Word: reformer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...candidate promised that enacting campaignfinance reform would be one of his top priorities...
...more focused, urgent. That is the way Zhu Rongji, China's Premier, likes it. Zhu, 70, is a risk taker, a breed apart in the Chinese leadership. In Beijing they call him Zhu Fengzi, Madman Zhu, as he crashes through the rickety communist superstructure in the name of reform, laying off millions of workers from state-owned enterprises, terrorizing corrupt officials, having smugglers shot. On a good day they call him Zhu Laoban, Zhu the Boss, the only man capable of imposing order on an economy of 1.3 billion money-hungry people snarled in one of the greatest economic traffic...
...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...
Chicago's school-reform movement has been gaining momentum for more than a decade. The late Mayor Harold Washington began planting the seeds of reform in the mid-1980s, but it wasn't until 1988 that the Illinois legislature passed a school-reform act that parceled authority to newly elected boards for each public school and granted them power to hire and fire principals. Even that reform movement didn't gain significant traction until 1995, when state Republicans turned control over to Daley. "Everybody knew things had to change, but they felt powerless to do anything about it," Daley says...
...deny that Chicago's 559 public schools are enjoying a slow but steady revival under Daley's leadership. Taking cues from his appointed schools' chief Paul Vallas, a veteran budget aide, and lawyer Gery Chico, who heads a new body called the Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees, the mayor has succeeded in pushing up test scores virtually across the spectrum. The district has added 632 classrooms, finally taking teachers out of lunchrooms and auditoriums. Some $2 billion has been spent on capital improvements, and for the first time in recent memory there's labor peace. "My people were used...