This book contains evidence about charter schools that can provide important data on evaluating this new public-private hybrid and its success at serving the core purpose of public education. The book focuses on charter schools in Michigan, which is regarded as having one of the most permissive charter laws in the country. The first three chapters provide a theoretical framework for, and the descriptive context of, the charter-school reform in Michigan. Chapter 4 analyzes charter-school finance in Michigan. The remainder of the book seeks to evaluate the "public-ness" of Michigan charter schools according to the definitions introduced in the first chapter. The last chapter summarizes evidence and provides an answer to the question, "What's public about charter schools?" These schools appear to be doing a reasonably good job of creating communities of teachers with commonly held educational viewpoints, but may be doing so at the expense of equitable access to the schools and student-achievement gains. Three appendices contain key historical developments in Michigan that affected public and private schooling, background and documentation for analysis of student achievement, and a list of education-management organizations and schools they operated in 2000-01. (Contains 157 references.) (RT)
I Am One of the Ghosts An estranged man, inextricably linked to a wounded Midwestern town, must decide to either embrace his past in a single night of fireworks, or walk away once and for all. Once the linchpin of a small band of misfits-a free spirit torn by his family's opulence, a pair of lost souls drawn together by secrets of their own, and a girl yearning for freedom-he is the only one who remains after a string of tragedies peels away the intricate layers of their friendship. In a disjointed rush of memories, he recalls the chance events that brought them together, then violently tore them apart. He sifts through the debris-both mental and physical-in his steadily deteriorating lakeside town, only to find that the past is as inescapable as his ties to the land that formed him. Stripped to the barest elements of his former existence, he faces a decision that will forever change him and the only life he has ever known. A psychologically complex tale of love, guilt, and redemption, The Captive Generation is a multilayered, sometimes hallucinatory meditation on finding permanence in an evanescent world. It's a rich, brilliantly crafted novel that will leave you examining your own conflicts, regrets, and triumphs.
Gary Webb had an inborn journalistic tendency to track down corruption and expose it. For over thirty-four years, he wrote stories about corruption from county, state, and federal levels. He had an almost magnetic effect to these kinds of stories, and it was almost as if the stories found him. It was his gift, and, ultimately, it was his downfall. He was best known for his story Dark Alliance, written for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. In it Webb linked the CIA to the crack-cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles during the Iran Contra scandal. His only published book, Dark Alliance is still a classic of contemporary journalism. But his life consisted of much more than this one story, and The Killing Game is a collection of his best investigative stories from his beginning at the Kentucky Post to his end at the Sacramento News & Review. It includes Webb's series at the Kentucky Post on organized crime in the coal industry, at the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Ohio State’s negligent medical board, and on the US military’s funding of first-person shooter video games. The Killing Game is a dedication to his life’s work outside of Dark Alliance, and it’s an exhibition of investigative journalism in its truest form.
Why do baseball fans stretch in the seventh inning? Why do hockey players wear shorts? These are the questions that try sports fans souls, sending the most ardent athletic aficionados into a tailspin. Luckily, sports lore is the domain of Answer Guy, whose column in ESPN The Magazine is the first place those fans turn to for answers.Now Answer Guys hilarious, highly anecdotal and mostly correct answers are compiled for the first time in this easy-to-tote volume that includes 65 of the best published and never-before-seen columns along with new material such as: testimony from famous and not-so-famous Answer Guy sources; an Answer Guy quiz; A Brief History of Inquiry; and questions Answer Guy thought of asking but didnt.
On a freezing night in January 1993, masked gunmen walked through the laughably lax security at the Rochester Brink's depot, tied up the guards, and unhurriedly made off with $7.4 million in one of the FBI's top-five armored car heists in history. Suspicion quickly fell on a retired Rochester cop working security for Brinks at the time-as well it might. Officer Tom O'Connor had been previously suspected of everything from robbery to murder to complicity with the IRA. One ex-IRA soldier in particular was indebted to O'Connor for smuggling him and his girlfriend into the United States, and when he was caught in New York City with $2 million in cash from the Brink's heist, prosecutors were certain they finally had enough to nail O'Connor. But they were wrong. In Seven Million, the reporter Gary Craig meticulously unwinds the long skein of leads, half-truths, false starts, and dead ends, taking us from the grim solitary pens of Northern Ireland's Long Kesh prison to the illegal poker rooms of Manhattan to the cold lakeshore on the Canadian border where the body parts began washing up. The story is populated by a colorful cast of characters, including cops and FBI agents, prison snitches, a radical priest of the Melkite order who ran a home for troubled teenagers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the IRA rebel who'd spent long years jailed in one of Northern Ireland's most brutal prisons and who was living underground in New York posing as a comics dealer. Finally, Craig investigates the strange, sad fate of Ronnie Gibbons, a down-and-out boxer and muscle-for-hire in illegal New York City card rooms, who was in on the early planning of the heist, and who disappeared one day in 1995 after an ill-advised trip to Rochester to see some men about getting what he felt he was owed. Instead, he got was what was coming to him. Seven Million is a meticulous re-creation of a complicated heist executed by a variegated and unsavory crew, and of its many repercussions. Some of the suspects are now dead, some went to jail; none of them are talking about the robbery or what really happened to Ronnie Gibbons. And the money? Only a fraction was recovered, meaning that most of the $7 million is still out there somewhere.
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