That’s not to defend Hatfield’s dishonesty (or his sloppy, unbelievable sourcing, should the tale be true). It’s just to note that none of the three Bush biographies now out — including his autobiography — has succeeded in penetrating his mildly charismatic, militantly unreflective averageness, to fill in the blanks in his past and explain how this under-accomplished son of privilege amassed a $100 million campaign war chest a year before the 2000 election, making the American presidency his to lose.

Bill Minutaglio’s “First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty” is by far the best of the lot, but that’s not saying much. All the books cover much the same ground: George Herbert Walker and Barbara Bush leaving the Eastern elite and lighting out for Texas; George the elder’s absence from the family as he attempts to make his own way in the oil industry independently (starting out with a job his father got for him, of course); George W.’s sister Robin’s tragic death at 4, when he was 7; the party years at Andover and Yale (friends from those days thought Bush was the model for John Belushi’s Bluto in “Animal House”); the notorious “nomadic years” of the early ’70s.

Then came the putative “entrepreneurial” years, when Bush returned to his dad’s Midland, Texas, oil roots and got family and friends to help him fail ever upward. Eventually he turned his investment in the aptly named, money-losing Arbusto Energy into a million-dollar stake in a much bigger firm and ponied up about $600,000 for a tiny share of the Texas Rangers baseball team, which was worth almost $15 million when he sold it last year. (To be fair, maybe the books explain more than I’ve given them credit for. Because if your life worked out this dang well, you might wanna run for president, too.)

Like a lot of reporters before and since, Minutaglio and Hatfield spend much time scouring the record to find out how Bush made all that money. (Bush’s own book blithely ignores such questions.) They dutifully — and in Hatfield’s case breathlessly — cite the controversies: the lawsuits and the Security and Exchange Commission investigations, the links to people connected to unsavory Saudi investors. But none of his critics have ever pinned him with any crime, or even any clear-cut breach of business ethics. He apparently made his money the old-fashioned way: He got some from his family, and made the rest thanks to the kindness of wealthy friends — or strangers who wanted to be his friends.

These books are less useful as biographies of our would-be president than as primers in American privilege. But as such, they’re very useful. Bush, like Reagan, stands for the open defense of inherited status and power, of the rights of people like us to run the world because people like us have always run it — a kind of affirmative action for the white and wealthy that was challenged, to Bush’s chagrin, in the 1960s and 1970s, but began its rehabilitation under Reagan in the 1980s. The next election could be a plebiscite on the notion of dynasty vs. meritocracy — but only if Bush faces someone other than Vice President Al Gore, similarly privileged and protected from the need to be self-reliant.

And yet, to his advantage, Bush has a shadowy romance with the non-white and non-wealthy that accounts for his political success. He’s in touch with the basic optimism of low-income and minority folks, with their aversion to being treated like victims, as well as their instinctive sympathy for a black sheep like George W. His pedigree makes him dynasty material; his flaws make him interesting to the rest of us. If he can integrate both, he’ll be president, and he might then even be a good one. But judging from the contents of these books, it’s not clear that he can hang onto all parts of his complex past as he moves into his overdetermined future.

Bush’s autobiography, “A Charge to Keep,” is the worst read of the three, devoid of all detail about what makes Bush’s life mildly intriguing: his temper, his years of rowdy drunkenness, his unresolved relationship with his father, the undercurrent of sadness and self-destructiveness that may well spring (we’ll never know for sure; the Bushes are hostile to “the couch”) from the early death of his sister. The book reads like most inspirational bestsellers by famous people on the back slope of their careers — former President Jimmy Carter, Children’s Defense Fund president Marion Wright Edelman, Gen. Colin Powell — as a collection of easy-listening observations best left on the bedside table for a night when sleep is elusive and there’s nothing on TV. Try this:

Faith, family and friends … They guided my father during twelve years as president and vice president; they are the ways by which ultimately, I believe, all of our lives will be measured … I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans. Politics is a fickle business. Polls change. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s adversary. People lavish praise and attention. Many times it is genuine; sometimes it is not. Yet I build my life on a foundation that will not shift. My faith frees me.

And so on. Written by Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes, it skates over the nomadic period between his graduation from Yale and his entry into Harvard Business School in just a few pages. Most of those pages are devoted to his flyboy years in the Texas Air National Guard. Bush spends just a few sparse pages on his entrepreneurial years, a time when old friends from Midland just happened to hook him up with the right people at the right time to help him make his fortune.

