1010G【fish】COMMENTS

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】4-2 【学习】

Student’s Arrest Tests Immigration Policy By ROBBIE BROWN Published: May 14, 2010 From the New York Time ATLANTA — Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant at the center of a contentious immigration case, surrendered to（屈服） a Georgia sheriff（治安官） on Friday but continued to deny wrongdoing. Ms. Colotl was arrested in March for driving without a license and could face deportation（驱逐出境） next year. On Wednesday the sheriff filed a felony charge against her（以重型罪指控） for providing a false address to the police. The case has become a flash point（亮点） in the national debate over whether federal immigration laws should be enforced by local and state officials. And like Arizona’s tough new immigration law, it has highlighted a rift between（突出了……之间的裂痕） the federal government and local politicians over how illegal immigrants should be detected and prosecuted（起诉）. “I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” Ms. Colotl said Friday at a news conference after being released on $2,500 bail. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.” Civil rights groups say Ms. Colotl should be spared deportation because she was brought to the United States without legal documents by her parents at age 11. They also note that she has excelled academically and was discovered to be here illegally only after a routine traffic violation. Supporters of immigration laws and the sheriff’s office in Cobb County say she violated state law, misled the police about her address and should not receive special treatment for her age or education. Ms. Colotl was pulled over（让司机靠边） March 29 by a campus officer at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, where she is two semesters from graduation, for “impeding（妨碍） the flow of traffic.” After she presented the officer an expired Mexican passport instead of a valid driver’s license, she was arrested and taken to a county jail, where she acknowledged being an illegal immigrant. On May 5, she was transferred to the Etowah Detention Center in Alabama to await deportation to Mexico. But after protests by Latino groups, demonstrations at the Georgia Capitol（国会大厦） by her sorority（大学的女生联谊会） sisters and a letter of support from the university’s president, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency granted a one-year deferral on her deportation so she could finish college. The “deferred action” means she could still be deported, but will be allowed to apply for an extension next year. Her ultimate goal, Ms. Colotl said at the news conference, is that proposed legislation called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — known as the Dream Act — will become law, providing students without legal immigration status a path to become legal. She and her lawyer declined to discuss the immigration status of her parents. In Georgia, the case has become intensely political. Ms. Colotl received in-state tuition, substantially reducing her cost of attending Kennesaw State. The university will charge her out-of-state rates in the future, but Republican politicians are calling for new legislation to make attendance more expensive, or impossible, for illegal immigrants. One Republican candidate for governor, Eric Johnson, has said that if elected he will mandate（强制执行） that all college applicants demonstrate their citizenship. The chancellor of the state university system says that would be prohibitively expensive, costing $1.5 million, for roughly 300,000 students. Under a program by the Department of Homeland Security, known as 287(g), local sheriffs are permitted to handle federal immigration law enforcement. The Cobb County sheriff’s office was the first in Georgia and one of the first in the United States to apply for the program. Immigration is a hot topic in the largely conservative county, where Hispanics（拉美裔） make up 11 percent of the population, census figures show. Mary Bauer, the legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is assisting in Ms. Colotl’s defense, said Cobb County had a history of using federal laws designed to detect dangerous criminals for arresting illegal immigrants for minor offenses. A review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that from 2007 to 2009, the main crime for which immigration detainees were arrested in the county was traffic offenses. “This is a civil rights disaster,” said Ms. Bauer, who called the county’s application of the law “mean-spirited and very probably illegal.” “We call on the Obama administration to end 287(g),” she said. Supporters of strict immigration legislation say Ms. Colotl’s case was handled legally. The sheriff, Neil Warren, said Ms. Colotl provided a false address to the police, a felony charge. Her lawyers say that she provided the address of the residence where she used to live and to where her car insurance is registered, and that she also provided her current address. No exception should be made, however admirable the offender, said Phil Kent, a spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, a national group opposed to illegal immigration. “Ironically, she says she wants to go on to law school, but she’s undermining the law（她破坏法律）,” Mr. Kent said. “What’s the point of educating an illegal immigrant in a system where she can’t hold a job legally or get a driver’s license?”

谦行天下UID: 2797557

44# azure9

嘿嘿。。。同意。。。

梦想在路上UID: 2812986

【COMMENT 3-2】
Innovation in history
Getting better all the timeThe biological, cultural and economic forces behind human progressMay 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
THIRTY years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous bet. Mr Simon, a libertarian, was sceptical of the gloomy claims made by Mr Ehrlich, an ecologist best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering that would result from the supposed “population bomb”. Thumbing his nose at such notions as resource scarcity, Mr Simon wagered that the price of any five commodities chosen by Mr Ehrlich would go down over the following decade. The population bomb was defused, and Mr Simon handily won the bet.
【bet----打赌。sceptical----不相信的，怀疑的。gloomy----阴暗的，令人沮丧的。wager----打赌】
Now, Matt Ridley has a similarly audacious bet in mind. A well-known British science writer (and former Economist journalist), Mr Ridley has taken on the mantle of（继成衣钵） rational optimism from the late Mr Simon. In his new book, he challenges those nabobs of negativity who argue that the world cannot possibly feed 9 billion mouths, that Africa is destined to（注定） fail and that the planet is heading for（朝……进发） a climate disaster】. He boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness.
【audacious---大胆的；冒失的。】
However, mankind cannot hope to achieve this if it turns its back on （抛弃、背弃）innovation. Feeding another 2 billion people or more will（或以上）, of course, mean producing much more food. Genetically modified（转基因的） (GM) agriculture could play an important role, as this technology can greatly increase yields while using smaller inputs of fertiliser, insecticide and water. Many years of field experience in the Americas and Asia have shown GM crops to be safe, but, Mr Ridley rightly complains, the Luddites of the green and organic movements continue to obstruct progress.
【Luddite--- 1. 勒德分子(19世纪初英国手工业工人中参加捣毁机器的人)
2. (l-)强烈反对机械化或自动化的人 】

