Can Equity and Excellence Coexist?

On June 15 of this year, President Clinton, speaking at the University of California, San Diego, issued a call for "a great and unprecedented conversation about race" in the United States. A week earlier, he had appointed a seven-member advisory panel headed by historian John Hope Franklin to guide efforts over the coming year to promote such a national dialogue and to devise concrete strategies for addressing lingering issues of discrimination. The project, which is to include town hall meetings and other public forums beginning this fall, will culminate with the release of the distinguished panel's report to the president next summer.

With the following Commentary, Education Week begins a yearlong series of essays aimed at locating the particular role of schools in affecting, for good or ill, the nation's racial and ethnic harmony. The series also will provide glimpses of how diversity and the cultural issues that surround it have changed educational institutions over the past three decades and what such institutions can do to help resolve the problem Mr. Clinton terms "the unfinished work of our time--to lift the burden of race and redeem the promise of America."

According to the theory of complementarity, some attitudes, actions, and events ought always to be kept together. Among these, for example, are love and justice, stability and change, excellence and equity. The two go well together. Despite or because of differences within their couplets, each component rounds out the other and gives rise to a new harmonic whole. In great hymns, voices in the treble and bass clefs often move in opposite directions and in so doing...