Educator's Vision Lives On In Network of 'Basic Schools'

By Linda Jacobson

Portland, Ore.

The small, one-story house in a working-class neighborhood here seems an unlikely spot to find the ideas of one of the 20th century's most highly respected educators being put into practice.

But inside Kelly Community House—where a mother can borrow a business suit for a job interview or pick up a free loaf of bread for her family—parents, professionals, and children are demonstrating what the late Ernest L. Boyer meant when he said schools should have a sense of community.

The house is a project of Clinton Kelly Elementary School, which is striving to become the kind of place Mr. Boyer, the U.S. commissioner of education under President Jimmy Carter, described in his 1995 report titled The Basic School .