The progress (and occasional retardation) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work. He starts by observing that humans are the only species capable of innovation. Other animals use tools, and some ants, for example, do specialise at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question（考虑之中的，被谈论着的） do not improve their technologies from generation to generation. Only man innovates continuously.
Why should that be? Some have suggested that perhaps it is the chemistry of big brains that leads us to tinker. Others that man’s mastery of（精通熟练） language or his capacity for imitation and social learning hold the key. Mr Ridley, a zoologist by training, weighs up （估量）these arguments but insists, in the end, that the explanation lies not within man’s brain but outside: innovation is a collective phenomenon. The way man’s collective brain grows, he says cheekily, is by “ideas having sex”.
【imitation---模仿；仿制品。cheekily---厚脸皮地】
His own theory is, in a way（某种程度上）, the glorious offspring that would result if Charles Darwin’s ideas were mated with those of Adam Smith. Trade, Mr Ridley insists, is the spark that lit the fire of human imagination, as it made possible not only the exchange of goods, but also the exchange of ideas. Trade also encouraged specialisation, since it rewarded individuals and communities who focus on areas of comparative advantage（相对优势）. Such specialists, in contrast with their generalist rivals or ancestors, had the time and the incentive to develop better methods and technologies to do their tasks.
【rival---竞争对手。incentive---刺激诱因动机。】
It is this culture of continuous improvement, which was only accelerated by the industrial revolution, that explains the astonishing improvements in the human condition over time. Through most of history, most people lived lives of quiet desperation, humiliating servitude（屈辱的奴役）and grinding poverty（赤贫）. And yet, despite the pessimistic proclamations of Mr Ehrlich and many other pundits, economic growth and technological progress have come to the rescue over and over again（一再地）.
【desperation---绝望。pundit---权威，专家。rescue---营救。】
The visible handAs Mr Simon did in his classic work, “It’s Getting Better all the Time” (2000), Mr Ridley provides ample statistical evidence here to show that life has indeed got better for most people in most places on most measures. Whether one counts air and water pollution in California or
vaccination rates（接种率） in Bangladesh or life expectancy（平均寿命） in Japan, his conclusion is indisputable. It does, however, highlight one of the book’s minor flaws: an over-anxious cramming in of too many obscure statistics and calculations that should have been relegated to footnotes or an annex.
【cramming in---填鸭式的。be relegated to---归属于。】
Another is the author’s slightly unfair attitude towards government. Mr Ridley makes it abundantly clear that he is a free marketeer, and he provides ample evidence from history that governments are often incompetent and anti-innovation: “The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs法老 is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.” He is particularly suspicious of (尤其怀疑)strong governments, which he equates with monopolies—and those, he insists, “always grow complacent, stagnant and self-serving.”
【monopolies---垄断。stagnant---停滞的不发展的。self-serving---自私自立的。】
He is right that the leaden hand of the state has often suppressed individual freedom and creativity. However, he does not fully acknowledge that some problems do, in fact, require government intervention—especially because markets themselves can sometimes fail spectacularly. Mr Ridley surely knows this, as he was forced to resign as non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, the first British bank to be rescued by the government during the financial crisis. Yet the most he will say about that affair is that he is now mistrustful of markets in capital and assets（资本资产，固定资产和专利权等）, but unflinchingly in favour of （为…而战，参加支持…活动）markets in goods and services（商品和劳务，全部动产）.
【leaden---铅制的，沉重的沉闷的。intervention干涉干预。resign辞职放弃。unflinchingly不畏缩地不妥协地。】
Mr Ridley is also generally sceptical about global warming, and worries that government policies advocated by greens today will be like treating a nosebleed by putting a tourniquet around one’s neck. He argues that the problem, if it exists, will be solved by bottom-up颠倒 innovation in energy technologies. But to accomplish that, he wants governments to “enact a heavy carbon tax（碳税）, and cut payroll taxes（工资税）.”
【sceptical不肯相信的，常怀疑的。】
That is a sensible prescription (often advocated by this newspaper), but surely a “heavy” tax suggests there is a role for government in fixing market failures? He glosses too over（掩饰错误，粉饰） the vital role that air-quality regulations played in cleaning up smog in California, choosing to focus instead on the inventions—like the catalytic converter and low-sulphur fuel—that arose as a result of those technology-forcing measures.
【prescription处方。arose引发激起唤起。】
Still, he is on the mark（说到点子上，中肯的，切题的） with the big things. “The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century,” declares Mr Ridley in the closing pages of this sunny book. He is surely right. Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic elites（技术官僚精英） in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour.
If man really can find a way of harnessing the innovative capacity of 9 billion bright sparks, then the audacious prediction about feeding the much hungrier world of 2110 using less land than today may very well be proven right too. After all, man’s greatest asset is his ability to harness that one natural resource that remains infinite in quantity: human ingenuity.
【harness马具；治理利用。infinite无限的无穷的。ingenuity足智多谋。】

梦想在路上UID: 2812986

【COMMENT 4-1】

Women on company boards
La vie en roseFrench companies get serious about putting women in the boardroomMay 6th 2010 | PARIS | From The Economist print edition
MOST French bosses have little time for a new law, now going through parliament, which would compel listed companies（股票上市公司） to lift the proportion of women on their boards to 40% by 2016. Xavier Fontanet, chief executive of Essilor, an eyewear firm, has quoted Charles de Gaulle as saying, “One may not command without having obeyed.” His point is that few women have had the 30 years or so of experience climbing the corporate ladder that a good director requires.
Nonetheless, the government is determined to make France the second country with a compulsory quota for women in the boardroom. (Norway挪威 was the first.) At the start of the year women occupied just 11% of the total of around 580 board seats at France’s biggest 40 firms. Now bosses will have to find as many as 170 new female directors in six years, according to OFG Research. “We are looking for women to fill every seat vacated by a man,” says Diane Segalen, vice-chairman of CTPartners, a headhunting firm in Paris.
In private, chief executives say they will look for female board members of a particular type: those who will look decorative and not rock the boat（破坏现状，捣乱）. One boss asked a headhunter for photographs of candidates and said he would treat looks as his first criterion, ahead of（在…之前） industry experience. A board member of a multinational company（跨国公司） who opposes the 40% quota said that bosses could simply appoint their wives or—more subtly—their girlfriends.
【decorative装饰性的。criterion标准，准则。subtly隐隐约约地。】
Some recent appointments have certainly raised eyebrows. In March Dassault Aviation, a manufacturer of fighter planes and corporate jets（喷气式飞机）, said it would nominate Nicole Dassault, the 79-year-old wife of Serge Dassault, its controlling shareholder, to its board. Mrs Dassault has little hands-on（实际操作的） business experience. LVMH has nominated Bernadette Chirac, the 76-year-old wife of the former French president. Mrs Chirac’s qualifications, explained the company, were that she was female and that as first lady she supported fashion and regularly attended catwalk shows.
【nominate提名…位候选人，任命。shareholder股东。】
Companies with no family controlling shareholder, to be sure（诚然）, will be expected to propose more qualified candidates. But finding them is not always easy. Sanofi-Aventis, a pharmaceuticals firm, was disappointed when Catherine Bréchignac, the head of the national science research agency, withdrew her candidacy. Some firms are tackling the shortage of senior women with direct experience of their industry by looking far outside. Vivendi, a telecoms（电信） and media group, for instance, found Aliza Jabès, the glamorous founder of NUXE, a beauty-products firm, having used her in an ad campaign for its corporate mobile-phone products.
【pharmaceuticals医药品。tackle解决；捉住。】
So far, says Pierre-Yves Gomez of EMLYON Business School, appointments such as Mrs Chirac’s confirm that the first reaction of French chief executives is to find women who will not challenge them. Because companies must find a lot of them in a short time, some women will gather many board seats. One female director, indeed, has had seven offers since January. A perverse effect of the quota, therefore, says Mr Gomez, may be to reduce rather than increase board diversity.
【perverse固执的，错误的。】

梦想在路上UID: 2812986

【COMMENT 4-2】

Student’s Arrest Tests Immigration Policy

【Arrest逮捕，制止，吸引。】

By ROBBIE BROWN

Published: May 14, 2010

ATLANTA — Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant（非法入境者） at the center of a contentious immigration case（诉讼案件）, surrendered to
（使自己陷入）a Georgia sheriff on Friday but continued to deny wrongdoing.

