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Show Salt akc tribune Qbf Friday Morning January 24, 1986 Page 14 Section A Easing School Board Latitude Makes Appealing Good Sense months ago that The professional qualifications as determined by the board. tion credentials as one of several reaThe amendment makes sense. As sons to reject the appointment of the superintendents employer, its the school boards role to decide who can Wayne Evans as interim superintendent of Salt Lake City public schools. handle the job. As elected representaArguments for altering those certifi- tives of the people and as taxpayers cation requirements nevertheless themselves, board members are achave merit. countable to the electorate and have Mr. Evans circumstances were every reason to choose the best qualiunique in that he resigned as school fied person they can find. They dont need constraints fashioned by legislaboard chairman to assume the superintendency. It may not have been true tors far removed from the process. in his case, but it appeared the adverWith all due respect to professiontising executive used his influence to al educators, a school board should be garner a powerful, highly paid and able to search beyond the education prestigious job. His lack of experience ranks for administrative talent if they teaching or supervising schools only deem it appropriate. Perhaps a Lee made matters worse, raising the Iacocca could run the state school ofhackles of properly qualified educawell or better than sometors in Salt Lake City District and fice just as with an one education background and throughout the state. certification. Its not as if the state The issue prompted a review of must head a classstatutes governing qualifications of superintendent room, evaluate teachers or establish state and local school district superinteaching standards. Other properly tendents, and Utah legislators now are prepared professionals can be hired to being asked to give school boards handle those specialized school tasks. greater leeway in choosing superinThe same reasoning could apply to tendents. Perhaps they should. the appointment of district superinof a state superintendent By law, But because superintentendents. 30 be must at instruction least public of school districts serve small dents years old and the holder of a state several functions, including instruccertificate of the highest grade issued tional ones, local school boards must in some state or shall be a graduate of be especially careful about straying some reputable university, college or from the education field. It might normal school. be appropriate for the state even It would be interesting to see the board, as ultimate authority, to state enforce the first provision in school some guidelines for such small set these days of job equity. And who knows what a state certificate of the entities. Theres little reason to believe the highest grade might be? Could medical, law or business certificates quali- proposed legislation on superintenfy, or is the law referring strictly to dent selection would unduly threaten public educators? If it does the latter, the quality of education leadership in does it matter that Bernarr Furse, the Utah. Rather, it would give school current state superintendent, lacks a boards, which are elected to provide doctoral degree in education? the best program the public can buy, as are legislatures, greater flexibility Sen. C. E. Chuck Peterson, suggests replacing the offend- in satisfying their schools administrative needs. If voters arent happy with ing language with the simple stipulation that the state superintendent is the decisions made and policies used, appointed on the basis of outstanding changes can be made at the polls. It was just 18 Tribune cited the lack of state educa- o, A Time to Still Remember As recent days were distinguished by countless ceremonies commemorating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., properly honoring the martyred effort and triumphs of this nations most accomplished civil rights leader, it was just as necessary to remember, this is not an end, but a beginning. The King encomiums, eulogies, stirring holiday programs all remind the nation of this courageous and monumenthoughtful mans legacy tal progress in assuring that no American can ever again be shoved to the back of the bus or denied a place at the lunch counter because of race, sex or ethnic origin. But such justified celebration should not allow Americans to forget their country still has many miles to march before it reaches Dr. Kings vision of true brotherhood and genuine equality. For instance, black unemployment in the United States is more than twice the national average; unemployment among teenage blacks is more than 40 percent; 46.2 percent of all black children live in poverty; the average family income among blacks is $10,000 less than that of whites. These statistics make clear that Martin Luther Kings dream of freedom from want and deprivation has yet to be realized. Surely, were he alive today, Dr. King would still be marching and challenging the best intentions of which his listeners were capable. Dr. Kings