They are insisting that Metro carry out rigorous reforms to restrain expenses and improve financial management before giving the system additional money.
The Brits were steered around some of the local schools in Maryland and Virginia, where rigorous reforms had turned around several low-performing schools in "challenging" circumstances, in areas troubled by crime and family breakdown.What these schools had achieved, often in only a couple of years, was encouraging.
Ukraine does have a $17 billion bailout program with the International Monetary Fund, conditioned on rigorous reforms.
Monday's meeting was the first since the finance ministers last month granted a four-month extension of the rescue plan offered to Greece in exchange for Athens taking rigorous reforms to jump-start its economy, stuck deep in the doldrums of a six-year recession.
Rigorous Catholic reform occasioned peasant uprisings in Austria and resistance by nobles in Hungary and Bohemia (where Calvinism had made inroads among the ruling classes).
It was only in 1922, when Vienna became fiscally independent after a rigorous tax reform was implemented (introducing luxury and real-estate taxes), that the financial foundation was created for the massive housing programme orchestrated by the Social Democrats.
Rigorous monetary reform aided Belgium's post-World War II recovery and expansion, particularly of the Flemish light manufacturing and chemical industries that developed rapidly in the north, and Belgium became one of the first European countries to reestablish a favourable balance of trade in the postwar world.
Moreover, Italy, with the continent's third largest economy, has ably weathered the global financial meltdown, instituted rigorous pension reforms and pared its public debt.
South Korea's 55-year-olds come close to bottom in the OECD's skills league tables, but their children and grandchildren massively outperform them, which suggests that rigorous school reforms can yield relatively quick results.Many questions remain.