【contentious好争论的。sheriff县的司法长官。】

Ms. Colotl was arrested in March for driving without a license and could face deportation next year. On Wednesday the sheriff filed a felony
charge against
（控告，归咎于）her for providing a false address to the police.

【deportation 移送，充军，放逐。felony重罪。】

The case has become a flash point in the national debate over whether federal immigration laws should be enforced by local and state officials. And like Arizona’s tough new immigration law, it has highlighted a rift between the federal government and local politicians over how illegal immigrants should be detected and prosecuted.

【tough坚强的，严格的，困难的。rift裂缝。prosecute检举，起诉。】

“I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up（弄乱，弄糟） system,” Ms. Colotl said Friday at a news conference after being released on $2,500 bail. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.”

Civil rights groups say Ms. Colotl should be spared deportation because she was brought to the United States without legal documents by her parents at age 11. They also note that she has excelled academically and was discovered to be here illegally only after a routine traffic violation（常规的交通违反行为）.

Supporters of immigration laws and the sheriff’s office in Cobb County say she violated state law, misled the police about her address and should not receive special treatment for her age or education.

Ms. Colotl was pulled over March 29 by a campus officer at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, where she is two semesters from graduation, for “impeding （妨碍，阻止）the flow of traffic.” After she presented the officer an expired Mexican passport instead of a valid driver’s license, she was arrested and taken to a county jail（县监狱）, where she acknowledged being an illegal immigrant.

On May 5, she was transferred to the Etowah Detention Center in Alabama to await（等候，期待）
deportation to Mexico.

But after protests（反对，抗议） by Latino groups, demonstrations（证明，游行示威） at the Georgia Capitol by her sorority sisters and a letter of support from the university’s president, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency granted（准许） a one-year deferral（延期） on her deportation so she could finish college. The “deferred action” means she could still be deported, but will be allowed to apply for an extension next year.

Her ultimate goal, Ms. Colotl said at the news conference, is that proposed legislation called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act （未成年人移民法）— known as the Dream Act — will become law, providing students without legal immigration status a path to become legal.

She and her lawyer declined（谢绝） to discuss the immigration status of her parents.

In Georgia, the case has become intensely political. Ms. Colotl received in-state tuition, substantially reducing her cost of attending Kennesaw State. The university will charge her out-of-state rates in the future, but Republican politicians are calling for new legislation to make attendance more expensive, or impossible, for illegal immigrants.

One Republican candidate for governor, Eric Johnson, has said that if elected he will mandate that all college applicants demonstrate their citizenship. The chancellor of the state university system says that would be prohibitively expensive, costing $1.5 million, for roughly 300,000 students.

Under a program by the Department of Homeland Security, known as 287(g), local sheriffs are permitted to handle federal immigration law enforcement. The Cobb County sheriff’s office was the first in Georgia and one of the first in the United States to apply for the program. Immigration is a hot topic in the largely conservative county, where Hispanics make up 11 percent of the population, census figures show.

Mary Bauer, the legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is assisting in（在…上给予协助） Ms. Colotl’s defense, said Cobb County had a history of using federal laws designed to detect dangerous criminals for arresting illegal immigrants for minor offenses. A review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that from 2007 to 2009, the main crime for which immigration detainees were arrested in the county was traffic offenses.

“This is a civil rights disaster,” said Ms. Bauer, who called the county’s application of the law “mean-spirited（卑鄙的） and very probably illegal.”

“We call on the Obama administration to end 287(g),” she said.

Supporters of strict immigration legislation say Ms. Colotl’s case was handled legally.

The sheriff, Neil Warren, said Ms. Colotl provided a false address to the police, a felony charge. Her lawyers say that she provided the address of the residence where she used to live and to where her car insurance（车辆保险） is registered, and that she also provided her current address.

No exception should be made, however admirable the offender, said Phil Kent, a spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, a national group opposed to illegal immigration.

“Ironically（讽刺的，挖苦的）, she says she wants to go on to law school, but she’s undermining the law,” Mr. Kent said. “What’s the point of educating an illegal immigrant in a system where she can’t hold a job legally or get a driver’s license?”

july07UID: 2756237

Student’s Arrest Tests Immigration Policy
By ROBBIE BROWN
Published: May 14, 2010
ATLANTA — Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old college student and illegal Mexican immigrant at the center of a contentious[容易引起争论的] immigration case, surrendered[投降 屈服] to a Georgia sheriff on Friday but continued to deny wrongdoing[不法行为].
Ms. Colotl was arrested in March for driving without a license and could face deportation next year. On Wednesday the sheriff filed a felony charge against her for providing a false address to the police.
The case has become a flash point in the national debate over whether federal immigration laws should be enforced by local and state officials. And like Arizona’s tough new immigration law, it has highlighted a rift between the federal government and local politicians over how illegal immigrants should be detected and prosecuted[检举 告发].
“I never thought that I’d be caught up in this messed-up system,” Ms. Colotl said Friday at a news conference after being released on $2,500 bail. “I was treated like a criminal, like a threat to the nation.”
Civil rights公民权利 groups say Ms. Colotl should be spared deportation because she was brought to the United States without legal documents法律证件 by her parents at age 11. They also note that she has excelled academically and was discovered to be here illegally only after a routine普通的 traffic violation交通违章.
Supporters of immigration laws and the sheriff’s office in Cobb County say she violated 违反 违背state law, misled[mislead误导] the police about her address and should not receive special treatment for her age or education.
Ms. Colotl was pulled over March 29 by a campus officer at Kennesaw State University in suburban Atlanta, where she is two semesters学期 from graduation, for “impeding the flow of traffic.” After she presented the officer an expired Mexican passport instead of a valid driver’s license, she was arrested and taken to a county jail, where she acknowledged being an illegal immigrant.
On May 5, she was transferred to the Etowah Detention Center in Alabama to await deportation to Mexico.
But after protests抗议 by Latino groups, demonstrations at the Georgia Capitol by her sorority 妇女联谊会sisters and a letter of support from the university’s president, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency granted a one-year deferral延期 on her deportation so she could finish college. The “deferred action” means she could still be deported, but will be allowed to apply for申请 an extension next year.
Her ultimate goal, Ms. Colotl said at the news conference, is that proposed legislation called the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — known as the Dream Act — will become law, providing students without legal immigration status a path to become legal.
She and her lawyer declined to discuss the immigration status of her parents.
In Georgia, the case has become intensely political. Ms. Colotl received in-state tuition, substantially reducing her cost of attending Kennesaw State. The university will charge her out-of-state rates in the future, but Republican politicians are calling for new legislation to make attendance more expensive, or impossible, for illegal immigrants.
One Republican candidate for governor, Eric Johnson, has said that if elected he will mandate that all college applicants demonstrate their citizenship. The chancellor of the state university system says that would be prohibitively expensive, costing $1.5 million, for roughly 300,000 students.
Under a program by the Department of Homeland Security, known as 287(g), local sheriffs are permitted to handle federal immigration law enforcement. The Cobb County sheriff’s office was the first in Georgia and one of the first in the United States to apply for the program. Immigration is a hot topic in the largely conservative county, where Hispanics make up 11 percent of the population, census figures show.
Mary Bauer, the legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is assisting in Ms. Colotl’s defense, said Cobb County had a history of using federal laws designed to detect dangerous criminals for arresting illegal immigrants for minor offenses. A review by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that from 2007 to 2009, the main crime for which immigration detainees were arrested in the county was traffic offenses.
“This is a civil rights disaster,” said Ms. Bauer, who called the county’s application of the law “mean-spirited and very probably illegal.”
“We call on the Obama administration to end 287(g),” she said.
Supporters of strict immigration legislation say Ms. Colotl’s case was handled legally.
The sheriff, Neil Warren, said Ms. Colotl provided a false address to the police, a felony charge. Her lawyers say that she provided the address of the residence where she used to live and to where her car insurance is registered注册, and that she also provided her current address.
No exception should be made, however admirable the offender, said Phil Kent, a spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, a national group opposed to illegal immigration.
“Ironically, she says she wants to go on to law school, but she’s undermining[undermine暗中破坏 逐渐消弱] the law,” Mr. Kent said. “What’s the point of educating an illegal immigrant in a system where she can’t hold a job legally or get a driver’s license?”