And yet, from all three books, a picture of Bush’s early life emerges. He opens “Charge,” after a meandering introduction, with a stark and moving picture of the day his sister Robin died of leukemia. By his own account and others, it was the trauma of his otherwise happy childhood. He didn’t know she was dying beforehand, though his parents did, and his high-WASP family didn’t discuss her death much afterward, either. But he took it hard, as did his mother, and would be plagued by nightmares for years.

Later, at Andover, asked to write a paper about an “emotional experience” — only Minutaglio’s book reveals the topic he chose was Robin’s death — Bush struggled to find a synonym for the overused word “tears” and came up with “lacerates” in his thesaurus. He described “lacerates running down my cheeks,” causing what must have been a stone-hearted teacher to flunk him.

Of course, Bush’s attendance at cold-blooded Andover was a key stepping stone on his path to the presidency. When the Bush family moved from Midland to Houston, George W. had gone to the tony Kincaid school, known as the place for rich kids who couldn’t get into the more rigorous St. John’s. East Coast privilege obviously didn’t yet cut mustard in Houston, but it certainly did at Andover, where the mediocre young Bush was accepted, like Bushes before him, despite failing to distinguish himself intellectually. And so it would go at Yale, too — where he was a solid C student — and at Harvard Business School.

Through pop foreign-policy quizzes and hapless attempts to list the books he’s read, a question continues to dog Bush: Is he stupid? Time magazine obtained his SAT scores, and it pains me to admit they’re exactly the same as mine, only inverted — he got 660 in math and 540 in verbal, while I got the high score on verbal. (Of course I marched off proudly to the University of Wisconsin without a thought about Yale; those weren’t Ivy League scores even in the ’60s and ’70s.)

Bush mostly thrived at Yale, among other legacy admissions and his frat-boy buddies. But he kept up his Houston roots, becoming engaged to Cathy Wolfson, a brainy coed at Houston’s Rice University, though the pair would never marry. The Hatfield book insists their trouble stemmed from the Bush family’s distaste for her Jewish stepfather (which the Bushes denied); Minutaglio, typically, underplays the story, but does reveal that the girl’s social status suffered due to “whispers” about her “merchant” roots, and that while the elder George Bush liked to play matchmaker, he never matched his son up with the wealthy and beautiful Wolfson. Bush himself devotes only one sentence to their romance.

In “Charge,” he describes his time at Yale as a lost age of innocence, just before the anti-war and civil rights movements ignited the nation’s campuses. This is silly, of course — those were the years of the Watts riots and other urban uprisings. While Bush was there, a majority of Yale students signed an anti-war petition, and the university’s black student union staged a two-day class boycott. He missed all of it. He did manage to rouse himself to protest one social outrage: the increasing attacks on fraternities, especially on their sadistic hazing rituals. He was first quoted in the New York Times in 1967, defending DKE’s practice of branding new pledges. The resulting mark “resembled a cigarette burn,” Bush told the Times.

There was another cause that got his goat at Yale, though he wouldn’t be able to articulate his outrage for some years: the spectacle of privileged youth protesting the institutions of their privilege. This utterly cheesed the young Bush, first at Yale, then at Harvard. Minutaglio quotes him later, describing his sense of anger at his left-wing classmates: “These are the ones who felt so guilty that they had been given so many blessings in life — like an Andover or a Yale education — that they felt they should overcompensate by trying to give everyone else in life the same thing.”

He would find solace, years later, in the works of David Horowitz, a ’60s radical who would become famous for denouncing the decade in the same outsized rhetoric that he earlier used to promote it. George W. resonated to the critiques of Horowitz and other reformed radicals, who gave him solace that his inherited privilege should be enjoyed, not resisted, or — God forbid — redistributed.
(Ironically, his discomfort with Yale’s prevailing liberalism helped
the son of privilege craft an unlikely self-image as an oppressed Texas
outsider, which would serve him well personally and especially politically in the years to come.)

Despite how many others have covered it, it’s still worth spending some time on those entrepreneurial years. These authors, as well as reporters for the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the New York Times and, yes, Salon, have sniffed around Bush’s vaguely dodgy investments, stock trades, buyouts and mergers, and none has come up with a blockbuster story to tell.

