Word: urban
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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TIME set out to track the flow of cash through a single large urban district--Baltimore's--to test the widespread assumption that urban schools fail because they don't have the money to do better. Last year the city spent $646 million on 110,000 children for a per-pupil total of $5,873, just shy of Maryland's statewide average. Yet the money produced a student body that failed to meet the most rudimentary state standards, as measured in a battery of tests that gauge functional skills in reading, math, writing and citizenship. The system's interim...
...principals questioned by state investigators agreed that the system desperately needed more money. Yet the investigators discovered that the system failed to use millions of dollars it did have. When school administrators somehow failed to spend $600,000 earmarked for early-intervention programs now deemed crucial to real urban-school reform, the state pulled back the money. The school system also failed to tap a $58 million building-construction fund until a girl was seriously burned when a school boiler forced superheated steam through a school toilet, says Nancy Grasmick, state superintendent of education...
...system lost additional millions when its "third-party billing" office failed to pursue Medicaid reimbursement for certain special-ed services, revenue that has become a lifeline for urban districts around the country. In fact, for reasons unknown, the billing department's supervisor actively resisted seeking reimbursement. Says Grasmick: "It was shocking beyond belief that that kind of behavior was tolerated and that there was no sanctioning of that individual's behavior." The office is vigorously seeking reimbursement and has managed to recoup $13.3 million in just the first 10 months of the past fiscal year...
...converts at a tent meeting. But critics, careful always to applaud Efficacy's central objective of raising expectations, wonder whether the $1 million Baltimore spent on the program--equivalent to the starting salaries of 40 teachers--was money wisely used. "It's an example of what is wrong with urban education," says the Abell Foundation's Embry. "It was put in without any evidence of its working--without any evidence even expected...
...edgy lyrics that characterized music of the late '60s and early '70s. Well, gentle listener, you are wrong. Yes, that is Shaggy doing a re-make of Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart" (actually, he has two versions on the CD--the regular radio mix and an "urban re-mix"). Shaggy has committed sacrilege by performing the song and it is not any good. Presumably one of the worse songs on the CD, Shaggy has taken it upon himself to do a remix of this classic song with vocals by a singer named Marsha in the tradition of Mariah...