But this tale of a self-educated pig who strives to attend an institution that looks very much like Harvard Law School didn’t make me laugh or feel wise. It made me feel nervous. Had I missed the allegory?

I suspect there is some complex philosophical premise at work beneath the tale’s apparent wry simplicity. Perhaps it’s Talmudic; I know Mamet has gotten very into his Judaism of late. I pictured adults chuckling knowingly while their savvy, Ivy-destined kiddies admired the pictures of the clever animal, who is “brought to life by Elizabeth Dahlie’s heartwarming illustrations.”

Though “heartwarming” is not the adjective I would have picked, Dahlie’s watercolor illustrations of the pig are sweet: She gives Henrietta a beribboned tail, and ears that droop when she is thwarted. Mamet’s language here is clean: free of the F-word, with only the occasional dash of his trademark-riddled syntax. (I wonder if the Harvard Coop will stock the $16 book alongside the pricey crimson rah-rah merchandise?)

The plot advances with merciful swiftness. Henrietta is a smart, anthropomorphic oinker who, after schooling herself in solitude on an anonymous East Coast isle, “burns to serve through the Medium of the Law.” Sadly, she is rebuffed by the admissions office of the presumed Harvard. (The school itself is never named, but Henrietta dons a crimson-striped muffler and strolls past quasi-fictional landmarks like “Charles Square,” and Alan Dershowitz offers a blurb.) Not that this stops her in her quest for knowledge; instead, she “haunted the libraries and folded herself into the backs of the lecture halls.”

Of course, the bums kick her out. They even post signs: “No Pigs.” (For me, this conjured up a vague memory of Snoopy in some long-forgotten Peanuts cartoon.)

Anyhoo, Henrietta descends into vagrancy — a common enough condition in Harvard Square, where well-dressed suburban slacker teenagers regularly panhandle along with genuine destitutes — until a myopic old vagabond proves to be her salvation. I won’t give away how he saves her or who he proves to be. Let’s just say it ends happily, with Henrietta delivering a noble commencement address worthy of any tweedy social-studies major.

“Let us not be sentimental over the accomplishments of one who comes from a disadvantaged group,” she declares, “but let us work for social justice.” And so she does, clawing — or would it be scrabbling? — her way up to the Supreme Court.

By the time Henrietta reaches the height of her career, “her accomplishments, of course, have been claimed by the School and the City,” writes Mamet, a touch acidly, “but she continues to credit her family, her friends, her books, and her island.”

What to make of this? Is Mamet railing against the historical resistance to minorities in Ivy League institutions, or against the dominance of the Ivy League in higher education at all? (For the record, Mamet himself went to Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt.) Is he saying that Harvard is a necessary evil, or that the true heroes are autodidacts who work toward a world where such evils become unnecessary? Or is it just a plug for good old-fashioned liberalism in the form of kindness to the downtrodden? Will this morality tale encourage the hyper-pressured children of the elite to ditch their private schools and Ritalin for home schooling?

God knows.

I’m not a parent. Nevertheless, I’m concerned that today’s schoolchildren are getting parables of higher education written by intellectual heavyweights, rather than cozy narratives about children at play, like the charming Betsy-Tacy series I enjoyed in my youth.

I would be wary of giving any kid a book that even hints at the tortuous, exclusionary application process required for admission to top-flight colleges and law schools; they’ll have plenty of time to enjoy that later. Maybe this book will serve as a palliative for a particularly sophisticated and anxious child, but for kids who have yet to lose sleep over their SAT scores, reading David Mamet will do nothing but add new monsters to the foot of the bed.

Frankly, I am afraid of David Mamet. Sure, he hides out in Vermont and designs silly hunting gear for Banana Republic. And he’s easy to parody. (My boyfriend’s sketch comedy troupe, the Associates, does a mean “Glengarry Glen Girl Scout.”) But I still admire him greatly. So I read this thing several times through to try to do the pig justice, as it were.

It just left me shrugging.

My insecurity was heightened by the fact that I was asked to write this review in part because I am a Harvard graduate (though of the college, not the Law School). So if there were some underlying meaning, I would look all the more foolish for not picking up on it.

I am hyper-sensitive to the fact that the classroom portion of my Harvard education left me, essentially, an expert in nothing. Nor do I feel broadly educated. This was made clear to me during a red-faced Thanksgiving of a few years back, when a family friend expressed shock that I didn’t recognize some obscure biblical reference. I can’t even remember what the reference was; all I remember is the humiliation: “You went to Harvard and you don’t even know — ?”

“She’s just jealous,” my mother whispered later. The family friend’s daughter had gone to some no-name school. But the incident still stung. She was right: I don’t know anything.

Meanwhile, here we have this pig from some no-name island, whose breadth of knowledge — Hamlet, Oedipus, Henry Fielding — is certainly far greater than that of many Harvard literature graduates. It must mean something.

Horowitz is wrong. What the Republicans need to do is prove they can govern sensibly. If Social Security, education and welfare are a mess, remember that the GOP has been in charge of the White House for 12 of the last 19 years, and of Congress for the last five (not to mention control of the Senate during the Reagan administration). The Republicans lose in issues that matter to voters because voters are wise enough to know the Republicans would rather work themselves into an angry froth than solve problems.

– Ken Schellenberg

Republican education programs are patently not about support for public
education and public schools. Instead, they’re
politically loaded packages designed to cater to the various right-wing
constituencies that wish to balkanize American education and culture.

Fundamentalist Christian Republicans, alarmed that their ideas
(particularly those about race and religion) are not given primacy in
public schools, demand something called “school choice.” School choice is
expressed in publicly funded vouchers used to pay for the education of
one’s children. The fact that vouchers are expressly a means to fund
private religious schools, and that such conduct means violation of the
establishment clause, is conveniently sidestepped.

