Word: whether
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there is one thing missing: proof that cracking down on social promotion will work. Most research shows that retaining students in the same grade rarely lifts their achievement. More often it demoralizes kids like Walker--and increases their chances of dropping out. "With respect to whether retention is a good idea," says University of Wisconsin professor Robert Hauser, who studied the issue for the National Research Council, "the answer is no or almost never...
...enthusiasm for the hard-line approach started in Chicago. Since 1996, after Mayor Richard Daley took control of the school system and appointed his budget chief, Paul Vallas, as its chief executive, the city has used standardized-test scores to help determine whether students should move to the next grade. In the year before the new approach, less than 2% of students were forced to repeat a grade; last year close to 15% of third-, sixth- and eighth-graders were retained. The city spent $24 million last year on summer programs designed to give kids one last chance to pass...
...model seems a sacrilege? Novick, a University of Chicago historian and a self-described secular Jew, is no Holocaust denier. But he is a ferocious chronicler of the way various agendas and accidents have conspired to make the Shoah ever more central to our consciousness. And he wonders whether this attention "is as desirable...as most people seem to think it is." It's a controversial thesis, made more so by the book's intensely polemical tone. Says James Young, a University of Massachusetts Holocaust expert who is advising the city of Berlin on its much disputed memorial: "Peter...
...Hall fleshes out the character by nailing the Microsoft chairman in all his scary intensity, from the whining, reedy voice to the shrunken-tortoise posture, body collapsed in on itself as if conserving all energy for a mind whose unfathomable power emerges only via his ever gleaming eyes. Whether peering over a winning poker hand in a Harvard dorm, patiently waiting out one of Jobs' flailing rages or cutting a deal with some hapless executive, Hall never loses--or lets us lose--sight of Gates as the man who will be king...
...Milosevic?s strongest challengers right now being nationalists who reject the Kosovo peace deal, it may not even be in the West?s immediate interest to make Milosevic?s ouster a short-term priority. After all, in the long run he?s probably damned himself to a nasty end, whether as a besieged despot, a fugitive, in a war crimes court or worse. The truth, of course, is that there are no real winners in this messy Balkan conflict, only plenty of losers: The Kosovar Albanian civilians who have been terrorized, tortured, r aped, murdered and driven from their homes...