'90S WILL BE DECADE OF RADICAL REFORM IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

We may look back ten or 12 years from now and say, in the words of the old '60s TV program, "this was the week that was" for education in America.

This week President Bush launched a nationwide effort to improve education, calling for national academic standards, voluntary national tests and greater parental choice of schools, among other reforms. All indications are the President and his administration are serious about this long-term push to re-invent America's public schools and equip them for the highly competitive global economy of the 21st century.

The administration's point man on education is former Governor Lamar Alexander, newly installed as Secretary of Education in the President's cabinet.

Is this piecemeal change the President and Secretary Alexander are proposing for America's public schools? No way. Make no mistake: Where reform of public education is concerned, the President, Secretary Alexander and their top aides are not mere reformers, asking for more money here, and tinkering there; these people are revolutionaries.

And, encouragingly, to lead the reform effort, they've been able to recruit top-flight talent not usually attracted to the educational bureaucracy. Among Secretary Alexander's first acts upon taking his job was to entice David Kearns, the former chairman and chief executive of Xerox corporation, to join him as his principal deputy. Kearns has built upon his glittering business background to become one of the nation's foremost proponents of "reinventing" the public school.

With this major national reform push, it's interesting to recall a little-known, two-year-old speech by one of America's leading teachers' union officials. In 1989, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, had some tough things to say about why, in his words, the American public education system has failed so badly.

"American public education as it exists today will not be tolerated by the American people, by our business community, or by our policy leaders for more than another few years," Shanker says.

Teachers' union president Shanker favors "drastic change." These changes especially, Shanker says, must include the introduction of "competition" into our public educational system.

"A Soviet-style system" has failed America's youngsters.

First among the factors that literally destroyed American public education, Shanker says, is that "we have a Soviet-style system of public education in this country." By "Soviet", Shanker explained, he means a system in which you are "treated exactly the same if you fail as if you succeed." That's what lack of competition does, he stresses, and that's why competition is so desperately needed.

Continuing his devastating analysis, Shanker says we have too much public school bureaucracy. (I say Amen to that!) We spend half our budget on bureaucracy, while other countries that are beating the pants off us in test scores and other indicators spend 20 percent or less of their budgets on school bureaucracies. Shanker says we have one teacher to every 25 children, but one supervisor for every six teachers. It is a ghastly fact and a national embarrassment that New York state has more school administrators and bureaucrats than all of Western Europe.

Change or die.

"In every other field of life," Shanker says, "where there's competition, if you're running a lousy show, and if you don't change, you die." (I told you this was tough stuff).

Among the drastic changes Shanker says are needed to introduce competition is a key tenet of President Bush's plan announced this week: Choice. What does it mean?

Parental choice means adopting a policy of allowing enrollment in any public school by any student, rather than the system of mandatory assignment of each child to the school selected by school administrators. What makes parental choice work is a unique hammer: Legislation that requires state funding to follow the student to his new school. (I told you this was radical).

Minnesota has enacted parental choice; Iowa and Arkansas have followed suit; other states from coast to coast are considering this exciting reform. At a conference in Washington, D.C. last February, I heard an impassioned speech promoting choice delivered by Wisconsin State Rep. Polly Williams, who represents inner-city Milwaukee. Polly Williams is an extremely attractive leader, a black single mother, formerly on welfare, who chaired the 1988 Wisconsin campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Rep. Williams knows that school choice is a reform that empowers the powerless, such as herself and her neighbors. She knows that choice cuts across traditional liberal-conservative lines in its broad appeal and in its power to change schools for the better.

Still, despite two years of reading and listening, I have yet to hear a single state or local education bureaucrat or school board member express any support for choice. Why do you suppose that is?

With his support for parental choice, President Bush has tapped into a powerful populist movement that is sweeping America, one that will radically change the way we educate our children.

In Tuesday's edition: Why are reformers looking to the successful results of Catholic schools for lessons on how to reinvent public edcuation?