This “choice” is less about overall quality of
education than about educational content. It is clear that some devoutly
religious parents find the teaching of evolution (for instance) in the
public schools upsetting, as it conflicts with their beliefs. This is fine
– it’s their right to disagree.

If the Republicans are as fond of the marketplace of ideas as they consistently claim, they should fight
for a truly public education — a standards-based, competency-based public
school curriculum that ensures that each child has a base of reading,
writing, arithmetic and reasoning skills that will enable him/her to
function in the world. Then they can tell their children that what they have
learned in school is incorrect, if they so wish, based on their religious
beliefs — and they can accept the results when their children use their
beliefs in the classroom and are given lower grades because of it. The
common educational base — a common history, a common science, a common skill set, a common ability to reason — is critical if we as a society are not to splinter into tiny groups fearful
of each others’ ideas.

If Republicans do otherwise — that is, restrict their children’s access
to ideas that don’t square with their doctrine, and so demand public
funding for those ideas — they tacitly admit that their ideas have
failed in the marketplace and that the only means to promulgate them is to
deny children access to the greater world of ideas.
When Republicans admit that the goal of a quality free public education,
in public schools, is what they’re after, then the public will take their
ideas seriously.

– Matt Hayden

This piece states that 90 percent of funding for education originates at the
local level, then in the next paragraph blames a Democrat-controlled
Congress (which hasn’t existed for several years) for the sorry state of
education. I think the inadequate education given to most Americans has
to have come from the same place it have always come: the local controlling authorities.

– John Bonanno

David Horowitz’s characterization of the test ban treaty issue and debate is
ludicrous. The notion that the country with the best verification and
simulation technology and the world’s largest nuclear weapons stockpile
would be put at a disadvantage with respect to North Korea or Iraq by this
treaty can only come from the mendacious or stupid.

Even the argument over whether our verification technology is good enough
misses the point. We are far ahead in nuclear weapons technology. We are
even further ahead in the technology needed to build and maintain bombs in
the absence of testing — even if the other side is conducting
ultra-low-yield tests. We have not only thousands of working warheads, but
many fully tested designs. The treaty would not affect our ability to
build more bombs. It is a much greater handicap
to those trying to build their first bomb than it is to us.

Without the treaty, Iraq and their ilk get to take the easier road (of larger tests)
to bomb development. The treaty is not about an Iraq vs. U.S. nuclear arms race — it’s about slowing down Iraq and convincing Iran to back off. The treaty is in our national interest.

– Russell Williams

As a former student of a poor inner-city school, I find it galling that
Horowitz blames Democratic policies for the plight of public schools.
While perhaps the Democrats have not done enough to help, the real culprit
lies in the white (and largely Republican) flight from our cities. This
flight has been abetted by Republican policies which shunt social problems
(and their costs) on urban residents. I remember the first time I visited
a suburban (and overwhelmingly Republican) public school … the roof
didn’t leak, they had a real playground, they even had art classes. Why
should their schools, only 10 miles away, be so much better?
The Republican plan for school vouchers would simply aggravate the problem
by fostering further flight and punishing already suffering urban schools

– Greg Stroud

Sharps and Flats: “So Many Roads”
BY SETH MNOOKIN

(11/29/99)

In his review of the new Grateful Dead box set, Seth Mnookin calls our decision to edit the botched
beginning of a song “nothing less than sacrilege.” He also implies that
fading jams in or out is an inappropriate way to present the band’s improvisations.

I can only assume that Mnookin is simply unaware that many of the Dead’s
best-loved live albums — the so-called “Skull and Roses” album, “Europe
’72,” “Live/Dead” and “Dead Set” — also contained edits, tunes faded in
and out, cut-and-pasted jams and even harmonies and keyboards overdubbed
in the studio long after the performance. Such edits and corrections –
sensitively done — are the tradition of Grateful Dead live albums, not
an aberration. We made a decision to make a slight edit to the start of
the final performance of “So Many Roads” so that Robert Hunter’s powerful
lyrics could be appreciated with a vocal performance that did every verse
justice.

Edits on live albums aren’t necessarily indicative of a Milli Vanillizing
of the music. Miles Davis’ early ’70s “live” recordings were pastiches of
many different performances layered in the studio by Davis and producer
Teo Macero, and the long jams on CSNY’s “4 Way Street” were woven together
by Graham Nash at the mixing board. One can hardly accuse Glenn Gould’s
cut-and-paste renditions of Bach of lacking “honest, genuine effort,” to
use Mnookin’s phrase.

Perhaps because Jerry Garcia didn’t have the luxury of imagining that every note
that he played was holy, he wasn’t kept up nights by the “sacrilege” of
making smart editorial decisions about the music.
Dead fans who cannot tolerate such alterations have the opportunity to
explore the thousands of hours of raw, unadulterated live Dead available
for free in the tape trading community.

– Steve Silberman

Co-producer, “So Many Roads (1965-1995)”

Breaking character
BY CLAIRE DEDERER

(11/22/99)

Philip Seymour Hoffman may be non-talented, fat and someone you would never
ask out on a date, but geez … Clair Dederer cuts him down like a
person who ran over a little old lady. Is this an
honest critique of Hoffman’s acting ability, or just line after line of
insults for someone who’s just trying to pay the rent?

– James Hamilton

Close the door on open marriage
(11/29/99)

One of the main reasons
marriages end is because of people’s unrealistic expectations. The idea of
monogamous/romantic/happy forever marriages is relatively new to human beings
(the last 100 years or so). People are just not that simple. Although some people are quite
content with monogamy, statistics and history show that the majority of people are not
monogamous. For those who aren’t, our culture embraces serial monogamy. And when each relationship
ends, it’s deemed a “failure.”