Here’s the story in a nutshell (the narrative comes from Minutaglio, since Bush is mostly silent on these issues and Hatfield’s book, which hews to essentially the same story, was withdrawn by the publisher and thus shouldn’t be relied on for factual accuracy): Bush mostly cleaned up his act, went to Harvard Business School (“the West Point of Capitalism,” a Cambridge cab driver told him) and became a loyal foot soldier for the profit motive. He drove out to Midland in a 1970 Cutlass to be a “land man,” a glorified paralegal who researched the ownership of the mineral rights beneath certain plots of land, and hooked them up with those who wanted to drill. He then founded Arbusto Energy (the name means “bush” or “shrub” in Spanish), and began to attract investment to fund his own drilling.

Bush would later call it “entrepreneurial heaven … one of the few places in the country where you can go without portfolio and train yourself and become competitive.” Of course he wasn’t exactly without portfolio. His uncle Jonathan Bush, a stockbroker, would tell Minutaglio, “I introduced him to clients. I marketed his firm. I think I was probably pretty helpful.” One of his best friends, Charlie Younger, added: “He could get into doors with his name that you and I couldn’t — with oil people. His Dad had friends, and he didn’t mind calling on them.”

Even with those advantages, it wasn’t easy for Bush to strike it rich in Midland. He got distracted by an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978, though he won the Republican primary, an amazing reach for a 32-year-old without a résumé. But thanks to Uncle Jonathan, the money-losing Arbusto attracted a growing list of investors, including William Draper and John Macomber, who would later become presidents of the U.S. Export-Import Bank under the Reagan and Bush administrations; James Bath, a front man for shady Saudi investors, including the father of Osama Bin Laden; and, when times were really tough, Philip Uzielli, an old Princeton pal of James Baker, George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, who invested $1 million and lost almost all of it.

Ultimately the firm — whose name was changed to the snazzier sounding “Bush Exploration” after Bush’s father became vice president — never made a profit; the number of dry holes it drilled would just about equal the number that yielded oil. Bush Exploration was rescued, first by investments from a firm called Spectrum 7, then by Harken Energy, which bought Spectrum and was awarded rights to drill off the shores of Bahrain, beating out giants like Amoco even though the Texas firm had never drilled overseas, or under water.

Six weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the son of the U.S. president dumped two-thirds of his Harken stock, earning almost $850,000, or two-and-a-half times its original value, on the eve of Harken announcing a huge quarterly loss. Bush faced accusations that he’d traded on insider knowledge to time his stock sale. Unhappily, he had neglected to file insider trading forms on the sale, triggering a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and the issue would dog him through his run for governor. Ultimately, though, the SEC declined to file charges.

In the end, baseball was where Bush ultimately struck oil, so to speak. In 1989 he invested $606,000 — or 1.8 percent of the sale price — in the Texas Rangers, and became the team’s managing partner. When the ownership group sold the Rangers in 1998, Bush’s stake would be worth $14.9 million. He was already governor; he had finally made his fortune; all that was left was the pursuit of the presidency, Minutaglio says, and finally Bush felt worthy to pursue it.

All three books make clear that Bush is to his party and his era what Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were to theirs — a peerless politician who unites his followers by virtue of his charisma and personal power, and frees them from the tyranny of ideological hairsplitting and circular firing squads. But whereas Clinton and Reagan came to their political personas by way of dysfunctional, working-class homes and absent, alcoholic fathers, Bush was handed everything his predecessors had to work for. And yet they all found redemption the same way, in the endless orgy of approval-seeking known as American politics. Do they have more in common than is apparent from their lineage?

Certainly they all had absent fathers, of a sort. It’s hard not to see Bush’s entire life as an attempt to live up to his father’s achievements and avenge his disappointments. You could read these three books and come to the defensible conclusion that Bush ran for Texas governor mostly to get back at Gov. Ann Richards for her legendary insult to his father at the 1988 convention: “Poor George, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” One of the most (unwittingly) poignant moment in “Charge” is when Bush recalls his father giving him cufflinks he’d gotten from his parents when he went into the Navy at 18; George W. finally received them at 48, when he was elected governor of Texas.

And Bush’s path to politics took him through alcohol troubles, too, mostly of his own making. At Yale, his drinking drew notice, but wasn’t a problem — it was part of the curriculum for a member of the rowdiest fraternity on campus. But the partying continued when he joined the Air National Guard and didn’t let up when he left. He bounced around, working on a couple of Republican Senate campaigns and signing on as a management trainee for an agribusiness company in Houston, then quit. His favorite job, he reveals in his autobiography, was sporting goods salesman at Sears. (There is an entry in the index to
“Charge” for Sears Roebuck and Co., by the way, but not for Securities and Exchange Commission.)

