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Stephen M. Saland, chairman of the State Senate Education Committee, is a conservative upstate Republican, and Steven Sanders, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, is a liberal New York City Democrat. But when it comes to education, they have much in common. Neither is a fan of the federal No Child Left Behind Law and its extensive testing mandates. Both say that standardized tests are too dominant in public schools today.That has at times put the two education chairmen in conflict with the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills. (46) During his 10 year tenure, Dr. Mills has turned New York into one of the most test-driven public systems in the nation, requiring students to pass five state tests to graduate.(47) For months now, the legislative leaders and the commissioner have been locked in a little-noticed fight over the future of 28 small alternative public high schools, a fight that may well be the final stand for opponents of standardized testing in New York.Senator Saland and Assemblyman Sanders are doing their best to protect these schools in New York City (Urban Academy, Manhattan International), Ithaca (Lehman Alternative) and Rochester (School Without Walls) and help them retain their distinctive educational approach. (48) Instead of the standard survey courses in global studies, American history, biology and chemistry pegged to state tests, these schools favor courses that go into more depth on narrower topics. At Urban Academy, there are courses in Middle East conflicts, world religions, post-Civil War Reconstruction and microbiology.In the mid-1990’s, the former education commissioner, Thomas Sobol, granted these 28 consortium schools (serving 16,000 students, about 1 percent of New York’s high school population) an exemption from most state tests. That permitted a more innovative curriculum, and students were evaluated via a portfolio system that relies on research papers and science projects reviewed by outside experts like David S. Thaler, a Rockefeller University microbiology professor, and Eric Foner, a Columbia history professor.The Gates Foundation, which has given hundreds of millions of dollars to start small high schools nationwide, is so impressed with these schools, and it regularly sends educators to New York to see how they’re run.But the testing exemption for these schools is about to expire, and Commissioner Mills does not want it renewed. He believes that all students, without exception, should take every test.Recently, Senator Saland defied the commissioner. He shepherded a bill through the Republican controlled Senate that passed 50 to 10 and would continue these schools’ waivers for four years. (49) Senator Saland’s bill does require that students pass the state English and math tests to graduate, letting the state gauge the alternative schools’ performance versus mainstream schools.On the Senate floor, Senator Sa[and noted that while 61 percent of consortium students qualified for free lunches and three quarters were black or Hispanic, 88 percent went on to college, compared with 70 percent at mainstream schools that give state tests. (50) He said that the dropout rate was half the rate at mainstream schools and that on the one statewide test these students took regularly, English, they scored an average of 77, outdoing mainstream students by 5 points. 46
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"We want Singapore to have the X-factor, that buzz that you get in London, Paris, or New York." That is how Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, (1) his government’s decision to (2) gambling in the country, (3) two large, Vegas-style casinos. Whether the casinos will indeed help to transform Singapore’s staid image remains to be seen. But the decision bas already (4) an uncharacteristic buzz among the country’s normally (5) citizens.The government has contemplated, and rejected (6) casinos several times in the past. One reason was (7) Singapore’s economic growth was so rapid that casinos seemed like an unnecessary evil. Buddhism and Islam, two of the country’s main religions, (8) on gambling. The government itself has traditionally had strong, and often (9) , ideas about how its citizens should behave. Until recently, for example, it refused to (10) homosexuals to the civil service. It also used to (11) chewing gum, which it considers a public nuisance.Nowadays, (12) , Singapore’s electronics industry, the mainstay of the economy, is struggling to cope with cheap competition from places like China. In the first quarter of this year, output (13) by 5.8% at an annual rate. So the government wants lo promote tourism and other services to (14) for vanishing jobs in manufacturing.Merrill Lynch, an investment bank, (15) the two proposed casinos could (16) in as much as $4 billion in the initial investment alone. (17) its estimates, they would have annual revenues of (18) $3.6 billion, and pay at least $600 million in taxes and fees. The government, for its part, thinks the integrated (19) , as it coyly calls the casinos, would (20) as many as 35,000 jobs. 16（）
"We want Singapore to have the X-factor, that buzz that you get in London, Paris, or New York." That is how Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, (1) his government’s decision to (2) gambling in the country, (3) two large, Vegas-style casinos. Whether the casinos will indeed help to transform Singapore’s staid image remains to be seen. But the decision bas already (4) an uncharacteristic buzz among the country’s normally (5) citizens.The government has contemplated, and rejected (6) casinos several times in the past. One reason was (7) Singapore’s economic growth was so rapid that casinos seemed like an unnecessary evil. Buddhism and Islam, two of the country’s main religions, (8) on gambling. The government itself has traditionally had strong, and often (9) , ideas about how its citizens should behave. Until recently, for example, it refused to (10) homosexuals to the civil service. It also used to (11) chewing gum, which it considers a public nuisance.Nowadays, (12) , Singapore’s electronics industry, the mainstay of the economy, is struggling to cope with cheap competition from places like China. In the first quarter of this year, output (13) by 5.8% at an annual rate. So the government wants lo promote tourism and other services to (14) for vanishing jobs in manufacturing.Merrill Lynch, an investment bank, (15) the two proposed casinos could (16) in as much as $4 billion in the initial investment alone. (17) its estimates, they would have annual revenues of (18) $3.6 billion, and pay at least $600 million in taxes and fees. The government, for its part, thinks the integrated (19) , as it coyly calls the casinos, would (20) as many as 35,000 jobs. 17（）