azure9UID: 2789030

Rewarding American bosses
Nay on pay
America’s shareholders find a voice to condemn undeserved compensation
May 13th 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition

IT IS too soon to call it a trend, but the fact that America’s normally passive shareholders have voted against executive pay packages at two big companies within a week suggests that something is going on. The 54% of votes cast against the remuneration of Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s chief executive, at the phonemaker’s annual meeting on May 3rd, marked the first time that American shareholders had ever rejected a boss’s pay. Four days later they did it again, voting against the wages of Ray Irani, boss of Occidental Petroleum.

Such expressions of discontent are unprecedented in America, not least because until recently no one bothered to ask shareholders to approve executive pay. Last year was the first time a significant number of American firms gave shareholders a “say on pay”, although the votes are usually not binding, and many of the firms that have adopted them were forced to do so as a condition of a government bail-out. This year around 300 big companies are giving shareholders a vote. If certain proposals in the financial-reform bill now before Congress become law, say on pay will become the norm for American public companies, as it already is in Britain.

In 2003 Jean-Pierre Garnier, the chief executive at the time of GlaxoSmithKline, became the first boss to lose a shareholder vote under the say-on-pay rules adopted in Britain a year earlier. The first two Americans to suffer the indignity of defeat made obvious targets. The $52.2m that Occidental paid Mr Irani for his services in 2009 not only made him the highest-paid boss at America’s 200 biggest firms; it also made him one of the most overpaid, once the performance of his firm’s shares is taken into account. Graef Crystal, a veteran analyst of undeserved executive pay, had singled out Mr Irani’s package for criticism on the grounds that the payment was in cash and that Mr Irani’s performance targets had been lowered.

As for Mr Jha, Motorola’s board seems to have ignored the shot fired across its bow by shareholders last year, when over one-third of them opposed his pay package. The board’s decision to give him a stake of up to 3% in the company he will run if Motorola is split in two, or a guaranteed payment if the planned break-up does not happen by June 2011, seems to have provoked the No vote.

One test of the significance of the two reversals will be how the boards of Motorola and Occidental respond. So far they have only issued boilerplate comments, promising to engage with shareholders “to get a better understanding of any specific concerns they may have” (Motorola) and to use their input to “re-evaluate the company’s compensation philosophy, objectives and policies” (Occidental).

Another test will be how widespread shareholder activism on pay becomes. Saying no to the greediest outliers may have little impact on remuneration at the average firm. “I’d have liked to see more No votes at other companies,” says Nell Minow of the Corporate Library, which conducts research on corporate governance. She had expected pay at firms bailed out by the government to come under close scrutiny from shareholders, but so far that particular dog has failed to bark.

In Britain, No votes have remained a rarity since shareholders snubbed Mr Garnier. Indeed, it was not until last year that another pay package got a majority of No votes—that of Royal Dutch Shell’s senior executives. However, activists argue that the right to vote on pay has led to far more consultation of shareholders by boards seeking to ensure that pay packages will not be controversial.

Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School argues that shareholder rights in general are less strong in America than Britain, “so there may be less pressure on boards to react to signals sent by shareholders.” It is much harder for American shareholders, for example, to force out recalcitrant directors. So much will depend on two other reforms currently under consideration in Congress. The first would require would-be directors to win a majority of votes cast to secure seats on a board. At present at many American firms, directors can be elected despite overwhelming opposition if no other candidates win more votes—something that is quite common because it is hard to get onto the ballot in the first place. For that reason, the second reform would make it easier for shareholders to nominate candidates.

Thus empowered, shareholders should be able to sling off the board members of compensation committees who ignore their advice on pay. In particular, they would be likely to target the chair of the compensation committee—people such as Spencer Abraham, a former energy secretary and senator who holds the position at Occidental, and Samuel Scott, a former boss of Corn Products International, at Motorola—who are arguably more to blame for excessive pay packages than the bosses who receive them.

azure9UID: 2789030

The Education of Diane Ravitch
By ALAN WOLFE
Published: May 6, 2010 by The New York Time

Attending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of literature and a fierce editor of homework, Ratliff, following Tennyson, told Ravitch “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The student evidently followed the teacher’s advice. Ravitch, a historian of American education and assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, has long sought to find out what makes schools work. She has now found what that is, or at least what it isn’t: choice and testing. Her case against both is unyielding.

Ravitch was lucky to have Ratliff as her teacher — and we are lucky to have Ravitch as ours. Education was once considered purely a state and local matter. In the past 30 or so years it has become a national political football, with left and right fighting over various proposals, while nothing ever seems to get fixed. Meanwhile, many schools remain essentially segregated; how much you earn has a great deal to do with where you were educated; and even the best and brightest seem to know less geography and grapple with less history than when Ruby Ratliff discussed “Ozymandias” with her Houston class.
Ravitch’s offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” she throws cold water on both. Along the way she casts a skeptical eye on the results claimed by such often-praised school reformers as New York’s Anthony Alvarado and San Diego’s Alan Bersin, reviews a sheaf of academic studies of school effectiveness and delivers the most damning criticism I have ever read of the role philanthropic institutions sometimes play in our society. “Never before,” she writes of the Gates Foundation, was there an entity “that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence.”