Bush apparently reached his nadir around Christmas 1972. Home for the holidays, worrying his parents by working too little and partying too much, he got carried away at a party with his 15-year-old brother Marvin, and drove the boy home drunk, smashing into a neighbor’s garbage cans and infuriating his parents. His father asked to see him in the den, and a drunk George W. burst in: “I hear you’re looking for me. You wanna go mano a mano right here?”

Jeb Bush broke the tension by announcing to his unhappy parents that George had been accepted to Harvard Business School. (Would that all domestic crises on the verge of violence could be diffused so easily!) But the angry young George insisted he didn’t plan to go to Harvard, he just wanted to prove he could get in (no mean feat given his solid C’s at Yale).

After the drunk-driving incident, his worried father got him a job at Project PULL (the placement Hatfield would insist was community service to expunge his alleged cocaine bust). And Bush may be counted among the many young people the inner-city project saved from self-destruction. Bush himself would say he found a “mentor” in PULL founder John White, a former Houston Oiler turned community activist in Houston’s African-American Third Ward. It was White who urged him to accept the entry to Harvard Business School. “If you really care about these kids as much as I think you do, why don’t you go and learn more and then you can really help,” Bush says White told him, and he took the advice.

After the Hatfield firestorm, Jay Leno would make fun of the fact that the Bush campaign was denying a cocaine arrest preceded his Project PULL stint, when the truth was it was only a drunk driving incident — as though the latter wasn’t scandal enough. Even Minutaglio’s softer version of the nomadic years provokes the reader to wonder what was eating at the affable son of privilege, driving him to squander his advantages on alcohol and a badly controlled anger.

And none of the books resolve it. It’s easy to see he spent most of his adulthood trying, and failing, to measure up to his father, struggling to go “mano a mano.” Ultimately, though, he did what his father was never able to do: find acceptance as a Texan and win statewide office. And his personal troubles paradoxically make him a far better politician than his father could dream of being. While Bush hasn’t publicly reckoned with his demons and how he gained control over them, the semi-public struggle has become part of his legend, giving him what depth he has and a sympathetic, instinctive identification with the underdog. He, his handlers, the media and the voters all know that’s the most interesting thing about him.

It also threatens to ruin him, as time and again, he faces questions about his past and flubs them with a series of lame non-denials, leading the public to the inescapable conclusion that sometime more than 25 years ago he did some kind of illegal drug. Odds are he’ll face the questions again, because Americans don’t like mysteries, and they don’t like unfairness. Everybody knows that hard-drinking, drunk-driving, angry C students from Houston’s Third Ward don’t grow up to become governor, after all — let alone president.

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.”

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

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 was only one bitter omission: As the Giants honored past owners, managers, broadcasters and staff, the team left out Hank Greenwald, the legendary and beloved broadcaster who was the voice of the team from 1979 through 1996, except for a two-year stint with the New York Yankees in the late 1980s. After an unhappy contract negotiation, Greenwald retired three years ago, prematurely, and with some bitterness at his treatment by Giants Vice President Larry Baer.

Earlier this year he vented his spleen — tastefully — in a sweet memoir, “This Copyrighted Broadcast.” The book is a love letter to the Giants, singling out president Peter Magowan and manager Dusty Baker for special praise. But because he devoted a handful of pages to his complaints about Baer — and a couple of paragraphs to disparaging superstar player Barry Bonds — the Giants have frozen him out of the organization. He used to occasionally fill in behind the mike as needed, broadcasting weekend home games with his former buddies, but now the team leaves some broadcasts understaffed. When it was time to hold a book party, it was hosted by the Oakland A’s, not the Giants.

Greenwald attended the Giants’ final Candlestick game last week, making his way down to a seat behind the dugout, thronged by fans. His classy successor in the broadcast booth, ESPN star Jon Miller, did the right thing and asked him up to call the game’s fourth inning on the radio. But he was never recognized out on the field that day.

Greenwald isn’t bitter, he says. He’s enjoying his retirement, and more time with his family. But when I talked to him before the end of the season it was clear he’s still an avid fan, catching every Giants game and well-versed on the team’s late-season stumble.

