But the will to reform is frustrated by the dead hand of the past.
Anything that weakens the dead hand of the teachers' unions is worth serious consideration.
But part of the problem is homegrown: The dead hand of government holds the economy in its grip.
Over-and-done-with firms need to be pushed out of business before their dead hand can be pried from the stick.
True, Carinthia suffers acutely from the dead hand of a bloated state sector and the pork-barrel politics it engenders.
He promised to lift the dead hand of the state from Italian enterprise and slash the surly bonds of taxation.
Capital emerged from the dead hand of tax shelters and precious metals and began flowing to talented entrepreneurs in high technology.
But the dead hand of Russian history must give optimists real pause.
He is prepared to meet these head-on as the price for removing what he sees as the dead hand of monopoly supply.
But the dead hand of Russian history surely must give optimists pause.
For much of the 20th century, the invisible hand of the market gave way, he writes, to the dead hand of the state.
If they win, they promise to remove the decision on who gets to open new schools from the dead hand of local government.
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Positive change is extremely hard to achieve, particularly in post-Communist countries which were severely disfigured and brutalized by the dead hand of Communism for several decades.
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It rose from collaboration among Koetsu, the painter Sotatsu, a suitably skilled papermaker, and not least the dead hand of the poet whose waka, or classic verses, Koetsu was transcribing.
Seniority promotion, the lifetime employment system and the dead hand of Japanese corporate bureaucracy are all anathema to the free-wheeling stock-option culture that attracts Chinese businessmen these days.
Its new 9-5 is a good-looking car and Saab's engineers are relishing the chance to show what they can do when liberated from the dead hand of GM.
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That is what Obama should have initiated when he first came into office, and I hope it will be done now that the dead hand of Summers has been lifted.
Cleveland's voucher scheme has led to the founding of new schools, free from the dead hand of school-board bureaucracy, offering poor families a real increase in choice (see article).
The contradiction at the heart of Mr Blair's reforms was always the absurdity of removing the dead hand of local government, only to impose an even tighter grip from the centre.
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Mr Gove's zeal to liberate schools from the dead hand of local authorities was strengthened by research published last year by McKinsey, a consultancy, which suggested that the best education systems in the world are those in which schools enjoy autonomy.
And while most others in his party, notably Mr Kohl, played down the task of integrating 17m people, who had lived for four decades under the dead hand of communism, into a modern entrepreneurial society, Mr Biedenkopf strode the state, declaring bluntly that the transition would be at least a decade long, very costly, and very painful indeed.
After being artificially cut off from Europe by the dead hand of state socialism, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and (my ancestral homeland of) Lithuania had regained their rightful place in the world and taken a very large step away from their troubled history of Russian and Soviet domination.
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Finally, there is the overarching and historically painful reality that an unarmed black teenager lies dead at the hand of an armed Hispanic man who ignored a dispatcher's advice not to follow and engage the "suspect, " and who may have -- and this too is forensically unclear -- uttered a racial epithet while chasing him.
Vintage clothes For a long time, image-conscious Italians wouldn't be seen dead in second-hand clothes.
The Pentagon, on the other hand, is dead keen to boost his armed forces.
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Skipper Brad Fittler then raced over straight from a scrum to close the gap to just eight points and, in a nailbiting finish, centre Russell Richardson had a try ruled out for putting his left hand on the dead-ball line before grounding the ball.
Most farmers use traps containing pheromones - chemicals that attract the flies - and then hand-count the dead insects every 10 days.
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He held a small photograph of his dead colleague, Ahad, in his trembling left hand.
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