The trouble all started, in her telling, with Milton Friedman, whose 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” advocated the idea that parents should be given vouchers that would enable them to purchase schooling of their choice. In the Reagan administration, Friedman’s essay provided the rationale for efforts to promote what Secretary of Education William Bennett called the three C’s: content, character and choice. Before long, support for school choice became bipartisan when urban public officials, many of them black Democrats, saw in vouchers a way to give minority parents the same options available to middle-class families who could afford houses in desirable school districts.

Testing, as Ravitch shows, also has something of a trans-ideological intellectual history. Though conservatives historically opposed a strong federal role in education, in the 1990s they began looking with dismay at evidence that schools were failing and turned to the idea of national standards as a way to overcome the problem. Liberals, meanwhile, hoped to see more money made available to the schools, and if testing was the price to be paid to identify schools that were failing poor and minority children, so be it. No Child Left Behind, passed in the fall of 2001, seems to belong to another political century: Edward M. Kennedy, a firebrand liberal, and George W. Bush, a compassionate conservative, were equally proud of it.

Choice never fulfilled its promises, Ravitch argues, because its advocates spent more time talking about how education should be delivered than examining what education is. With so little effort devoted to the promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most motivated students without producing consistently better results than traditional public schools. She is skeptical of the charter movement’s free-market model of competition and choice. “At the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as regulation of financial markets got a bad name,” Ravitch points out, “many of the leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation was through deregulation.” Instead of treating markets as a panacea, she argues, we should look at the data, the latest of which shows that charter schools as a whole do not do better than traditional schools.

Given that result, we should be working harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that neighborhood schools offer.

Testing experienced much the same fate as vouchers. Knowing that their students would be tested and that the results would be used to evaluate which schools would be rewarded, educators began teaching to the tests, at the expense of sound curriculum. But educational testing, Ravitch shows, is inexact, roughly the way public opinion polling is. Far from holding schools accountable, testing resulted in massive cynicism. Meanwhile the level of education received by many students remained “disastrously low.” Ravitch points to a 2009 study sponsored by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago showing that the increases in the performance of the city’s eighth graders in math and reading were due mostly to changes in testing procedures, and that in any case such gains evaporated by the time those students reached high school.

Some may ask whether we should trust someone who was once widely viewed as a conservative but now actually says nice things about teachers’ unions. But for all the attention paid to Ravitch’s change of heart, she has always been less an ideologue than a critic of educational fads, whether the more touchy-feely forms of progressive education popular in the 1960s and ’70s or the new nostrums of choice and testing. Ravitch now supports ideas associated with the left not because she is on the left. She does so for the simple reason that choice and testing had their chance and failed to deliver.

Ravitch ends with a call for a voluntary national curriculum, and believes that a consensus around better education is possible. On this point I do not share her optimism: parents who want creation science for their kids are not going to accept the teaching of evolution, and any push to establish common curriculum is likely to raise an outcry similar to that surrounding the 1994 history standards, drawn up by a panel of left-leaning historians and vociferously denounced by Lynne Cheney, the former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other conservatives. (Ravitch writes that she was “disappointed” by the partisan nature of the standards, but “thought they could be fixed by editing.”)

I have always relied on Ravitch’s intellectual honesty when battles become intense. And her voice is especially important now. President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seem determined to promote reforms relying on testing and choice, despite fresh data calling their benefits into question. I wish we could all share Ravitch’s open-mindedness in seeing what the data really tells us. Somehow, I doubt that’s what will carry the day.

talentliuyangUID: 2752741

学习 【COMMENT】5-1

Rewarding American bosses Nay on pay America’s shareholders find a voice to condemn undeserved compensation May 13th 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition IT IS too soon to call it a trend, but the fact that America’s normally passive shareholders have voted against executive pay packages at two big companies within a week suggests that something is going on. The 54% of votes cast against the remuneration （compensation的同义词替换）of Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s chief executive, at the phonemaker’s annual meeting on May 3rd, marked the first time that American shareholders had ever rejected a boss’s pay. Four days later they did it again, voting against the wages of Ray Irani, boss of Occidental Petroleum. Such expressions of discontent are unprecedented （好句型）in America, not least because until recently no one bothered to ask shareholders to approve executive pay. Last year was the first time a significant number of American firms gave shareholders a “say on pay”, although the votes are usually not binding, and many of the firms that have adopted them were forced to do so as a condition of a government bail-out. This year around 300 big companies are giving shareholders a vote. If certain proposals in the financial-reform bill now before Congress become law, say on（说下去，有“那么”的意思，可以模仿使用） pay will become the norm for American public companies, as it already is in Britain. In 2003 Jean-Pierre Garnier, the chief executive at the time of GlaxoSmithKline, became the first boss to lose a shareholder vote under the say-on-pay rules adopted in Britain a year earlier. The first two Americans to suffer the indignity of defeat made obvious targets. The $52.2m that Occidental paid Mr Irani for his services in 2009 not only made him the highest-paid boss at America’s 200 biggest firms; it also made him one of the most overpaid, once the performance of his firm’s shares is taken into account. Graef Crystal, a veteran analyst of undeserved executive pay, had singled out Mr Irani’s package for criticism on the grounds that the payment was in cash and that Mr Irani’s performance targets had been lowered. As for Mr Jha, Motorola’s board seems to have ignored the shot fired across its bow（这是一种形象的比喻，比“耳边风”要紧迫一点，意为警示） by shareholders last year, when over one-third of them opposed his pay package. The board’s decision to give him a stake of up to 3% in the company he will run if Motorola is split in two, or a guaranteed payment if the planned break-up does not happen by June 2011, seems to have provoked the No vote. One test of the significance of the two reversals will be how the boards of Motorola and Occidental respond. So far they have only issued boilerplate comments, promising to engage with shareholders “to get a better understanding of any specific concerns they may have” (Motorola) and to use their input to “re-evaluate the company’s compensation philosophy, objectives and policies（后面三个词排比用）” (Occidental). Another test will be how widespread shareholder activism on pay becomes. Saying no to the greediest outliers may have little impact on remuneration at the average firm. “I’d have liked to see more No votes at other companies,” says Nell Minow of the Corporate Library, which conducts research on corporate governance. She had expected pay at firms bailed out by the government to come under close scrutiny from shareholders, but so far that particular dog has failed to bark. In Britain, No votes have remained a rarity since shareholders snubbed Mr Garnier. Indeed, it was not until last year that another pay package got a majority of No votes—that of Royal Dutch Shell’s senior executives. However, activists argue that the right to vote on pay has led to far more consultation of shareholders by boards seeking to ensure that pay packages will not be controversial. Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School argues that shareholder rights in general are less strong in America than Britain, “so there may be less pressure on boards to react to signals sent by shareholders.” It is much harder for American shareholders, for example, to force out（封杀） recalcitrant directors. So much will depend on two other reforms currently under consideration in Congress. The first would require would-be directors to win a majority of votes cast to secure seats on a board. At present at many American firms, directors can be elected despite overwhelming opposition if no other candidates win more votes—something that is quite common because it is hard to get onto the ballot in the first place. For that reason, the second reform would make it easier for shareholders to nominate candidates. Thus empowered, shareholders should be able to sling off the board members of compensation committees who ignore their advice on pay. In particular, they would be likely to target the chair of the compensation committee—people such as Spencer Abraham, a former energy secretary and senator who holds the position at Occidental, and Samuel Scott, a former boss of Corn Products International, at Motorola—who are arguably more to blame for excessive pay packages than the bosses who receive them.

