making teachers more accountable for their work, such evaluations strengthened parents' confidence in the schools.
Cash incentives, the authors conclude, are not necessarily the key to better teaching. But making teacher evaluations common practice willben-efit the nation's educators-and, in turn, its students.
"What Antipoverty Policies Cost the Nonpoor" Robert H. Havernan, in Challenge (Jan.-Feb. 1986), 80 Business Park Dr., Arrnonk, N.Y. 10504.
The debate over Lyndon Johnson's Great...
sheep and English traditions. Then Prime Minister Da- vid Lange hit the headlines. He told Washington to keep the
U.S. Navy's nuclear-armed ships out of his country's ports. Sur- prised, the Reagan administration said that New Zealand's sud- den self-assertiveness threatened the 35-year-old ANZUS alli- ance. Nevertheless, New Zealand's parliament will soon vote on a bill formalizing Mr. Lange's anti-nuclear ban. Our contributors examine New Zealand's changing society and its new dilemmas as a South...
at all, they probably thought of it as an old ally, a faraway vacationland something like California, a pair of picturesque islands domi- nated by sheep and English traditions. Then Prime Minister Da- vid Lange hit the headlines. He told Washington to keep the
U.S. Navy's nuclear-armed ships out of his country's ports. Sur- prised, the Reagan administration said that New Zealand's sud- den self-assertiveness threatened the 35-year-old ANZUS alli- ance. Nevertheless, New Zealand's parliament will...
's North Island. Even today, facing the quiet waters of mile-wide Waitemata Harbour and flanked by a phalanx of 60 volcanoes, Auckland retains a certain South Pacific flavor.
In the shadows cast by Air New Zealand's glass and con- crete office tower, Polynesian greengrocers sell taro, yams, and coconuts to Maori housewives along Karangahape Road. Amid the hibiscus, frangipani, and banana trees in Albert Park, brief- case-toting bankers dressed in shorts, knee-socks, shirts, and ties discuss the...
many pilgrims," Guthrie-Smith testifies to New Zea- hinders' passionate, but ambivalent, love of their land.
Unlike Guthrie-Snlith, who cher- ished the countryside as it was, many British colonists were bent on domes- ticating both the wild bush and the na- tive Maori. In archivist Ray Grover's
Cork of War: An Historical Narra- tive (John Mclncioe, 1982), a fictional Scottish settler, moving through real history, watches as English and Austra- lian speculators in 1839 buy one-acre plots of...
in America's intellectuals and artists have long been known for their leftist, even Marxist, sympathies. Few today emulate the late Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who remained loyal to Moscow even after the horrors of the Stalin era. But Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Mhrquez, Argentina's Julio Cortazar, and others have ritu- ally clenounced Washington's imperzalismo while singing the praises of Fidel Castro. Mexico's Octavio Paz is one of the ex- ceptions. The widely read poet-essayist and former diplomat...
"Reading maketh a full man," Francis Bacon declared in 1597, "and writing an exact man." His aphorism, penned a century and a half after Gutenberg's creation of the printing press, expressed the West's revived faith in the awesome power of literacy—to elevate the human mind, to uplift the citizenry, to spur progress.
ot;Reading maketh a full man," Francis Bacon declared in 1597, "and writing an exact man." His aphorism, penned a century and a half after Gutenberg's creation of the printing press, ex- pressed the West's revived faith in the awesome power of liter- acy-to elevate the human mind, to uplift the citizenry, to spur progress. Today, many Americans, awash in memos and junk mail, take the written word for granted. Yet perhaps 27 million of their countrymen are "functionally illiterate."...
How is the West's attitude toward "reading" beginning to change?
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"Learn them to read the Scriutures, and be conversant therein," the Reverend John Cotton urged his Boston parishio- ners in a 1656 homily on child rearing. "Reading brings much benefit to little Children."
"Benefit" was an understatement. In the harsh moral uni- verse of Cotton's New England Puritans, ignorance was no ex- cuse for sin: A child who died young (as many did) could ex- pect no mercy in the hereafter merely because he had not been able to read the Bible....