The  day after school opened, Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander ran over to Baltimore to give a "Breaking-the Mold" award for successful educational innovation to an outfit called Education Alternatives, Inc. (EAI). What has EAI, a private, for-profit company, done to deserve this kind of recognition? Well, it has landed a 5-year contract to manage nine schools in Baltimore. Otherwise, its record consists of running two small private schools, a school district in Minnesota (EAi was dismissed after four months) and a public school in Dade County, Fla. EAI was invited to Dade because it promised to raise lots of money from the private sector.

All across the country, principals and superintendents are starting the school year by announcing their plans for radical change. As a result, they say, test scores will go through the ceiling, discipline problems will vanish and all their students will be successful. Nobody knows if any of this will happen; announcing changes is the easy part.

That's true in Baltimore too. Like a lot of other groups trying to fix the public schools, EAI has some ideas I tend to like, but there's no way of knowing whether they will result in improvement or deterioration in the schools -- or no change at all.

But Secretary Alexander chose this place, of all the school districts in the country, to hand out his award. Is this the silly season? What evidence does he have that EAI will change these schools for the better? Do we give medical researchers an award for developing a wonderful new medicine before they even field-test it? And if we're handing out awards for trying a new idea, why not give them to the thousands of people across the country who are doing just that?

Maybe Secretary Alexander deserves a Breaking-the Mold award, too -- for his new definition of successful educational innovation. On second thought, his performance in Baltimore probably didn't have anything to do with education or school reform, and we should view it as a political event. I suspect it's the first of many.

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Perhaps the Republicans are right and family values, as they define them, are under attack everywhere. Take the study of school success among children of working mothers that was described at a recent meeting of education researchers in the Netherlands. Contrary to what the advocates of family values tell us, the study found that children of women who work often do better in school than children whose mothers stay at home with them. "What makes a difference," according to the Times Educational Supplement, which reported the conference (July 17, 1992), "is the sort of job the woman does .... If she has an unskilled manual job, her children do less well at school than if she stayed at home. But a mother working as a shopkeeper .... or a higher-level employee has a positive effect on her children's achievement." If this is correct, we'd better stop pestering poor women to get jobs and start putting the pressure on Marilyn Quayle.
 

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Public education takes a lot of hits these days, and many of them are well-deserved. so it's encouraging to hear from a student who thinks his school has done a terrific job educating him. Logan McCarty of North Brunswick, N.J., a winner in the 24th International Chemistry Olympiad, sent me such a letter this summer. it read, in part:

Four students from each of 33 countries competed in laboratory and written examinations to determine who were the best high school chemists in the world.

The United States did exceptionally well, placing fourth behind China, Hungary and Poland and outscoring such educational "models" as the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and others. With one gold medal, two silvers and a bronze, we were one of only a handful of countries to earn four medals.

I was one of the silver medalists in the competition, and in my opinion one of the most important characteristics of the U.S. team is that all four of the top chemists in the United States came from public schools ....

The U.S. team was selected out of a group of 20 exceptional students after a two-week study program at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A group of the students there did attend elite, selective private high schools in diverse parts of the country, but the top four students were all educated in this country's public schools.

I should add some information about the students and their schools. Jeffrey Chuang attended Bellaire High School, a language magnet in Houston. Swaine Chen attended O'Fallon High School in O'Fallon, Illinois, a suburb of St. Louis. Swaine's school does not even offer Advanced Placement courses. Christopher Herzog attends High Park High School in Central New Jersey. and I attended Amherst Central High School outside of Buffalo, N.Y., a small school with about 200 in our graduating class.

I feel very strongly about the value of a public school education and hope, that, in the midst of all this posturing about "school choice" that the American people know that the best education is still to be found in our public schools.