You’ve been a pretty vocal critic of the current umpiring situation. What was your reaction to the umpires’ ultimatum — threatening to quit, and then having their resignations selectively accepted?

Well, it’s not anything that I couldn’t see coming. What they are essentially is a group that is willing to be paid by Major League Baseball but doesn’t want to be ruled by them. And somehow society doesn’t work that way. And I think it’s time that they learned that they are not an entity unto themselves, and that there has to be some conformity with some sort of order. And right now I think they just feel that they can do whatever they want and don’t have to be governed by the rule book, by the definition of the strike zone, by any kind of code of behavior — that it’s OK for players to be suspended for their behavior, but you can’t do that to an umpire. And they’ve got a lot coming to them and I don’t feel at all sorry.

Has it gotten worse in the last couple of years, or is it just that I’ve gotten more impatient?

No, I think it’s gotten worse over the last several years, because they feel that they’re untouchable, that nothing can happen to them, so their arrogance on the field knows no bounds. And I’m maybe the first person who’s called into question the integrity issue. I mean, they always, “Well, you can question our judgment, but you can’t question our integrity.” Well, hell.

Yes, we can.

Yes, we can! And we are.

I was at a Giants game recently where they threw out Mark McGwire in the third inning. I’m not saying any player should be God, but it was a questionable strike call; he questioned it, and within five or six seconds he was gone. And the stadium was packed to see McGwire. What’s the resolution in your mind?

Well, I think the resolution is that you set up a code of conduct that they have to adhere to, and that they have to realize that when they get out of bounds in their behavior they’re going to be treated like ballplayers — be suspended. And they can be fired for their actions. There has to be a showdown, as painful as it may be. It has to be seen through to its conclusion. Because there’s a lot at stake here. I mean, this is a game where you can ban Pete Rose because you question his integrity, but you let the umpires work who will do things that will influence the outcome of the game because of a certain spite they may be carrying inside of them.

So, you’ve retired from broadcasting. You seem to still follow it very, very closely. They can’t take that out of your blood, I suppose. Are you still following the Giants?

I sure do. I listen or watch the games all the time. You know, I’m a great Dusty Baker fan.

I know. Let’s talk about his greatness just for a minute. I talk about it every chance I get.

[laughs]

What is it about Dusty? How does he accomplish what he does — sportswriters have picked the Giants to finish near the bottom the last three years, and they’ve been on top or close to it every season?

Well, I think that Dusty has not lost the feel for what ballplayers go through, even though he’s been removed from that situation himself for probably 15 years. But he has never forgotten the day-to-day frustrations of a ballplayer. He sits down with them. He cares about their families. He knows what’s bothering a player. And guys feel that he cares about them. And they play hard for him.

What’s the best news for baseball in the last few years? Since you’ve left?

I think the new stadiums that are going up are the best news. Because baseball went through a stage where they all wanted new stadiums, and so many cities got them. And they were awful. The Astroturf. They were circular. They weren’t made for baseball; they were really made for football. Multipurpose stadiums. And they now suddenly realize that the concept of the old ballpark was really what baseball was about, in terms of the fans.

And the downtown ballpark.

Yeah, and having them downtown, I think is a very important thing. And now you’re going to have some — how do I put this? — instant nostalgia. People who saw pictures of the old ballparks now are going to get to go to games and be there in person.

For example, in Boston, where they’re going to get a new park, with technology the way it is, and design and all of that, there’s no reason you can’t reproduce the look of Fenway Park, as hallowed as it was, as you see it from the stands, but with all new infrastructure, the comforts, amenities that people deserve in this day and age. But when they sit there and look out it looks the same.

You talk in the book about the greatness of the Sosa/McGwire home run chase last year. But is there a downside to that?

Well, the only downside is that expectations get so unrealistic on the part of fans that they start thinking that if McGwire only hits 64 this year, he’s had a bad year.

Right. And also, I like Dusty Baker baseball — the hit-and-run, stealing, just being aggressive on the base paths and eking out runs. It seems like that’s less valued than it used to be.

Well, it’s possible. The home run has always been the glamour hit, so to speak. But I think people come out to see teams win and play well … I don’t know that the superstar factor is that strong. But I think a winning ballclub certainly is. And that’s what’s more sustaining in terms of fan interest. The exception being if you have a star pitcher. Whether it be a Randy Johnson today, or somebody like [Sandy] Koufax or [Juan] Marichal or guys going back into the ’60s. Certainly in the case of the Dodgers, you could have proved years back that on the nights that Koufax pitched, he had at least somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 more people.