I don’t have a solution for this couple’s marital problem, other than
researching the roots of the “ideal marriage” and deciding whether it’s
meant for you. Being aware of how we came to have such standards is the first step in
understanding ourselves in relationships.

– Mike Ryan

This couple successfully negotiated what many would call two infidelities; they both changed jobs; they’re raising their first child with solid concern for her needs — and they’re still speaking? Fabulous!

They tried something difficult, and the experiment didn’t succeed. So — next! If they apply the mutual respect and admiration that allowed them to make it through all those tough moments, they’ll be back to humping like bunnies whenever they and the baby have had enough sleep … which should occur
sometime in the year 2018.

– Lisa Moricoli Latham

Attack of the holiday gift guides!
BY JENN SHREVE

(11/19/99)

I was offended by the remarks about “A Real Man” by Norah Vincent. I have
been married for almost five years to a wonderful woman who had the
strength and courage to get her sex changed. In today’s politically
correct climate, journalists can no longer make snide remarks about
African-Americans, Hispanics or women. Transsexuals, however, seem to be
fair game.

I found this article acutely derisive towards transsexuals. It just
underscores the fact that in the media, transsexuals are invariably
referred to by their former genders and names; their
problems are trivialized, and they are relegated to the same social tier
as junkies and rapists.

Jenn Shreve asks, “Can someone please tell me what is the
point of obsessing over this relatively rare operation?”
The answer is twofold. For one thing, young people who suffer from gender dysphoria need to be aware that there is a cure (therapy and surgery) and that they are not alone.
These young people live in a hell of self-hatred and fear. It is far better that they get therapy and surgery when they are young than later on in life, when it will cause confusion and pain
for their spouses and children.

Also, transsexuals are often the victims of hate crimes, even murder. The
media sets the tone for social behavior. When the media treats
transsexuals like freaks, it sends a message to the public that it is OK to
treat these people differently from those who are “normal.” It tells
parents that they are justified in being embarrassed by, and therefore
disowning, their transsexual child. It even makes it easier for
some wacko to assault and murder his beautiful girlfriend when she
confesses to him that she grew up as a boy.

I hope that, in the future, Shreve thinks about what she is saying in
her writing and how it may carelessly hurt. Transsexuals don’t have powerful publicists. They can’t afford first-class lobbyists. Their numbers are too few to demand the attention and
respect that the gay and lesbian community has won.

– Mark Roth

It wasn’t always like this, he says.

“I owe a lot of kids an apology for the way I used to teach math,” the portly, ebullient teacher says. Haupt has the mien of a newly recovering alcoholic anxious to share his change of life with other sufferers, and make amends to those he harmed before he saw the light.

“It was all ‘Add, take away, multiply, divide — what’s so hard about that?’” he recalls with a shudder. “A lot of people will tell you: They became math teachers because there’s only one right way to teach it, and only one right answer. And of course that’s completely wrong.”

The agency of change in Haupt’s life — his 12-step program, if you will — was an innovative training program sponsored by the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, a seven-year-old program put together by determined school reformers at the University of Texas, El Paso. It was specifically designed to train both new and experienced teachers to get results for the diverse, low-income population that dominates El Paso schools.

The program seems to have produced extraordinary results in El Paso. But Haupt’s conversion story is being told all over Texas. A 15-year push to reform education and demand high standards of all schools for all students, but especially blacks and Latinos, has in the last five years finally paid big dividends, producing an education turnaround unrivaled by other states.

The vast improvement in Texas schools has gotten national attention, and it’s going to get more, because much of the change has occurred during Republican Gov. George W. Bush’s five years in office. Detractors try to explain away the good news by saying Texas has improved kids’ test-taking skills, not their education. Others credit — or blame — Texas’ lack of strong teachers unions, which they say lets reformers make change quickly, but ensures that such change can never be replicated nationally without union-busting coast to coast.

But it’s clear that even correcting for Texas’ unique labor climate and test-happy education establishment, Bush deserves credit for the school reform that’s now making headlines. Progress in Texas predates Bush, of course: In 1984, a reform commission headed by none other than Ross Perot pushed through a sweeping program for change. The components included expanded funding, mandatory teacher testing and evaluation, a new statewide curriculum and a statewide student-testing system, including a graduation exam. Later, Gov. Ann Richards mandated tougher tests and a new emphasis on improving minority achievement.

The effort has paid off: Once among the lowest performing states, Texas is now at or near the top on most measures. On the state’s own assessment tests, scores have steadily climbed in the last five years. The Texas high school exit exam, which students have to pass to graduate, is a good example. Sophomores take the test, required for graduation, to prepare for their final chance as seniors. Where only half of Texas 10th-graders managed it in 1994, fully 75 percent did in 1998.

On national tests, Texas kids rank at or near the top in math, reading and writing. In writing, Texas eighth-graders ranked fourth in the nation, behind traditionally high-achieving, relatively homogeneous states like Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine, while its black and Latino students ranked first and second, respectively.

If Texas’ statewide school-reform achievements are noteworthy, El Paso’s are stunning. Pebble Hills’ demographics are matched by the city as a whole. It’s the fifth-poorest congressional district in the nation. Two-thirds of its 135,000 students live in poverty, half enter school speaking only limited English and about 10 percent cross the Mexican border from dusty, polluted Juarez every day.

Since 1993, El Paso’s test scores have soared. That year only two-thirds of its white students, and about a third of Latinos and African-Americans, passed the state’s mandatory math exams. In 1998, the pass rates were 91 percent, 80 percent and 75 percent for the three groups. The city has seen similar gains in reading. The most striking thing about those figures is how the city has closed two-thirds of the achievement gap between its white and minority students.

