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“American schools are going test-crazy,” writes the New York Times education editor, Edward B. Fiske. He elaborates: “The scores emerging from those sheets full of X’s and penciled-in circles are increasingly being used to promote and hold back students, hire and fire teachers, award diplomas, evaluate curriculums, and dole out money to schools and colleges…
Oftentimes, putting two and two together is obvious but never done. Putting the hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ purchasing power together with the achievement of innovative national goals has been often obvious, but rarely does this potent combination of government procurement connect with the stimulation of better products and services. Government agencies…
By Ralph Nader and Carl Mayer Our Constitutional rights were intended for real persons, not artificial creations. The Framers certainly knew about corporations but chose not to mention these contrived entities in the Constitution For them, the document shielded living beings from arbitrary government and endowed them with the right to speak, assemble and petition.…
A smug, corporate-indentured Congress continues to misread the looming backlash by community groups and citizens against the gross indifference their legislators are displaying toward critical environmental health risks. In the past month, for example, Senators have refused to end a filibuster against a vote on a simple bill to establish a medical warning notification by…
Inside the offices of the Heritage Foundation–the nonprofit policy advocate for the Reagan Administration, a handful of zealots are in constant touch with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Their mission: privatize a large array of governmental services and assets. The Heritage list was reflected in the recent report of the President’s Commission on…
Goodbye Firestone. The Japanese tire giant, Bridgestone, has offered to buy the venerable U.S. company for $88 a share. This is considered a hefty price by John Nevin, Firestone Chairman, who supports the sale of his company and who, along with other large shareholders, will become much richer as a result. But will America become…
Day after day in a federal courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, the ghastly story of the tobacco industry and lung cancer is being told. The case involves Rose D. Cipollone who died in 19E4 at age 59 from smoking cigarettes since she was 16. Her husband is suing, on her behalf, Philip Morris, P. Lorillard…
Many years ago I wondered why nobody developed a publication which just printed letters that citizens write to their members of Congress, their newspapers and other outlets. The vast majority of these epistles never reach beyond their immediate recipient — a pity as this sample of mail we have received on a recent day: —…
Former Speaker Tip O’Neill said of Reagan: “he knows less than any president I’ve ever known.” A hundred and seventy page book by Mark Green and Gail MacColl fills page after page with Mr. Reagan’s verbal errors, falsifications and wild political exaggerations. Among the items in “Reagan’s Reign of Error” are assertions that ‘once launched,…
“In the final analysis, the issue in this campaign is leadership”, says Bob Dole over and over again, adding that “I voted in Congress fifteen or twenty thousand times in twenty-seven years. My record is there. You can study it.” Let’s “study” some contrasts. Repeatedly, Dole says that the deficit is the biggest domestic issue.…