What do you think is the worst news for baseball in the last few years since you’ve left?

Well, this umpire thing is probably not going to affect the fans a whole lot, because the game’s still going to be played. But there’ll probably be another player-owner war on the horizon. I’m sure of that, in 2001 or whenever this next contract comes up. And there are other problems that need to be addressed, namely the playoffs and the World Series being played at night in climates that are conducive to monsoons and building snowmen and things like that. All this talk about the kids, and we have to do things for the young fans and make new fans. And the games go on in the East at hours that the –

That they can’t stay up for.

Even adults can’t! And that’s utterly ridiculous. If TV said to play at 3 in the morning they’d play at 3 in the morning.

You called the wild card playoff spot “the Viagra of baseball,” but Viagra’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’m wondering what you think of the wild card now.

My analogy to Viagra was it didn’t matter how you got there, as long as you made it.

Right. I was against it until last year, when the Giants were fighting for a wild card spot, and now I think it’s great.

Well, I don’t. You’re rewarding something that diminishes finishing first. I think what needs to happen, and will eventually, is that baseball will expand again. And they will go to 32 teams, which is a workable number. And it certainly would be my hope that at that point they’d eliminate the wild card, because now, knowing baseball, they will have eight four-team divisions, four in each league. And if you have four teams finishing first, you’ve got two rounds of playoffs right there. So you won’t have a need for a second-place team to get in.

They’ll probably create two wild card spots.

Yeah, I know. And then play until December.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the Giants’ reaction to your book. I read that you wound up doing an event in Oakland, and that seemed kind of unfortunate. Has there been hostility? I mean, you’re really only hard on Larry Baer.

Yeah, I know.

But I guess that’s enough?

Well, apparently it is. I don’t know. Did you get the impression that I trashed the organization?

No, no. You praise them for privately financing their great new stadium — and even though you hate seat licenses, you defended the Giants in this case –

I defended that, absolutely. I said the city ought to build a statue to Magowan. Which I still believe. But [Baer] had it coming. And I was in a position to say it, and others who are there are not. And so I felt this was the appropriate forum. And there’s certainly been no denial. I mean, as I said in the book, I felt he had no respect for what we did as broadcasters. Witness the way he treated us. But others can’t talk, and that’s understandable.

A friend of mine has never gotten over your leaving broadcasting. He says you sound like somebody who grew up and became a broadcaster because you loved baseball, whereas certain other broadcasters, not mentioning any names, sound like they grew up and became broadcasters because they loved broadcasting. And I thought that was an interesting distinction.

Well, I certainly would agree with my end of it, yeah. There’s no question about that. Because as a kid in Detroit following the Tigers during the war years I became a big fan. And you’d become a fan in those days by listening to the radio and going to games, which I had the chance to do. And then later, when we moved to upstate New York, in Rochester, I’d go to the minor league games, of course. But I’d sit in my room at night and see how many major league games I could pick up on the air. And I knew at a very early age that this was something I really wanted to do. And I loved the game, and I read everything I could read about it. I wanted to learn the stories and the lore and the history of the game. And I tried to communicate that, and I felt that you have an obligation as a broadcaster to stimulate the imagination of would-be baseball fans in a way that mine was. You hope you can help to create a new generation of fans, just as the broadcasters before did.

Well, you did it. Are we going to hear you again?

I think it’s doubtful. I mean, I’m not seeking any work at this point. But the biggest thrill I’ve had this year was sitting in with my son who’s doing the games in Stockton. And being on the air with him for a few innings. And that satisfies me, in my career, and in my life.

But on Friday, U.S. State Department officials in Jakarta had told Salon News that Indonesia’s regime — which had banned Nairn from the country for his assiduous coverage of human rights abuses by the Indonesian military in East Timor — planned a criminal show trial of Nairn that could have sent him to prison there for 10 years. Days of diplomacy by U.S. officials failed to secure Nairn’s release. The full story of why the regime reversed itself is not yet known.

American newspapers had been strangely silent about Nairn’s captivity. Although the New York Times reported Nairn’s release on Monday, it had never mentioned his arrest. The Washington Post ran a Reuters dispatch last week. The Associated Press reported his arrest and his release but nothing in between.

