Organizations like In Defense of Animals and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contend force-feeding is inherently inhumane.
But with the law, states had to report their test scores, and that spotlight, Schneider and others contend, forced schools to pay attention to their performance.
Each contended force could have resulted in or contributed to the same failings.
Given the array of contending forces, inertia seemed a cinch.
For both artists, nature is a personal matter as well as a drama of contending forces.
The old screwball idea of heterosexual courtship as a battle of equally matched, contending forces is close to extinct.
Like Berlin in microcosm, this crossroads has for centuries been a theatre of power, a field of contending forces.
Her interest in St. Augustine led her to a fascination with Manichaeanism, the doctrine that the universe is a battleground between equal, contending forces of Light and Darkness.
To him the whole war was an irrelevance; he saw it simply as a struggle of contending forces which were alike Imperialist and capitalist.
And Syria now is a cruel battleground of contending forces with almost 3 million refugees and an unimaginable quarter of a million dead.
"The fundamental problem we face in Iraq is that there is not a single center of gravity, as in the cold war, but a whole constellation of contending forces," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism and counterinsurgency expert at Georgetown University.