Texas still ranks 40th in education spending, and about that in teachers’ salaries. Just this week Bush got into a pissing match with his GOP rivals to prove that his legendarily miserly state is even less generous to poor people than the rest of the nation believes. Still, many credit him with continuing the state’s commitment to reform. They say he’s raised standards, funding and school and teacher accountability to a new level.

Now, the GOP front-runner’s all-but-inevitable presidential nomination threatens to put the Democrats on the defensive when it comes to education, for the first time since the party made the issue its own by pushing through expanded funding for poor students under President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. It could be that just as it took a Democratic president to preside over dramatic welfare reform, it will take a Republican to reform the schools, to break the stalemate over turf, bureaucracy, ideology and funding that has sentenced many children, especially poor urban kids, to educational failure.

Boosters say Texas accomplished its reform with a potent combination of expanded funding and a new, rigorous commitment to assessment and accountability. The reform zeroes in particularly on the grades and test scores of individual racial groups, and administrators and teachers are judged by how well all their students achieve. An otherwise stellar school could be singled out — and find itself subject to virtual takeover by the state — if, say, Latino girls test poorly in reading. “Without a doubt the state’s accountability system has had a big impact across Texas, and in El Paso,” says Susana Navarro, executive director of the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence and a longtime California school reformer who grew up in El Paso.

But critics say Texas schools have made those gains by taking up too much class time “teaching to the test,” in this case the TAAS — Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. In some cities, including El Paso, administrators have been accused of manipulating test scores, and even outright cheating, to inflate their gains. Meanwhile, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund has sued the state, claiming the tests are discriminatory, flunking too many Latinos and African-Americans.

And it’s possible that a key element in the Texas school-reform story is a political one — the relative weakness of the state’s teachers unions. Unlike their counterparts in New York and California, Texas teachers lack collective bargaining rights and tenure. As a consequence, it’s much easier for superintendents and principals to make radical change, encouraging — or coercing — recalcitrant teachers to leave. “The unions don’t amount to much politically,” wrote former Reagan education secretary Chester Finn, praising Bush’s education policies in the Weekly Standard, “which makes it easier for a governor to build a record of education reform.”

“We’ve had 60-percent staff turnover in four years,” says Pebble Hills principal Dona Descamps unapologetically. “We met with great resistance from teachers, and those who weren’t happy either left or became believers.”

And yet, as always, the truth seems more complicated than ideologues on either side believe. Surprisingly enough, Texas’ largest teachers union, the Texas Federation of Teachers, has actually supported the state’s toughened accountability measures — including a controversial requirement that teachers be tested to stay licensed, and regularly evaluated by principals — and its leader praises the Republican governor for maintaining and even toughening education reform that began under Democrats. “George W. Bush has been a terrific education governor,” says TFT president John Cole.

Cole and others say perhaps the biggest reason for Texas’ educational turnaround is the change to mandatory kindergarten and vastly expanded funding for pre-kindergarten programs — something candidate Bush, by the way, has not yet proposed on a national scale. “Gov. Bush has benefited from what’s already been done, but the next governor will profit from what he’s doing now. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in this state,” said Cole.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Teachers like Paul Haupt say that that El Paso’s school-reform crusade allowed them to grow into the challenge of educating hard-to-serve kids — not just resist it or run from it. The key, they say, is the El Paso Collaborative, which became a key project for University of Texas-El Paso president Diana Natalicio when she was worried about declining achievement in the city’s public schools. UTEP draws 85 percent of its students from El Paso and another 9 percent from Juarez, and its education department produces 85 percent of the local teachers. “We’re in a minority city, but we had a disproportionate number of students coming from the wealthier Anglo population,” Natalicio recalls.

Navarro and Natalicio began raising money to put together a partnership that could improve instruction in El Paso schools by focusing on training teachers and principals. The so-called “Teams Leadership Institute” eventually included 3 El Paso districts and 100 schools. The collaborative provided seven-member school teams with data about their school, with test scores and other indicators broken down by race, ethnicity and subject matter, while offering strategies for raising achievement and links to new enriched curriculum.

“We had never looked at test scores,” recalls Alicia Barra, a former El Paso teacher and now the collaborative’s deputy director. “We felt like it would prejudice us against students. It wasn’t that we didn’t care. It was that we knew these kids were poor, or monolingual, or just out of the cotton fields, and it was always like, ‘Well, what can you expect of them?’ We didn’t want to burden them.”

With funding from the National Science Foundation, among other sources, the collaborative was able to recruit and train mentor teachers, who could then bring their skills into classrooms and serve as personal coaches to provide ongoing support for the transition to higher standards. That’s where Paul Haupt got his new training; he left Pebble Hills and joined the collaborative to be a mentor, working at many different schools. But four years ago he got an offer to return to Pebble Hills and be director of instruction — essentially acting as a full-time, in-house mentor to a single staff. His boss at the collaborative, Dona Descamps, then followed him to become Pebble Hills principal.

In four years they’ve accomplished a complete turnaround. Test scores are up and the school is now a magnet for public and private funding. The computer lab, equipped with Apple G3 laptops, is among the most impressive I’ve seen nationally. The district has provided every student with e-mail accounts, and at Pebble Hills, all teachers have their own laptops — for planning lessons, doing Internet research and sharing work with staff and students. In 1994, this was one of the state’s lowest-performing schools; it’s now cited by the state for high performance, and 80 to 90 percent of its students — well above the state average — pass the various TAAS exams in math, reading and writing.