azure9UID: 2789030

Rewarding American bosses
Nay on pay
America’s shareholders find a voice to condemn undeserved compensation
May 13th 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition

IT IS too soon to call it a trend, but the fact that America’s normally passive shareholders have voted against executive pay packages(?) at two big companies within a week suggests that something is going on. The 54% of votes cast against the remuneration(報酬) of Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s chief executive, at the phonemaker’s annual meeting on May 3rd, marked the first time that American shareholders had ever rejected a boss’s pay. Four days later they did it again, voting against the wages of Ray Irani, boss of Occidental Petroleum.

Such expressions of discontent are unprecedented(空前的，前所未有的) in America, not least because until recently no one bothered to ask shareholders to approve executive pay. Last year was the first time a significant number of American firms gave shareholders a “say on pay”, although the votes are usually not binding, and many of the firms that have adopted them were forced to do so as a condition of a government bail-out. This year around 300 big companies are giving shareholders a vote. If certain proposals in the financial-reform bill now before Congress become law, say on pay will become the norm for American public companies, as it already is in Britain.

norm:  a standard or model or pattern regarded as typical
          a statistic describing the location of a distribution( 指標)

In 2003 Jean-Pierre Garnier, the chief executive at the time of GlaxoSmithKline, became the first boss to lose a shareholder vote under the say-on-pay rules adopted in Britain a year earlier. The first two Americans to suffer the indignity of defeat made obvious targets. The $52.2m that Occidental paid Mr Irani for his services in 2009 not only made him the highest-paid boss at America’s 200 biggest firms; it also made him one of the most overpaid, once the performance of his firm’s shares is taken into account. Graef Crystal, a veteran(老手) analyst of undeserved executive pay, had singled out Mr Irani’s package for criticism on the grounds that the payment was in cash and that Mr Irani’s performance targets had been lowered.(?)

indignity: an affront to one's dignity or self-esteem

As for Mr Jha, Motorola’s board seems to have ignored the shot fired across its bow by shareholders last year, when over one-third of them opposed his pay package. The board’s decision to give him a stake of up to 3% in the company he will run if Motorola is split in two, or a guaranteed payment if the planned break-up does not happen by June 2011, seems to have provoked the No vote.

One test of the significance of the two reversals will be how the boards of Motorola and Occidental respond. So far they have only issued boilerplate comments, promising to engage with shareholders “to get a better understanding of any specific concerns they may have” (Motorola) and to use their input to “re-evaluate the company’s compensation philosophy, objectives and policies” (Occidental).

boilerplate: standard formulations uniformly found in certain types of legal documents or news stories

Another test will be how widespread shareholder activism on pay becomes. Saying no to the greediest outliers may have little impact on remuneration at the average firm. “I’d have liked to see more No votes at other companies,” says Nell Minow of the Corporate Library, which conducts research on corporate governance. She had expected pay at firms bailed out by the government to come under close scrutiny from shareholders, but so far that particular dog has failed to bark.

scrutiny:the act of examining something closely (as for mistakes)

In Britain, No votes have remained a rarity since shareholders snubbed Mr Garnier. Indeed, it was not until last year that another pay package got a majority of No votes—that of Royal Dutch Shell’s senior executives. However, activists argue that the right to vote on pay has led to far more consultation of shareholders by boards seeking to ensure that pay packages will not be controversial.

rarity:noteworthy scarcity
snub:refuse to acknowledge
consultation:a conference between two or more people to consider a particular question

Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School argues that shareholder rights in general are less strong in America than Britain, “so there may be less pressure on boards to react to signals sent by shareholders.” It is much harder for American shareholders, for example, to force out(?) recalcitrant directors. So much will depend on two other reforms currently under consideration in Congress. The first would require would-be directors to win a majority of votes cast to secure seats on a board. At present at many American firms, directors can be elected despite overwhelming opposition if no other candidates win more votes—something that is quite common because it is hard to get onto the ballot in the first place. For that reason, the second reform would make it easier for shareholders to nominate candidates.

recalcitrant: marked by stubborn resistance to and defiant of authority or guidance
get on to: to begin to ralk about a new new subject

Thus empowered, shareholders should be able to sling off the board members of compensation committees who ignore their advice on pay. In particular, they would be likely to target the chair of the compensation committee—people such as Spencer Abraham, a former energy secretary and senator who holds the position at Occidental, and Samuel Scott, a former boss of Corn Products International, at Motorola—who are arguably more to blame for excessive pay packages than the bosses who receive them.

empower: give or delegate power to
               give qualities or abilities to
sling: to throw sth somewhere in a careless way

