Word: reformer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Health care reform legislation cleared an important hurdle on Nov. 21, when the U.S. Senate voted to open full debate on a proposed 10-year, $848 billion overhaul of the industry. Democrats relied on a coalition of centrists and liberals to advance the measure with a filibuster-proof 60-to-39 vote; all the nays came from Republicans. Maintaining the fragile Democratic alliance could mean weeks of legislative haggling and debate: four key moderate Senators oppose the inclusion of a public-insurance option, which some colleagues on the left consider nonnegotiable. A final vote is probably a month or more...
...instead of 40, as the panel advised in 2002). The task force cited enhanced analysis of the risks and benefits of screening as the reason for the new guidelines. But the recommendations went straight to the heart of the emotionally charged debate over the Democratic-sponsored health care reform legislation that is working its way through Congress. Republicans like Representative Marsha Blackburn charged that "this is how rationing begins. This is the little toe in the edge of the water." No one was more surprised, or less prepared, for the uproar over the new guidelines than the advisory panel itself...
...decades of relative poverty, its latest stimulus-supplemented gambit is to devote billions to try to fix the nation's very worst schools. After having directed almost $50 billion toward saving teacher jobs and $4 billion toward its Race to the Top program, in which states vie for reform-oriented funding, the department just made available applications for districts to compete for $3.5 billion earmarked for turning around failing schools. As part of the application, each state identifies its most "persistently lowest-achieving schools." The submission deadline for this race to the bottom is Feb. 8. (See pictures...
While enthusiastic about the district's reform plans, Boasberg is the first to admit that some of its turnarounds - and, by extension, some of the turnarounds across the country - will not succeed. "If we had a magic formula for school success, we wouldn't be lagging behind other countries like we are right now," he says. "We have to be prepared that some of these efforts will fail, but I'm confident that on the whole, they'll do far better than what they are replacing...
...even that clear what makes a turnaround a turnaround. "There's no agreement on how bad a school has to be in order to qualify," says Andy Smarick, a former deputy assistant education secretary who is a visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-reform think tank. "There's no agreement on how long it has to sustain that level of excellence. There's no agreement on whether it means the entire population of students or just certain subgroups. Does it mean having a school go from an F to a C or from...