I ask Haupt about the notion that Pebble Hills accomplished its turnaround by purging bad teachers. He sighs. “We try to work with all the teachers. There were some who left, because they had some concerns about the change. And it is harder for teachers, no doubt about it. We still have a few who are struggling, but it’s my job to give them everything they need to be successful.” On the other hand, Pebble Hills has a long waiting list of teachers who want to work at the school.

But Haupt is genuinely insulted by the other common complaint about Texas school reform: that it’s a result of “teaching to the tests,” using class time to drill students on how to improve their scores — time that might be better spent on academics. Haupt says El Paso’s local standards, which Pebble Hills meets, are much higher than the state’s.

“We aim higher than the tests,” he sniffs. “How do you celebrate being the best of the worst?”

But there’s no doubt Texas is test-happy. When I stopped by Bel Air High School the same day as Pebble Hills, principal Vern Butler, balding and mustachioed, was hospitable and helpful, but I couldn’t visit classrooms because students were taking regularly scheduled course exams.

It would seem hard to avoid exam day at Bel Air. From freshman year onward, students take a steady battery of tests, including course exams every nine weeks, TAAS drills, practice college aptitude and achievement tests, the regular college tests and of course the graduation exam in 10th grade and the TAAS every May. Last year, when the seniors finished with their required tests, Butler gave them a vocational exam. “Some of them asked me, ‘Why another test?’ and I told ‘em, ‘It won’t hurt you.’”

Bel Air — overwhelmingly low-income, 95-percent Latino — sits on the other side of Interstate 10 from Pebble Hills. The freeway bisects El Paso, standing in for the proverbial “tracks.” The southern, Bel Air side is decidedly the wrong one. Here, the scrubby Chihuahuan desert is pockmarked with informal garbage dumps; piles of tires cluster on the sides of the road and the houses get smaller and more shack-like. If you go far enough you reach the colonias, settlements without toilets or running water, where it feels as if Mexico has crossed the Rio Grande. When the wind is right, much of the south side of the city smells like Mexico, too, that singular mix of diesel fumes, rotting wastes and tropical vegetation that distinguishes so many cities on the other side of the border.

Bel Air’s road to reform was rockier than that of Pebble Hills. Three years ago, the school got the education equivalent of the death penalty. In 1996 Butler and district Superintendent Tony Trujillo staged what’s known as a “reconstitution” — essentially asking for the resignation of everyone at the school, from custodians to sports coaches, and forcing them to reapply for their jobs. “As a principal, when I got here, it was scary,” Butler recalls. “There was an attitude that the kids here can only get to a certain level, and I said, I’m not gonna accept that. All kids can succeed.”

Reconstitution is a drastic, and fairly uncommon move in Texas school reforms. Most schools designated “low performing” come in for intensive intervention by the state, which will send in teams of administrators from other districts and the Texas Education Agency to pore over data; visit classrooms; interview staff, students and parents; and otherwise make life a living hell for administrators.

“It’s what principals dread more than anything else,” says Butler, who once served on an intervention team that visited another school, a fairly good school, he says, except that too many African-American boys were failing math. “It’s a lot of work. Your whole school is taken apart. You do not want this!”

At Bel Air, after reconstitution, more than half the staff left. Since then achievement has steadily climbed, and the school is also a good place to see how El Paso’s curriculum changes have taken root. Virtually every ninth-grader in El Paso, and Bel Air, must take algebra, for instance. Nearly three-quarters of El Paso students now take algebra 2, and the number taking physics has tripled. One drawback: Because so many students are now taking courses they wouldn’t have dreamed of, failure rates are high. But where more than half of Latino freshmen failed algebra in El Paso last year, only 20 percent failed an innovative course that combined algebra 1 and 2 at Bel Air.

Still, Bel Air is not without its critics, and their complaints offer a window on several wider educational debates. The first is over testing: Some accuse the school and the district of inflating test scores by exempting low-performance students from testing — and, indeed, the district’s high TAAS scores for a time were probably inflated. Butler and others admit the Ysleta district was exempting too many low-achieving students for a while — mostly limited-English and special-education kids. But he points out that last year Bel Air tested 97 percent of its student body and saw its test scores remain roughly the same, a sign that all students are being reached by Bel Air’s reforms, Butler believes.

There are worse testing scandals in Texas: Austin officials have actually been indicted for falsifying data on test scores as well as dropout rates, and in Houston, one principal and several teachers had to resign after an investigation found they’d erased students’ answers on multiple-choice exams to write in the correct ones.

The Ysleta district, meanwhile, is still under fire from the state, which has questions about the accuracy of its data. Data is king in Texas schools, because rewards and punishments are tied to minute details about who’s achieving how well on what subjects, and the state looks at everything from dropouts to the number of counselors in a school. The Texas Federation of Teachers has emerged as a critic of the district, and has used the state’s open-records system to keep track of whether Ysleta is improving its data and record-keeping. “That’s the beauty of the accountability system,” says the TFT’s John Cole. “We can ask for this data and expect to get it.”

The TFT’s animus against Ysleta springs, again, from the teachers union controversy. Former Ysleta Superintendent Trujillo likes to boast that he got rid of 2,000 of 3,000 teachers as he turned the district around in the mid-1990s — leading many to conclude that teachers are the obstacle to high achievement in urban districts. “Schools were never an employment institution, they’re an education institution. We lost a lot of good teachers because they couldn’t buy into our belief system, that everybody could learn,” Trujillo says.

