have the camels inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. He wanted to keep them where he could see them and where they would have to take his orders. He also wanted to use them to put pressure on the Balts." That arrangement was fine with the reactionaries, since they had considerable latitude in how to interpret...