talentliuyangUID: 2752741

学习【COMMENT】5-2

The Education of Diane Ravitch By ALAN WOLFE Published: May 6, 2010 by The New York Time Attending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of literature and a fierce editor of homework, Ratliff, following Tennyson, told Ravitch “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The student evidently followed the teacher’s advice. Ravitch, a historian of American education and assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, has long sought to find out what makes schools work. She has now found what that is, or at least what it isn’t: choice and testing. Her case against both is unyielding. Ravitch was lucky to have Ratliff as her teacher — and we are lucky to have Ravitch as ours. Education was once considered purely a state and local matter. In the past 30 or so years it has become a national political football, with left and right fighting over various proposals, while nothing ever seems to get fixed. Meanwhile, many schools remain essentially segregated; how much you earn has a great deal to do with where you were educated; and even the best and brightest seem to know less geography and grapple with less history than when Ruby Ratliff discussed “Ozymandias” with her Houston class. （这一段是讲美国在过去的30年中存在的教育问题，可以引用） Ravitch’s offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” she throws cold water on both. Along the way she casts a skeptical eye on（形象的表达方式） the results claimed by such often-praised school reformers as New York’s Anthony Alvarado and San Diego’s Alan Bersin, reviews a sheaf of academic studies of school effectiveness and delivers the most damning criticism I have ever read of the role philanthropic institutions sometimes play in our society. “Never before,” she writes of the Gates Foundation, was there an entity “that gave grants to almost every major think tank（智囊团） and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence.” The trouble all started, in her telling, with Milton Friedman, whose 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” advocated the idea that parents should be given vouchers that would enable them to purchase schooling of their choice. In the Reagan administration, Friedman’s essay provided the rationale for efforts to promote what Secretary of Education William Bennett called the three C’s: content, character and choice. Before long, support for school choice became bipartisan when urban public officials, many of them black Democrats, saw in vouchers a way to give minority parents the same options available to middle-class families who could afford houses in desirable school districts. （这一段都在讲过去的美国教育资源的不平等） Testing, as Ravitch shows, also has something of a trans-ideological intellectual history. Though conservatives historically opposed a strong federal role in education, in the 1990s they began looking with dismay at evidence that schools were failing and turned to the idea of national standards as a way to overcome the problem. Liberals, meanwhile, hoped to see more money made available to the schools, and if testing was the price to be paid to identify schools that were failing poor and minority children, so be it. No Child Left Behind, passed in the fall of 2001, seems to belong to another political century: Edward M. Kennedy, a firebrand liberal, and George W. Bush, a compassionate conservative, were equally proud of it. （美国政府在改进） Choice never fulfilled its promises, Ravitch argues, because its advocates spent more time talking about how education should be delivered than examining what education is. With so little effort devoted to the promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most motivated students without producing consistently better results than traditional public schools. She is skeptical of the charter movement’s free-market model of competition and choice. “At the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as regulation of financial markets got a bad name,” Ravitch points out, “many of the leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation was through deregulation.” Instead of treating markets as a panacea, she argues, we should look at the data, the latest of which shows that charter schools as a whole do not do better than traditional schools. （现今教育存留的问题，和教育者们的无奈） Given that result, we should be working harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that neighborhood schools offer. Testing experienced much the same fate as vouchers. Knowing that their students would be tested and that the results would be used to evaluate which schools would be rewarded, educators began teaching to the tests, at the expense of sound curriculum. But educational testing, Ravitch shows, is inexact, roughly the way public opinion polling is. Far from holding schools accountable, testing resulted in massive cynicism. Meanwhile the level of education received by many students remained “disastrously low.” Ravitch points to a 2009 study sponsored by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago showing that the increases in the performance of the city’s eighth graders in math and reading were due mostly to changes in testing procedures, and that in any case such gains evaporated by the time those students reached high school. Some may ask whether we should trust someone who was once widely viewed as a conservative but now actually says nice things about teachers’ unions. But for all the attention paid to Ravitch’s change of heart, she has always been less an ideologue than a critic of educational fads, whether the more touchy-feely forms of progressive education popular in the 1960s and ’70s or the new nostrums of choice and testing. Ravitch now supports ideas associated with the left not because she is on the left. She does so for the simple reason that choice and testing had their chance and failed to deliver. Ravitch ends with a call for a voluntary national curriculum, and believes that a consensus around better education is possible. On this point I do not share her optimism: parents who want creation science for their kids are not going to accept the teaching of evolution, and any push to establish common curriculum is likely to raise an outcry similar to that surrounding the 1994 history standards, drawn up by a panel of left-leaning historians and vociferously denounced by Lynne Cheney, the former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other conservatives. (Ravitch writes that she was “disappointed” by the partisan nature of the standards, but “thought they could be fixed by editing.”) I have always relied on Ravitch’s intellectual honesty when battles become intense. And her voice is especially important now. President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seem determined to promote reforms relying on testing and choice, despite fresh data calling their benefits into question. I wish we could all share Ravitch’s open-mindedness in seeing what the data really tells us. Somehow, I doubt that’s what will carry the day. 这篇文章很不错，值得回味，值得后续关注的

azure9UID: 2789030

The Education of Diane Ravitch
By ALAN WOLFE
Published: May 6, 2010 by The New York Time

Attending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of(I am a passionate lover of advertising!) literature and a fierce editor of homework, Ratliff, following Tennyson, told Ravitch “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The student evidently followed the teacher’s advice. Ravitch, a historian of American education and assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, has long sought to find out what makes schools work. She has now found what that is, or at least what it isn’t: choice and testing. Her case against both is unyielding.

Ravitch was lucky to have Ratliff as her teacher — and we are lucky to have Ravitch as ours. Education was once considered purely a state and local matter. In the past 30 or so years it has become a national political football, with left and right fighting over various proposals, while nothing ever seems to get fixed.(可以直接就拿來用的句子) Meanwhile, many schools remain essentially segregated; how much you earn has a great deal to do with where you were educated; and even the best and brightest seem to know less geography and grapple with less history than when Ruby Ratliff discussed “Ozymandias” with her Houston class.

segregated: separate by race or religion
grapple: come to terms or deal successfully with

Ravitch’s offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” she throws cold water on both. Along the way she casts a skeptical eye on the results claimed by such often-praised school reformers as New York’s Anthony Alvarado and San Diego’s Alan Bersin, reviews a sheaf of academic studies of school effectiveness and delivers the most damning criticism I have ever read of the role philanthropic institutions sometimes play in our society. “Never before,” she writes of the Gates Foundation, was there an entity “that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence.”

philanthropic: generous in assistance to the poor
advocacy: active support; especially the act of pleading or arguing for something

The trouble all started, in her telling, with Milton Friedman, whose 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” advocated the idea that parents should be given vouchers that would enable them to purchase schooling of their choice. In the Reagan administration, Friedman’s essay provided the rationale for efforts to promote what Secretary of Education William Bennett called the three C’s: content, character and choice. Before long, support for school choice became bipartisan(兩黨聯立的) when urban public officials, many of them black Democrats, saw in vouchers a way to give minority parents the same options available to middle-class families who could afford houses in desirable school districts.

Testing, as Ravitch shows, also has something of a trans-ideological intellectual history. Though conservatives historically opposed a strong federal role in education, in the 1990s they began looking with dismay at evidence that schools were failing and turned to the idea of national standards as a way to overcome the problem. Liberals, meanwhile, hoped to see more money made available to the schools, and if testing was the price to be paid to identify schools that were failing poor and minority children, so be it. No Child Left Behind, passed in the fall of 2001, seems to belong to another political century: Edward M. Kennedy, a firebrand liberal, and George W. Bush, a compassionate conservative, were equally proud of it.

Choice never fulfilled its promises, Ravitch argues, because its advocates spent more time talking about how education should be delivered than examining what education is. With so little effort devoted to the promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most motivated students without producing consistently better results than traditional public schools. She is skeptical of the charter movement’s free-market model of competition and choice. “At the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as regulation of financial markets got a bad name,” Ravitch points out, “many of the leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation(返老還童) was through deregulation.” Instead of treating markets as a panacea, she argues, we should look at the data, the latest of which shows that charter schools as a whole do not do better than traditional schools. Given that result, we should be working harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that neighborhood schools offer.

deregulation: the act of freeing from regulation (especially from governmental regulations).
panances: A remedy for all diseases, evils, or difficulties; a cure-all.