But TFT president John Cole says Trujillo fired exactly one teacher during his tenure — the rest left for a variety of reasons, including better jobs elsewhere. Turnover is high throughout Texas, Cole says, with more than half of all teachers changing jobs within five years. “It’s because of low pay, poor working conditions and unprofessional treatment. Texas is not friendly to working people, but the idea that schools improved because he got rid of teachers, and had no teachers unions … well, I don’t think they could have done it without us. We supported teacher testing, teacher evaluation. We’ve been selling reform throughout the state, and I’m very proud of what we’ve done, even though it’s been painful — for everybody, teachers, principals, administrators, students and parents.”

So has the lack of strong teachers unions in Texas ultimately helped or hurt the cause of reform? “Frankly, we don’t know the answer to that,” says Kati Haycock of the Washington-based Education Trust, which advocates for low-income and minority students nationally. “It’s true that some of the most successful turnarounds nationally have been in systems without strong unions. But you can also point to districts that have made extraordinary progress in strong union cities.

“Do union contracts slow you down? Of course. Seniority provisions alone can make it hard to get the best teachers into the neediest schools.” But Haycock notes that El Paso has fired very few teachers, although principals and superintendents may have coerced bad apples into leaving. “But you can do that in unionized systems too, and good principals do. I think it’s just too easy an answer, to say ‘Texas could do this because of weak unions.’”

Navarro is familiar with the controversy over teacher turnover. She too takes issue with Tony Trujillo’s claim that Ysleta’s turnaround was due to a wholesale exit of bad teachers.

“There’s absolutely no evidence that turnover was that high,” she says. “Tony knows I think that’s exaggerated.” Trujillo left the district last year after a falling out with the school board, and his tough talk made him some enemies around El Paso. “What Tony did is send a message we will not tolerate low achievement and excuses that students can’t learn. But that no longer means [that those teachers] can just leave and go to another district, because that’s now the message statewide.”

Navarro is an unlikely admirer of George W. Bush. A longtime activist on behalf of educational improvement for minority children, years ago she worked for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, traditionally an ally of liberals. Today she’s got a picture of herself with George W. in her office, and she’s actually opposing MALDEF’s lawsuit to halt the state’s graduation exams, which it claims discriminate against Latinos and African-Americans.

“Ann Richards certainly developed the state’s accountability system, and I think there were lots of people who wondered if the system would stay alive under the Bush administration,” Navarro says. “The fact that he not only didn’t weaken it, he strengthened it, is a clear credit to George Bush. Frankly, no one expected it to last.” The Bush administration has not only increased funding and launched a new early reading program, Navarro says, but has forced schools to reduce the state’s high dropout rate and increase college-preparatory courses and SAT-taking among high schoolers.

But some advocates say the increased emphasis on testing has hurt minority students. Of the 10,000 Texas seniors who fail the graduation exam, for instance, about 7,000 are Latino or black, even though those minorities make up only 40 percent of state students. To MALDEF, that’s evidence of discrimination. “Nobody can prove that failing the exam actually means they can’t succeed later in life,” says Joe Sanchez, MALDEF’s state policy analyst.

Maybe not. But the Texas exam is criticized because it only tests for a ninth-grade education — ensuring that students can read, write and do basic ‘rithmetic — and it’s hard to imagine many who can’t pass it succeeding at more than fast-food jobs. Sanchez argues the test is unfair because blacks and Latinos generally go to worse schools than whites. But while that’s true, many say it’s only been the state’s commitment to rigorous assessment that’s improved minority schools and minority school performance in the last 10 years.

“I’m a longtime MALDEF supporter — I worked for MALDEF! — but I have strong concerns about this legal challenge,” says Navarro. “Without the accountability system, these gains for minority students would never have been made. Yes, there’s some concern that the system increases tension for parents and students, but more accountability always brings more tension — that’s a part of all our lives.”

Haycock also worries that MALDEF’s suit could slow the pace of change in Texas if it does away with the graduation exam. “I understand the desire to get minority kids what they need to pass the exam,” says Haycock. “But to say: ‘You ought not put consequences for failure on kids until you have total school reform’ — well, these kinds of exams have actually been the fastest way to force reform in minority schools, all across the nation.” And the idea that kids can succeed without passing the exam? “Oh, please.”

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Back at Pebble Hills Elementary, Paul Haupt is standing in a desert garden, in between a red-blooming Mexican sage plant and a spiny gray-green cactus, his back to a waterfall, in a microcosm of the Chihuahuan desert. “We used to have the kids study the rain forest, but there’s no rain forest here!” he explains exuberantly. “We’re surrounded by this beautiful blooming desert.”

So the staff turned what used to be “the place we put all our junk” into this desert garden, Haupt says, which has become part botany classroom, part study hall, part soothing oasis. A fifth-grade boy works quietly on a book report about the Holocaust at a shady corner table.

“We used to say every year, ‘Let’s put in a garden,’ but we never did,” Haupt recalls. “When we finally made it happen, I knew this school had really changed.”

There’s an idea. In fact, it occurs to me that Kansas isn’t going far enough in applying this new approach just to evolution and the big bang. After all, very little in the ordinary curriculum is completely uncontroversial, accepted as truth by everyone who cares, and supported by eyewitness testimony.

So, go further, folks. Go far.

History and geology could give Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox equal time with the more conventional narratives of westward expansion — it doesn’t matter that some people will claim that it’s only a “tall tale,” because they weren’t there to prove that Paul Bunyan didn’t carve out the Grand Canyon and build the Rocky Mountains.

There’s more to biology than evolution, of course. For example, the germ theory of disease is not universally accepted. Christian Scientists believe that disease is a matter of incorrect thinking, and can be overcome by the right worldview. Equal time is in order here. In fact, we probably need to make room for the related idea that disease is a sign of having lived an immoral life (though we may have to tread carefully when it comes to divine punishment, since identification of the punishing deity could lead to charges of bias).

