Word: underclass
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...entries, most of them words that have come into use since 1966. The field of business and finance has contributed its share (greenmail, golden parachute), as have science and technology (string theory, user friendly), government (disinformation, -gate as an all-purpose suffix for scandals), social trends (yuppie, underclass) and relations between the sexes (significant other, palimony...
...that the Brits are going to catch with that one is a few harmless former spies eking out their pensions with ripping yarns about the bad old days in MI5. No, what they need over there is an Unofficial Secrets Act -- something that will stop the English underclass from converting squalid youthful memories into rude, shrewd, occasionally lewd movies of the kind that have lately been jostling away at one another -- and at our innocent colonial funny bones. As a group they form a kind of Disasterpiece Theater, more blithely brutal than typically British, and likely to prove ruinous...
...that the dramatic concentration of superstudents has peaked, talented young Asian Americans have already shown that U.S. education can still produce excellence. The largely successful Asian-American experience is a challenging counterpoint to the charges that U.S. schools are now producing less-educated mainstream students and failing to help underclass blacks and Hispanics. One old lesson apparently still holds. "It really doesn't matter where you come from or what your language is," observes Educational Historian Diane Ravitch. "If you arrive with high aspirations and selfdiscipline, schools are a path to upward mobility." Particularly when there is a close working...
...magic formula can end this cycle of poverty and social pathology. More money for social programs, a welfare system with stronger incentives to succeed, the teaching of values in the schools: these are the familiar answers of policymakers. But compared with the gravity of the problems of the black underclass, almost all the standard remedies amount to little more than changing the bandages on a festering wound...
...housing, point to a depressing conclusion: little will be done to make the ghetto an acceptable place to live and raise children. This by no means suggests abandoning those trapped in the inner city. Rather, the emphasis of both government and private philanthropy must be on helping the black underclass escape the social isolation of these inner-city wastelands. What successes there have been come not through cosmetically improving the ghettos but by providing residents with opportunities through jobs and education to rise out of them. Saving people, not inner-city neighborhoods, may be the only way America can redeem...