Herbert Hoover lives! “In the short run, the Republicans hope to win in 2004 by running as tax cutters against tax-and-spend Democrats,” writes David Moberg in In These Times (June 16). “In the long run, Republicans plan to starve and thus drastically shrink federal government, especially spending on social programs. As budgetary crises resulting from the tax cut unfold, the only solutions will be devastating cuts in programs– including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And if the economy suffers, as is likely, the prescription will be more tax cuts.”
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Free wheelin’. In the 2002 report “Mayor Daley’s Bicycling Ambassadors,” Yvonne Jennings, one of those ambassadors, notes, “As a writer, all of my best ideas have come to me while on a bicycle.”
Is Chicago’s school reform a media hoax? That’s what George Schmidt argues in Substance (June): “The 2003 [testing] data suffer from the same problems that have plagued Chicago’s accountability system since 1996, when former schools CEO Paul Vallas first established the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills as Chicago’s accountability test. The ITBS was never meant to be used for such activities. Prior to the lucrative explosion of standardized testing in the late 1990s, the developers and publishers of the ITBS even warned purchasers of the test that the tests were not to be used to evaluate individual students, the success of schools, or any particular curriculum.”
