Political Conflict

There is a massive experiment being performed on thousands of primarily African American children in New Orleans. No one asked the permission of the children. No one asked permission of their parents. This experiment involves a fight for the education of children. The other half of public school students, over ten thousand children, have been assigned to a one year old experiment in public education run by the State of Louisiana called the “Recovery School District” (RSD) program. The education these children receive will be compared to the education received by the first half in the charter schools. These children are effectively what is called the “control group” of an experiment – those against whom the others will be evaluated. The RSD schools have not been given millions of extra federal dollars to operate. The new RSD has inexperienced leadership. Many critical vacancies exist in their already insufficient district-wide staff. Many of the teachers are uncertified. In fact, the RSD schools do not yet have enough teachers, even counting the uncertified, to start school in the fall of 2007. Some of the RSD school buildings scheduled to be used for the fall of 2007 have not yet been built.

Sudan's main oilfields are in the south and disputes over oil prolonged negotiations to end 20 years of civil war there. In contrast, the presence of oil in Darfur comes as a surprise to many in the humanitarian community. The big question now is whether oil will give a motive for warring parties to speed up moves towards peace or make the conflict even harder to solve. "The issue of oil in Darfur isn't very different from the issue of oil anywhere else," said Mike Aaronson, director general of British NGO Save the Children. "It's potentially a tremendous blessing, and potentially a tremendous handicap.