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PARTISAN REVIEW
Edith Kurzweil:
Thank you, Rita Kramer. Next is Chester Finn.
Chester Finn: I
visited a wonderful school yesterday, in this very city. It
was a charter school in a tough part of town, enrolling a hundred tough
kids, from grades six and seven, almost all from tough inner-city circum–
stances. They were being brilliantly taught serious stuff and their actual
learning was being carefully monitored. When they weren't learning
enough, they came back for more, sometimes involuntarily. Their parents
were deeply engaged, every week, in the work of the school and the per–
formance of their kids.
It
was as good a school as I have ever seen. This was
a public charter school that started this year. I asked the principal, who's a
friend and one-time protegee of mine, how many of the teachers are cer–
tified? She said, "I don't know. They don't need to be certified in order to
be hired by charter schools in this state." She had six hundred applicants.
With one hundred kids she obviously didn't have to hire very many of
them. I left feeling quite buoyed, knowing that it's possible to run good
schools, even in the most adverse of social circumstances. The question is,
why don't we do more of this? I'm glad that Rita mentioned charter
schools, and other "end runs," as she puts it, around the system. That is
why I'm finally somewhat more optimistic about the prospects for change
in U.S. K-12 education. But for a bunch of reasons it's bloody difficult.
Partly this is because we don't have a European school system-a tidy,
well-controlled, carefully-planned, meticulously supervised education sys–
tem. Partly it's because K-12 education in the United States is in utter
chaos. Almost anything can happen in the interstices and around the edges,
in the form of alternatives, exceptions, and options. And the more those
interstices show developments such as the ones we're beginning to see, the
more optimistic I feel. But it's not corning from anything carefully coor–
dinated or centrally planned. This creates an interesting paradox, as we
think about strategies for educational change in the future. We have heard
four very interesting presentations, including Edith's own opening com–
ments, which I thought were extremely provocative, about the number of
reform ideas on the table. Only one allusion gave me a little pause, when
she referred to the current set of legislative proposals,
if
I heard her right,
as being "from the bottom of the president's heart." My wife is a cardiac
pathologist, and I think even she would have difficulty finding that partic–
ular anatomic spot. Other than that, I thought this was a very interesting
set of propositions.
Today I'll
talk
about the intersection of primary/secondary education
on the one hand and higher education on the other. Mostly I'm interest–
ed in how what's going on in K-12 education affects what's going on in
the universities, sort of the opposite perspective from what Igor was talking
