The privatizing drive, the vouchers drive emerged naturally from that. At the heart of the vouchers movement is the idea that we might siphon off a few of these kids and give them something special if their parents are aggressive enough to apply. And for all the others, we'll leave them behind in schools that are depleted of resources, with less money, with less people to advocate for them (because we will have filtered off all the activist parents to voucher schools) and once those kids die quietly in their poorly funded urban schools, we'll provide them with plenty of space in prison.

That's been the mood for 15 years. And although some of it was about economic class, I think that race was at the heart of the agenda. Going right along with that has been the tendency for even small municipalities to shut down even the smallest integration efforts. The Brown vs. Board of Education decision has been virtually invalidated now in most communities.

Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush appear to have very different ideas about public education. Do you believe that whichever one of them becomes president should adjust his views to be more in line with those of the electorate in California and Michigan?

Whichever nominee becomes the president of the United States -- assuming one of them does -- will have to pay attention to the shifting climate of opinion about education in general and about low-income kids in particular.

I think it's notable that George W. Bush, although he has not disowned the voucher issue, tried very hard not to speak of it during the campaign. I think he too is reading the political mood correctly.

These three separate votes I spoke of in California, and the similar vote in Michigan, and the general change in mood I sense in New York, these are three large states stretching from coast to coast. Perhaps I'm grasping at straws, but I see what I would call a good kind of global warming.

I think it's a change in the sympathies of the electorate, and I think it's a sign that political leaders do respond to the explicit -- or even implied -- will of the people. I see that in Michigan. The governor, a guy named John Engler, used to be a voucher advocate, but he didn't even support the voucher referendum this time. Like Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin and Pete Wilson in California, he was a tough guy as far as poor people were concerned. So it was interesting to see that he backed down from vouchers. Maybe he's reading the electorate correctly.

Naturally, because George W. Bush, at least in principle, still supports vouchers, I hope he's not going to be our next president. If he does have a Republican majority in both houses, I'd worry very much about whether we would see vouchers resurrected on a national level. I was asked by Ralph Nader, a man I admire very much, to be a surrogate speaker for him. In any other year, I would have been honored. But the voucher issues made it an easy decision for me: I supported Vice President Al Gore as strongly as I could. I don't want to see our public education system dismantled.

Even if George W. Bush is the next president, I think he will be forced to accept this change in the national will. He's sort of a baffling person for me to deal with. I've spent 30 years arguing that if people really spend a lot of money on their children's education, in public or private schools, you usually get what you pay for. And then I look at him. And I think, Good Lord, this man is ruining my entire argument. You know, Andover now costs at least $30,000 a year, which is three to five times what we spend on a child in an inner-city school. But it didn't seem to work in his case.

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