Obviously, the idea of standardized spelling has to be questioned. President Andrew Jackson pointed out that it’s a poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word. Indeed, the way we spell is based on a mere theory, an agreement, and there are a number of equally valid theories out there. Students should be taught British as well as American spelling, and encouraged to choose whichever they think makes more sense.

Also, those students who prefer to spell phonetically — who point out, for example, that “Missouri” isn’t pronounced the way it’s spelled — should be encouraged in their creativity and independence of mind. Granted, this might make it a little more difficult for Kansas students to cope in the larger world outside the Kansas school system, but if we can afford that risk in biology for the sake of intellectual freedom, we certainly can afford it in reading.

Inquisitive students may, of course, have their own opinions on geography. Many a bright youth might ask how we know that a place like Tokyo really exists. Teachers should be prepared to bring in eyewitnesses who have actually visited Tokyo, or accept that their students have the right to deny the existence of such a place. After all, Japan is as much a matter of opinion as spelling or evolution.

I met someone once who denied the existence of Wyoming, insisting it was a plot by cartographers to conceal the fact that there is a gap on the Earth where Wyoming is alleged to be. The evidence, he maintained, was simple and incontrovertible — he had never met anyone from Wyoming. He concluded, logically enough, that if he had never met anybody from Wyoming, that was because there is nobody from Wyoming, and that meant there is no Wyoming. Let’s invite him into the Kansas schools! He can explain what is not located where the map says “Wyoming,” and what this means for geology, history, physics and the interstate highway system.

Gym class would be totally revolutionized, of course. Nobody can deny that the rules of games are arbitrary and thus subject to change. Baseball, soccer, or tag — sports are as they are because we want them that way. Right now, the teacher picks the rules, but why should they have that sort of arbitrary power when nobody else gets a vote? If someone wants five strikes to an out, so be it. If they want to require all players to bat left-handed while singing “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” why not? They should have the opportunity to make the rules, at least until the next person comes along and claims that baseball is played with a tennis racket and that the base-runner gets an extra point for tackling the shortstop.

The kids may get a little confused when they go see the Royals play, but it’ll be well worth it. Think of the exercise their imaginations will get in school every day. Finding the hidden base while doing the hokey pokey has to be more fun than waiting patiently to see if anyone is ever going to hit a ball into left field. In a few years, the new sports resulting from this creative fervor will be recognized at the Olympic Games, where Kansans will take all the medals.

In the interest of sanity — and gravity — there will have to be a few concessions to conventional schooling in the new system. School buses probably will still keep a regular schedule, and even the most ardent kindergarten students won’t be able to make their blocks float in mid-air, even if they believe that castles should float and toy airplanes should really fly.

I, for one, look forward to the modified Kansas curriculum with delight and curiosity. At last, education for the open-minded.

Only 46 years old, West has been called — if only by his publisher — “the pre-eminent African American intellectual of his generation.” His work has elicited White House invitations and more requests as a speaker, blurb writer and distinguished guest than any individual could possibly fill. In a market in which it is increasingly difficult for genuine scholars to get an academic monograph in print, West has written or edited 20 books published by commercial publishers — 16 in the last 10 years alone.

Even more remarkable, except for a thin volume of rambling opinions on issues of the day called “Race Matters,” none of West’s books sell sufficiently to justify the commercial support his work has received. They are put into print (as one of his publishers informed me) as “prestige” publications to bring credit to the house.

One reason for the failure of West’s books to gain intellectual traction is that while his writings combine the philosophically grandiose with postmodern frou frou, they are singularly lacking in the intellectual power that would sustain either. His first effort, published when he was 29 (and old enough to know better) was titled “Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity.” Then followed “Prophetic Fragments,” “The American Evasion of Philosophy,” “The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought,” “Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times,” “Prophetic Reflections,” “Keeping Faith” and “Restoring Hope.”

If the subject matter implied by these titles suggests intellectual airiness, their style recalls a Jesse Jackson riff without the rhymes. Thus we learn from notes West has supplied for the new Cornel West Reader that “prophesy” (which appears to be his academic specialty) means injecting Marxist clichis into religious dogmas: “These introductory remarks to my second book, ‘Prophetic Fragments’ (1988), convey my moral outrage at the relative indifference of American religion to the challenge of social justice beyond charity.” The excerpt from the book that appears in the Reader is more explicit (the style pompously typical): “The principal aim of ‘Prophetic Fragments’ is to examine and explore, delineate and demystify, counter and contest the widespread accommodation of American religion to the political and cultural status quo.”

A few years ago, Leon Wieseltier wrote a cover feature for the New Republic on West’s oeuvre called “The Decline of the Black Intellectual.” West’s productions were, in Wieseltier’s mortifying words “monuments to the devastation of a mind by the squalls of theory.” Surveying the corpus of West’s academic work, Wieseltier concluded that the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Harvard professor was an intellectual empty suit whose writing was “noisy, tedious, slippery … sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared,” and whose works were “almost completely worthless.” As Gertrude Stein once said of the city of Oakland, there is no “there” there.

Ironically, it is the very emptiness, even incoherence, of his intellectual persona that West has managed to turn into a career virtue. One of the early catalysts of his rise into the cultural stratosphere was his plea for racial harmony. As a Marxist black radical he was almost unique in saying that it was not appropriate for other black militants to hate all whites and Jews. Yet he has endorsed the radicals grouped around the magazine Race Traitor, which calls for the “abolition of whiteness,” and two of America’s most notorious black race haters.

While West is known as the most prominent radical among African-Americans preaching ecumenical healing between blacks and Jews, he is a friend to Louis Farrakhan, the most influential anti-Semite in America. Recently, as Bill Bradley’s advisor on blacks, he encouraged the presidential candidate to meet with Al Sharpton (whose own senatorial candidacy West supported). This is the same Sharpton who incited black anti-Semites to boycott a Jewish-owned store in Harlem, which was then torched by a deranged member of the group and set on fire, killing seven people.