Upon his release, Nairn told reporters in Singapore Monday that the commander of Indonesia’s armed forces, Gen. Wiranto, will determine whether militiamen in East Timor fight U.N. peacekeepers sent to restore order in the province.

“Once Gen. Wiranto gives the order to the militias to stop the terror, the militia will stop,” said Nairn, a free-lance reporter for the Nation, Pacifica Radio and the PBS “Newshour.” “This has been a tightly controlled army and police operation.”

Nairn, who witnessed a massacre of civilians by Indonesian troops in 1991 in East Timor, said the Indonesian military was behind the terror that pro-Jakarta militias inflicted on the East Timorese after they voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia in a U.N.-sponsored referendum on Aug. 30.

While he was detained at Koren military headquarters in Dili, Nairn said, he saw groups of militiamen there, and one of the officers questioning him said they were with the notorious Aitarak militia.

“You could see them going out on their motorbikes and their trucks fully armed to do their attacks around Dili and it was the same story at Polda, the police base in Dili,” he said. “You could see the uniformed Aitarak people wandering in and out of the intelligence and operations rooms, so clearly the militias were operating out of the army and police bases.”

Salon News will have the full story behind Nairn’s arrest, captivity and release later on Monday.

So more than a few reformers have begun to flirt with heretofore taboo ideas — charters, school privatization, merit pay for teachers, even vouchers. And some are even flirting with supporting a Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Bush’s Sept. 2 education policy speech in Los Angeles, in which he committed himself to closing the achievement gap for poor and minority kids and cracking down on the failures of Title 1, was a hit with many education reformers, and some of them will even say it publicly.

Bush won points for both style and substance. “The fact that it was about poor kids and minority kids was right on the money, because that’s where the feds are supposed to count,” says Kati Haycock, executive director of the Education Trust, a respected Washington advocacy group for low-income education reform. “And he’s clearly learned that accountability matters.”

But the centerpiece of Bush’s accountability plan frightened some advocates: Schools receiving Title 1 funds that, after three years, don’t show improvement in low-income kids’ achievement will see their federal funding yanked, and given to parents — to the tune of $1,500 a year per student.

Is Bush a dedicated education reformer, finally enforcing standards for poor kids? Or is he a right-wing ideologue trying to slouch toward vouchers — a word, the New York Times noted, he never used during his speech?

Salon News asked Haycock, who has closely watched Bush’s reform efforts in Texas, to talk about the implications of the Republican front-runner’s proposals. Although Haycock worked closely on education reform issues with the White House, she’s won no friends there by praising Bush’s education plans to NBC News and other media outlets.

Judging from his Texas policies, Haycock says, Bush means business. He’s used both carrots and sticks to force schools to devise strategies to improve the achievement of poor, black and Latino kids — and achievement gaps have narrowed significantly in his state. So Haycock thinks Bush deserves a serious look from education advocates — although she notes that Clinton, too, was a committed education reformer when governor of Arkansas, while as president he has disappointed his former allies.

The big news of Bush’s proposal was his notion that if a given school can’t make things better for poor kids, we’re going to give the money to their parents. How did you respond to hearing that?

When I read the speech, I said, Wow! The fact that it was about poor kids and minority kids was right on the money, because that’s where the feds are supposed to count. He made it clear that he thinks these kids can learn, no excuses, and that he understood the ramifications of continued low achievement. That was just great. I also think that he’s clearly learned a good part of the Texas lesson — even though a lot of that good work was started on [former Texas Gov.] Ann Richards’ watch — that making schools accountable for poor kids really matters.

In other words, if we just say you’re accountable and you’ve got to get better, but there are no consequences — which is how it’s been for a very long time — I don’t think we get their attention the way we do when there are consequences. Now the question is whether the consequence that he’s proposing will have the effect that he seems to think it will. I’m not sure.

You mean: Will taking away those schools’ funding, and giving it to parents, really help poor kids?

A part of me says, Wait a second, you’re talking about accountability, yet what you’d be doing [by giving the money to parents] is in many cases sending dollars to schools where there is no accountability whatsoever, where the kids don’t have to take the state exams, where there is no public reporting of data, and where parents may be getting the shaft again — even though you won’t know they are. I mean, if accountability is critically important, then you have to extend it over there.