Testing experienced much the same fate as vouchers. Knowing that their students would be tested and that the results would be used to evaluate which schools would be rewarded, educators began teaching to the tests, at the expense of sound curriculum. But educational testing, Ravitch shows, is inexact, roughly the way public opinion polling is. Far from holding schools accountable, testing resulted in massive cynicism(犬儒主義). Meanwhile the level of education received by many students remained “disastrously low.” Ravitch points to a 2009 study sponsored by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago showing that the increases in the performance of the city’s eighth graders in math and reading were due mostly to changes in testing procedures, and that in any case such gains evaporated by the time those students reached high school.

evaporated:lose or cause to lose liquid by vaporization leaving a more concentrated residue

Some may ask whether we should trust someone who was once widely viewed as a conservative but now actually says nice things about teachers’ unions. But for all the attention paid to Ravitch’s change of heart, she has always been less an ideologue than a critic of educational fads, whether the more touchy-feely forms of progressive education popular in the 1960s and ’70s or the new nostrums(万灵药，和上面的panances一样) of choice and testing. Ravitch now supports ideas associated with the left not because she is on the left. She does so for the simple reason that choice and testing had their chance and failed to deliver.

Ravitch ends with a call for a voluntary national curriculum, and believes that a consensus around better education is possible. On this point I do not share her optimism: parents who want creation science for their kids are not going to accept the teaching of evolution, and any push to establish common curriculum is likely to raise an outcry similar to that surrounding the 1994 history standards, drawn up by a panel of left-leaning historians and vociferously denounced by Lynne Cheney, the former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other conservatives. (Ravitch writes that she was “disappointed” by the partisan nature of the standards, but “thought they could be fixed by editing.”)

I have always relied on Ravitch’s intellectual honesty when battles become intense. And her voice is especially important now. President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seem determined to promote reforms relying on testing and choice, despite fresh data calling their benefits into question. I wish we could all share Ravitch’s open-mindedness in seeing what the data really tells us. Somehow, I doubt that’s what will carry the day.

azure9UID: 2789030

56# talentliuyang

這沒有後續了... 這篇是篇書評，要了解得多只能買書了

talentliuyangUID: 2752741

56# talentliuyang  

這沒有後續了... 這篇是篇書評，要了解得多只能買書了
azure9 发表于 2010-5-17 09:56

我的意思是后续关注一下美国教育改革的新闻。。

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】5-1【学习】

Rewarding American bosses Nay on pay（Ney (also nay, nye, nai), a wind instrument） America’s shareholders find a voice to condemn undeserved compensation（谴责不应有的赔偿） May 13th 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition IT IS too soon to call it a trend, but the fact that America’s normally passive shareholders have voted against executive pay packages（薪酬福利） at two big companies within a week suggests that something is going on. The 54% of votes cast against the remuneration（薪水） of Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s chief executive, at the phonemaker’s annual meeting on May 3rd, marked the first time that American shareholders had ever rejected a boss’s pay. Four days later they did it again, voting against the wages of Ray Irani, boss of Occidental Petroleum. Such expressions of discontent are unprecedented in America, not least because until recently no one bothered to ask shareholders to approve executive pay. Last year was the first time a significant number of American firms gave shareholders a “say on pay”, although the votes are usually not binding, and many of the firms that have adopted them were forced to do so as a condition of a government bail-out（以优先权给股东分红）. This year around 300 big companies are giving shareholders a vote. If certain proposals in the financial-reform bill now before Congress become law, say on pay will become the norm for American public companies, as it already is in Britain. In 2003 Jean-Pierre Garnier, the chief executive at the time of GlaxoSmithKline, became the first boss to lose a shareholder vote under the say-on-pay rules adopted in Britain a year earlier. The first two Americans to suffer the indignity of defeat made obvious targets. The $52.2m that Occidental paid Mr Irani for his services in 2009 not only made him the highest-paid boss at America’s 200 biggest firms; it also made him one of the most overpaid, once the performance of his firm’s shares is taken into account. Graef Crystal, a veteran analyst of undeserved executive pay, had singled out Mr Irani’s package for criticism on the grounds that the payment was in cash and that Mr Irani’s performance targets had been lowered. As for Mr Jha, Motorola’s board seems to have ignored the shot fired across its bow（？鞠躬之后的怒火？） by shareholders last year, when over one-third of them opposed his pay package. The board’s decision to give him a stake（股份） of up to 3% in the company he will run if Motorola is split in two, or a guaranteed payment if the planned break-up does not happen by June 2011, seems to have provoked the No vote. One test of the significance of the two reversals will be how the boards of Motorola and Occidental respond. So far they have only issued boilerplate（样板文件） comments, promising to engage with shareholders “to get a better understanding of any specific concerns they may have” (Motorola) and to use their input to “re-evaluate the company’s compensation philosophy, objectives and policies” (Occidental). Another test will be how widespread shareholder activism on pay becomes. Saying no to the greediest outliers（贪婪的门外汉） may have little impact on remuneration at the average firm. “I’d have liked to see more No votes at other companies,” says Nell Minow of the Corporate Library, which conducts research on corporate governance. She had expected pay at firms bailed out by the government to come under close scrutiny（彻底的审查） from shareholders, but so far that particular dog has failed to bark（？形象的比喻？没有对股东彻底的审查吧?）. In Britain, No votes have remained a rarity since shareholders snubbed（冷落） Mr Garnier. Indeed, it was not until last year that another pay package got a majority of No votes—that of Royal Dutch Shell’s senior executives. However, activists argue that the right to vote on pay has led to far more consultation of shareholders by boards seeking to ensure that pay packages will not be controversial. led to far more consultation of……seeking to Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School argues that shareholder rights in general are less strong in America than Britain, “so there may be less pressure on boards to react to signals sent by shareholders.” It is much harder for American shareholders, for example, to force out recalcitrant directors. So much will depend on two other reforms currently under consideration in Congress. The first would require would-be directors to win a majority of votes cast to secure seats on a board. At present at many American firms, directors can be elected despite overwhelming opposition if no other candidates win more votes—something that is quite common because it is hard to get onto the ballot in the first place. For that reason, the second reform would make it easier for shareholders to nominate candidates. Thus empowered, shareholders should be able to sling off the board members of compensation committees who ignore their advice on pay. In particular, they would be likely to target the chair of the compensation committee—people such as Spencer Abraham, a former energy secretary and senator who holds the position at Occidental, and Samuel Scott, a former boss of Corn Products International, at Motorola—who are arguably more to blame for excessive pay packages than the bosses who receive them.