Until recently, the main villains of the piece had seemed to be the teachers’ unions, who have opposed any sort of reform or accountability. Now they face competition from an unexpectedly destructive force: the court. Fifty years ago, it was the judges who forced the schools to desegregate through Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Now the courts have moved from broad principles to micromanagement, telling schools how much money to spend and where - right down to the correct computer or textbook. Twenty four states are currently Stuck in various court cases to do with financing school systems, and another 21 have only recently settled various suits. Most will start again soon. Only five states have avoided litigation entirely. Nothing exemplifies the power of the courts better than an 11-year-old case that is due to be settled (sort of) in New York City, the home of America’s biggest school system with 1. lm students and a budget nearing $13 billion. At the end of this month, three elderly members of the New York bar serving as judicial referees are due to rule in a case brought By the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a leftish advocacy group, against the state of New York: they will decide how much more must Be spent to provide every New York City pupil with a "sound basic" education. Rare is the politician willing to argue that more money for schools is a bad thing. But are the courts doing any good Two suspicions arise. First, judges are making a lazy assumption that more money means better schools. As the international results show, the link between "inputs" and "outputs" is vague--something well documented by, among others, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Second, the courts are muddling an already muddled system. Over time, they have generally made it harder to get rid of disruptive pupils and bad teachers. The current case could be even worse. The courts have already said that, in order to determine the necessary spending, they may consider everything from class size to the availability of computers, textbooks and even pencils. This degree of intervention is all the more scandalous because the courts have weirdly decided to ignore another set of "inputs"--the archaic work practices of school teachers and janitors. David Schoenbrod and Ross Sandier of New York Law School reckon the demands of the court will simply undermine reform and transform an expensive failure into a more expensive one. And of course, the litigation never ends. Kentucky, for example, is still in court 16 years after the first decision. A lawsuit first filed against New Jersey for its funding of schools in 1981 was "decided" four years later--but it has returned to the court nine times since, including early this year, with each decision pushing the court deeper into the management of the state’s schools. Bad iudges are even harder to boot out of school than bad pupils. What does the lawsuit filed against New Jersey indicate
In recent years, Microsoft has focused on three big tasks: building robust security into its software, resolving numerous antitrust complaints against it and upgrading its Windows operating system. These three tasks are now starting to collide. On August 27th the firm said that the successor to its Windows XP operating system, code-named Longhorn, will go on sale in 2007 without one of its most impressive features, a technique to integrate elaborate search capabilities into nearly all desktop applications. (On the bright side, Longhorn will contain advances in rendering images and enabling different computing platforms to exchange data directly between applications. ) It is a big setback for Microsoft, which considers search technology a pillar of its future growth -not least as it competes against Google. The firm’s focus on security championed by Bill Gates himself--took resources away from Longhorn, admits Greg Sullivan, a lead product manager in the Windows client division. Programmers have been fixing Windows XP rather than working on Longhorn. In mid- August, Microsoft released Service Pack 2, a huge set of free software patches and enhancements to make Windows XP more secure. Though some of the fixes turned out to have vulnerabilities of their own, the patches have mostly been welcomed. Microsoft’s decision to forgo new features in return for better security is one that most computer users will probably applaud. Yet ironically, as Microsoft slowly improves the security of its products---by, for instance, incorporating firewall technology, anti-virus systems and spam filters its actions increasingly start to resemble those that, in the past, have got the firm into trouble with regulators. Is security software an "adjacent software market", in which case Microsoft may be leveraging its dominance of the operating system into it Integrating security products into Windows might be considered "bundling" which, with regard to web browsing, so excited America’s trustbusters in the 1990s. And building security directly into the operating system seems a lot like "commingling" software code, on which basis the European Commission ruled earlier this year that Microsoft abused its market power through the Windows Media Player. Microsoft is appealing against that decision, and on September 30th it will argue for a suspension of the commission’s remedies, such as the requirement that it license its code to rivals. Just last month, the European Union’s competition directorate began an investigation into Microsoft and Time Warner, a large media firm, on the grounds that their proposed joint acquisition of ContentGuard, a software firm whose products protect digital media files, might provide Microsoft with, undue market power over digital media standards. The commission will rule by January 2005. Microsoft, it seems, in security as elsewhere, is going to have to get used to being punished for its success. Its Windows monopoly lets it enjoy excessive profits but the resulting monoculture makes it an obvious target for viruses and regulators alike. It can be concluded from the text that ______.
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