West can maintain this oxymoronic position — racial healer and bedfellow of racial extremists — for the simple reason that no one takes him seriously. He is the quintessential non-threatening radical, an African American who can wave the bloody shirt to orchestrate the heartstrings of white guilt, while coming to dinner at the Harvard faculty club and acting as a gentleman host.

The text of the “Cornel West Reader,” itself a holograph of his iconic place in the PC culture, reads like the diary of an inginue — breathless with discoveries both real and imagined, particularly the discovery of self. It is as though Georgie Porgie, reincarnated as a Harvard don, stuck in his thumb and pulled out this plum: “I am a Chekhovian Christian.” Thus West announces his intellectual identity in the introduction.

He proceeds to go on and on about his “Chekhovian Christian viewpoint,” whatever that means. But looking for tangible meaning in West’s prose is a terminally discouraging quest, a bit like looking for a breath of fresh air at the bottom of the sea. There is no “there” there, except perhaps the tedious injection of more religious sentiments into Marxist cant:

I am a Chekhovian Christian … By this I mean that I am obsessed with confronting the pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery.

If we ask why Chekhov (and not, say, Tony Kushner or Spike Lee), however, all we get is a blast of hot air: “I find the incomparable works of Anton Chekhov - the best singular body by a modern artist …” Or, as specifically as West can manage: “[Chekhov's] magisterial depiction of the cold Cosmos, indifferent Nature, crushing Fate and the cruel histories that circumscribe desperate, bored, confused and anxiety-ridden yet love-hungry people, who try to endure against all odds, rings true to me.”

Well, duh. What has this to do with identifying Chekhovianism as a genus of Christianity? It is beyond West’s mental reach to address the question his juxtaposition begs: How can a Christian universe informed by love and the prospect of redemption be squared with the cold Chekhovian Cosmos, an “indifferent Nature [and] crushing Fate?” Don’t spend too many gray cells attempting to answer that one.

Throughout, the intellectual superficiality is accompanied by an intellectual status-seeking worthy of a character out of Molihre: “Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human - a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives …” “I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard …” “My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos … My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O’Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov … And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms’s ‘Requiem’ and Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’”

Notwithstanding the intellectual jive, comedy would be an inapt term to describe a yearning like West’s, which has been socially constructed and is entirely unnecessary. For his intellectual charade reflects the political sickness of the modern academy, which has thrown over its traditional calling to the “disinterested pursuit of knowledge,” and assumed a new institutional identity as an “agency of social change.” West’s plight is that of a paradigmatic affirmative-action baby, whom the good wishes of his “oppressors” have elevated so far beyond his merits that he has lost sight of terra firma below. As a result, he has been condemned to a life of suspended animation, his entire being addressed to the impossible task of proving that he is someone he can never be.

Although West is almost incapable of writing a concrete sentence, he shows just enough autobiographical skirt in “The Cornel West Reader” to betray the source of this dilemma. Growing up as a precocious black child in the radical 1960s, West became a black militant activist, president of his senior high school class and an inevitable target of liberal uplift. At 17, he was recruited to Harvard where his political militancy convinced him that he had more to tell his professors than they had to teach him. He was determined, as he informs us, to press the university and its intellectual traditions into the service of his political agendas and not the other way around: to have its educational agendas imposed on him. “Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s, I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world.”

This was a crucial moment for what could have been a promising student — the confrontation of a brash but also impressionable youth with a 300-year-old educational institution dedicated to passing on the intellectual traditions of a 3,000-year-old civilization. It was a system that had shaped generations before him. Yet, it was a system that failed West, as its liberal ramparts collapsed before his militancy, backed by the cultural radicalism of the age.

In the years West was a student at Harvard, traditional disciplines were being broken down and destroyed, intellectual authority assaulted and deconstructed, and the university transformed into a quasi-political party. New disciplines and even entire institutions were created — ideologically committed black studies and women’s studies departments, paganized theology schools, Marxist and post-Marxist curricula in the fields of English and the humanities.

The old and tested rules of scholarship were rejected. Instead of educating and disciplining their intellectual tyro, Harvard and its liberal faculties merely encouraged him. It was the PC thing to do for the oppressed. Cornel West’s aborted education was a case of what Shelby Steele has analyzed as liberal whites looking for moral absolution and radical blacks looking for the easy way up — and who could blame them or West for that? As a result, the once-promising student never learned the difference between an intellectual argument and a political attitude, between the pursuit of an intellectual inquiry and the search for “answers” that were ideologically correct.

“The Cornel West Reader” is a testament to the intellectual vacuum that a progressive education creates. The trappings of intellect are in place, the canonical names invoked, the capsule histories recalled, the theories broadly rehearsed. But behind the footnotes and the latinate prose, the vulgar mind of the activist is feverishly at work. A “discourse” is produced in which political postures invariably substitute for thought.

The intellectual ruin of West is not an isolated case. There is a whole generation of racially favored intellectual water flies — Bell Hooks, Michael Dyson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Patricia Williams, to name a few — whose cultural elevation is not only unrelated to any serious intellectual achievement, but has eliminated the possibility of one.

For them, as for West, the pathos lies in what might have been. The left-wing university culture has stripped them of an educational opportunity that is given only once per individual lifetime. Meanwhile, the self-appointed social redeemers, whom West thanks for helping him along, are in reality the very people who deprived him of a chance to learn the hard, old-fashioned way, and thus helped to destroy whatever intellectual potential he may once have had.