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Four decades after visionary developer James W. Rouse set out to build the perfect community on what was then Howard County farmland, Columbia [Maryland]'s 96,000 residents are embroiled in a debate about the future of living in the suburbs. At issue: How does the planned community complete Rouse's vision for a vibrant city center before the remaining land is developed? Howard Research and Development Corp. … wants to construct 1,600 housing units in Columbia's Town Center neighborhood. But some community activists are arguing that the land should be used for office buildings and retail shops—the downtown that was part of the concept they bought into decades ago. … Urban planners, who vow to watch the debate closely, say the controversy signals the growing evidence that many people are becoming weary of such trappings of traditional suburban life as traffic, sprawl and enclosed malls, [and] are yearning for a more urbanized look that would make cars and big–box retail stores less needed. Full story
DIGEST• The education reforms of the No Child Left Behind Act are ambitious and well-intentioned, requiring schools to demonstrate improvement and produce students with a certain level of proficiency. There's just one problem, says Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. How do you define improvement and proficiency? Smaller schools, he points out, tend to show the most improvement or decline, regardless of their quality. "A lot of the ups and downs in a school's test scores are due to chance factors, such as the presence of a few really good or really poor students in a class, or the fact that on test day a few students may guess right on a couple of hard questions—and the smaller the school, the larger the role played by chance," Gladwell says. And when it comes to proficiency, luck gives way to chaos. Some schools measure proficiency according to the scores of the most successful students; others rank test questions—or weigh them individually—according to difficulty. So the percentage of proficient students in Kentucky is either 61, 22.7, or 10.5. Gladwell doesn't explain whether the No Child legislation fails to specify a method or chooses one that will require some states to change, but he makes an essential point: "Learning cannot be measured as neatly and easily as the devotees of educational productivity would like. If schools were factories, America would have solved the education problem a century ago." Full story
• The Patriot Act is one of those things that everyone seems to have an opinion about despite next to no knowledge of what it actually says. Enter Slate's four-part Guide to The Patriot Act. Nearly two years after the legislation breezed through Congress in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and with John Ashcroft's recent campaign-like tour of the country to rally support, Slate says The Patriot Act is "suddenly being revisited, and this time around some of the folks holding opinions have actually read the thing." Slate starts off diplomatic enough: "The truth of the matter seems to be that while some portions of the Patriot Act are truly radical, others are benign." But then it breaks down some of the scariest sections of the legislation, including the green light the law gives the government to walk into libraries and see what someone has checked out. This gives the FBI "power to conduct essentially warrantless records searches, especially on people who are not themselves terror suspects, with little or no judicial oversight," says Slate. "The government sees this as an incremental change in the law, but the lack of meaningful judicial oversight and expanded scope of possible suspects is pretty dramatic." One of the most useful steps forward, Slate says, would be for the government to get more specific about how this and other sections will be implemented. The series is a mostly fair and helpful step beyond the battle of hyperbole between advocates of homeland security and defenders of civil liberties. Full story
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