Word: preps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Friday night, James Cooney needed a car to pick up his girlfriend. He borrowed his good friend Barry Bootan's father's Chevrolet, banged it into a pole and racked up $900 worth of body damage. To come up with the money, the two New York City prep school graduates hatched a bizarre robbery scheme. Over the next 48 hours, youngsters who had never been in trouble played out every parent's nightmare. A minor scrape gave way to panic, then to terror. All judgment vanished. At the end, Cooney, 18, was dead, and four other lives lay in ruins...
Frantic to get the car repaired before Bootan's father returned from a weekend fishing trip, Cooney and Bootan, 18, called three other classmates from Fordham Prep, a Jesuit school from which they were graduated on June 3. About 1 a.m. last Sunday, the five headed off in Jason Katanic's mother's Chrysler with three ski masks and a .22-cal. rifle. They drove to a late-night grocery, where Cooney held up the owner for $140. Buoyed by their success, the boys rode around looking for someone else to rob, shooting out the windows of about six empty...
...Cooney or his friends suggested they were capable of reckless, murderous behavior. So far, drinking and drugs do not appear to be a factor. Three of the boys came from working-class families who struggled to pay the $3,225 tuition at a strict private school where Catholic, not prep, is the defining sensibility. Cooney was the stepson of a police officer; Katanic's widowed mother is a clerical worker. All five boys were headed to college in the fall...
George Bush followed lockstep in his father's path: prep school, Yale, stalwart of the baseball team, Skull and Bones. Dukakis, on the other hand, broke with the expected pattern, deciding against Harvard in favor of Swarthmore, a small Quaker college near Philadelphia. A D in physics dissuaded him from studying medicine. Instead, he threw himself into politics, working for the 1951 election of Philadelphia reformist Mayor Joe Clark, his first taste of squeaky-clean government. Dukakis still did not have much of a social life -- no one remembers a steady girlfriend -- and he did not join any fraternities because...
...NAEP document notes that the average Japanese high schooler does better at math than the top 5% of Americans taking college-prep courses. It blasts U.S. math instruction as "dominated by paper-and-pencil drills on basic computation" and by rote explanations from teachers too dependent on set- piece texts. Innovative teaching, lab work and special projects "remain disappointingly rare...