Word: uniformization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Slowly, Hizballah is losing its influence over daily life. The Iranian flag still flies from the watchtowers of the former Lebanese Army base, but its red, green and white stripes have faded to a uniform pastel. Many of the hundreds of Iranian Revolutionary Guards who lived inside the barracks have reportedly left. Many women used to wear chadors, but now relatively few do; over the past 18 months, the Iranians stopped paying them to wear the long black veils...
...place is in the kitchen. The jokes are moronic: the '50s mom tries to use 1990s lingo with malaprop results ("My, don't you look squirrelly," she says, meaning "foxy"). And when the punkish '90s kid asks for a high five, his '50s counterpart, who wears a Boy Scout uniform, gives him $5. Oh, pooh...
...right? Under the Bush proposals, tests would be taken voluntarily by students across the country in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades, yielding uniform yardsticks of performance. What the exams would look like is unclear, although Education Department officials vow they would not resemble the multiple-choice exercises of the past. The achievement tests would document the knowledge of children in five core subjects: mathematics, science, English, history and geography. The White House has asked Congress for $12.4 million -- a pittance -- to start work on developing both the exams and the standards that would go with them...
Proponents of national testing argue that the exams would provide a uniform means for parents to judge a school's performance and compare it with that of other schools in the neighborhood and across the nation. If unhappy with a particular school, parents could take their child to another -- and could shop around for the best alternatives based on standardized data. Thus the exams could become a vehicle to implement the controversial "school choice" program that is one of the cornerstones of the Bush Administration's package of education reforms. They also become passports to be produced upon demand...
...work completed over time, open-ended questions to explore student thinking, writing samples and perhaps some multiple choice. These would be part of a complicated web of standards that would be calibrated first at the state level, then among states and regions and, finally, nationally. Just how this uniform grading would be accomplished, however, remains foggy...