My point of view is, if a school doesn’t get better, there’s got to be big-time consequences — and that can end with pulling the dollars out of the school and sending them someplace else. My own preference is that they ought to go to enable the poor kid to attend a high-performing public school. Because that’s the only place where $1,500 is going to get you anything. But there are some communities where there aren’t high-performing public schools for poor kids. So, in those circumstances, if the school is willing to submit to the state exams and show how different kinds of kids are doing on the exams, then fine. Better to do that than to lock kids into crummy public schools.

Do you worry that this is his stalking horse for vouchers? He didn’t use the word, but …

It could be. It would be naive to suggest that the right has not figured out that this is the easiest way to sell public money going into private schools. Because it makes sense not just to people who were always in favor of vouchers, but to people like me, who know damn well how poor quality most high-poverty schools are. If you say to me: Should we hold poor kids hostage in low-performance public schools? I’ve got to say: No, we shouldn’t. So it is the one place where you can appeal to people who otherwise have their doubts about this. Who knows? I don’t know what’s in this guy’s heart. And that side of it does worry me somewhat.

When I think about a future, 10 or 20 years from now, where Catholic kids are educated separated from Muslim kids and white kids from black kids, even more so than it already is today, I find that frightening. But then the other side of me says: What’s scarier, that, or continuing to consign generations more of black kids and brown kids and poor kids to low quality education, and dooming them to lives on the margins? How do you measure the trade-off there? Polls say more and more black folks in particular are saying, These reformers are taking decades to change public education, so thank you, I’ll take the vouchers.

And of course in lots of low-income schools we have de facto segregation already, where 100 percent black or minority kids are stuck in a terrible school.

Right. So I guess in the end the question for people like me is, Where does this guy really want to go with it? Is this but one piece, this voucher thing, one piece of a strategy that’s really about getting serious about the education of poor kids and really about making sure they are in high-quality schools? Then I’m game to go along, although I’m careful.

Or is it the first step toward a larger, ideological assault on public education?

Well, we don’t know, but I have to point out: Bush sure talked about poor kids more in that single speech than a lot of Democrats have so far in the whole campaign.

Here’s what I don’t understand: We all know the problems with Title 1 funding and the lack of accountability. But in 1994, the Clinton administration presided over an overhaul of Title 1 that was all about accountability. If you read what it was designed to do, it sounds like it was written by the Education Trust.

It was. It was written by the Commission on Chapter 1, which is housed here.

So what happened? Why haven’t they gone forward with making sure that those reforms are actually taking place state by state and school by school — making sure that poor and minority kids actually get help in school?

What the White House will tell you is that what happened was the ’94 elections. With the change in the composition of Congress and the shift in the majority, the ability to be tough on states evaporated, and all of the consensus went away. So they couldn’t really accomplish what had been the original design. I just don’t accept that as an honest answer. From the get-go they fought very hard against us on the issue of [analyzing] data by race and poverty …

Looking specifically at how poor kids, or minority kids, do compared with better-off kids?

They fought fiercely against that. They fought fiercely against the suggestion that schools had to make progress for poor kids. That, after all, was supposed to be the trade-off in the ’94 law. The idea was the feds would back off from telling schools how they spent the money, but in return parents would be given the information to know whether those schools had made progress with their kids — with poor kids. Well, all of the regulations the department issued let schools demonstrate progress either by showing that their poor kids’ scores went up — or, if they prefer, by showing that the school average went up. Which means that rich kids’s scores can go up, and the school can improve overall, while poor kids’ scores are actually going down. So they broke the bargain as far as I’m concerned.

It got to be so nobody would even say the words “poor kids” on the Hill. We’d come in and talk about poor kids and they’d say, “You can’t talk about poor kids –”

But now Republicans can talk about poor kids?

It’s wild. So all I’m saying is, Right now George Bush’s message on education gives me more hope that something might happen for poor kids than what I’m hearing elsewhere. And in Texas they’re doing the right things for poor and minority kids.

Isn’t there some worry, though, that while test-score gaps are closing, there’s too much “teaching to the test,” just drilling kids on what they’re going to be taught, and it’s not measuring learning?

Yeah, but they’re designing a new test that’s going to be much better, much more rigorous. So they’re really doing the right things. One of my staff members, a longtime Democrat, went out to Texas and did advance work on the release of their new education standards, and Bush was there. She came back and said, “This is the first time I’ve ever done advance work for an event like this with a Republican, but you know what? He’s really genuine.” So who knows? I don’t know what to make of this. The White House isn’t happy with us right now, but that’s OK. Our job is to call people out on these issues. And people are talking about it.