November 28, 1984

In addition, Chester E. Finn Jr., a professor at Vanderbilt University who worked with the Governors to develop the blueprint for the citizens' lobby, has reportedly modified plans for a second project, an "Institute for Better Schools," that he has been developing with the Governors and with Diane Ravitch, an adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.

When the Westbrook Teachers Association learned last month of the teacher's illness, the group sent a formal request to the town's board of education requesting that the 60 teachers in the district be permitted to donate their sick leave to Alice Coes, the teacher who is ill.

Developed under the leadership of Edward A. Wynne and Herbert J. Walberg, professors of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the statement asserts that educators must pay greater attention to "the critical issue" of student character development.

Elementary-school teachers usually use literature in the classroom as a supplement to reading-skills instruction, ignoring the value of literature as a primary teaching tool, according to Jill P. May, associate editor of Children's Literature Association Publications at Purdue University and chairman of the committee that is working to develop the model curriculum.

"It seems like our teachers and our counselors are not having the impact they could have on our kids," said George Petrangelo, an associate professor of psychology at St. Cloud State University and an author of the study.

Those students who pass a physical-fitness test and score 70 percent on a basic-skills examination will have completed the special "astronaut training" course created and designed by Mr. Paulsen and will get to ride on a 12-foot-long, 600-pound scale model of America's space shuttle.

"I would expect Governor White to declare education matters an emergency issue so the House and Senate can take action in the first months," said Steve Collins, legal counsel for the Legislative Education Board. That board has the statutory duty to review and oversee the implementation of education policy passed by the legislature, including the education-reform act, HB 172, enacted last July. (See Education Week, Aug. 22, 1984.)

In a 17-page paper published recently by Learn Inc., a Washington-based policy-research organization, Mr. Walberg said Chapter 1 (formerly Title I) money has not raised the academic achievement of needy students and has often been spent on students who are not poor.

The recommendations include a request to the legislature to fund a $5-million-per-year mentor-teacher program in which highly competent teachers would be selected and paid to help beginning teachers. The program would cost $100,000 for plan-ning in the first year and approximately $5,000 per new teacher for about 1,000 teachers thereafter, according to Philip M. Lewenstein, a spokesman for the board.

Representative Ray Keller, chairman of the House Law Enforcement Committee, said last week that the $29,000 average annual salaries of the 371 teachers and librarians who staff the precollegiate programs in Texas's 27 prisons are "impossible to justify."

I am a strong advocate of increased choice for both parents and students as one important element of public education in a free society, but Mr. Arons himself hints at the quagmire of problems one encounters if that choice is the only answer to a conflict of values. Probably more practical for the millions of students, parents, teachers, and citizens involved in public education is to learn to live in a more civilized fashion with the dilemmas of running "public" schools in a pluralistic society.