dream will not become reality until America molds a society in which no child is hungry, in which no man or woman is homeless, in which no man or woman searches for work. There is no equality and there is no freedom where hun- ger, poverty and arbitrary denial of opportunity are permitted to exist. America has yet to reach the promised land of Dr. Kings dream. what Dr. King Acknowledging stood for and honoring his struggle is fine and proper; making actual that which Dr. King knew was possible and fervently believed his countrymen could achieve would be infinitely more becoming. Otis Pike Cuteness Rage Among Presidency Bidders Newhouse News Service WASHINGTON time It is cutesy-poin U.S. politics. Most of the press talk has been about who will be running for president in 1988. The cast of this drama is huge, but the names on the program at this time in the tryouts are Bush, Kemp, Hart and Cuomo, and all suffer from varying degrees of cute. o With Vice President George Bush, the cute is compulsory. He can get the nomination if Ronald Reagan really wants him to have it. Reagan can give him important assignments that will make him look good, or petty ones that will make him look weak. Bush must have Reagans blessing, and the way to keep the boss happy is not to get in front of him on the stage. He must not step on the boss' lines or hint that the boss is capable of error. Bush plays this role as if born for the part, and he will probably be rewarded with some degree of backing from the big man. In the meantime, it makes him look wimpy, but cute. is the darling of Rep. Jack Kemp, the wealthy conservative wing of the Republican Party, which is a very potent wing. He can distance himself from any element of the presidents program that they dont like, as he did with the tax reform bill, but not too far lest the president really disown him. When the president called him on tax reform, he scrambled back into the president's good graces by switching his vote. Cute. has announced Sen. Gary Hart, this that he is not running for he not He for announced is has running year. the presidency; that would violate all the rules of cuteness. He has merely said that he has a farther horizon as he gazed in the general direction of the White House. Hart has a huge debt left over from his 1984 presidential run, and will have to devote a depressing amount of time to raising money. This is largely advanced as his reason for A bigger, unannot running for nounced, reason is that it is perfectly possible that he would have lost. He won with a bare 50.3 percent of the vote in his last senatorial contest, and in the process of running in 1984, he was obliged to take some liberal positions that did not endear him to the good folk of Colorado. this year and barring a revolution, is going to win by a mile. He has, he proclaims, no burning desire to be president. He apparently has some burning desire for travel, for he ventured to Texas last week, goes to Florida next week and to New Jersey and Illinois next month. Cuomo is either the cutest of the lot, or much too sensitive to be president. In a nation in which DiMaggio and Rizzuto were national heroes of my youth, Cardozo was a hero of my law school days, a federal judge named Sirica was a hero of my middle years, and a guy named Iacocca topped the bestseller list most of last year, Cuomo says he might have to run for the presidency to n can make it in prove an Italian-America- this benighted land. Come on, governor, if Jesse Jackson can run, your candidacy wouldnt shine as much of an ethnic breakthrough. Ask Sen. or Sen. Domenici, or a couple of dozen House members from all over the nation whose names end in vowels. In this nation of nothing but minorities, it doesnt hurt to remind people that you are one of a minority, but its hardly a reason to run for the presidency. One gets the uneasy feeling that it is possible to exploit ethnics while condemning ethnicity, but who knows? It is cutesy-po- o time in U.S. politics, and terribly hard to figure out what anyone means by what they are saying. Now free to gallop off toward that far horizon, Hart is still the most straightfor- DA-mat- ward among those busily not saying what they are thinking. He has written books and papers and made speeches and staked out positions, frequently unpopular positions like opposing restrictions on imports, more than any of the others. To the extent he has been more straightforward, he has probably been hurt. Every time you take a hard position on anything you alienate someone. With the withdrawal of Sen. Edward Gov. Mario Cuomo of Kennedy, New York has become the odds-o- n favorite of the eastern liberals. He is going to run for U.S. Can Boast Few Male Intellectuals Universal Press Syndicate WASHINGTON Norman Mailer made a few noteworthy comments about women as intellectuals at the PEN International Congress in New York last week. (They are still mopping the blood off the floor). He didnt put women on the panels at the congress, he said, since the formulation of the panels is reasonably intellectual. There are not that many women, like Susan Sontag, who are intellectuals first, poets and novelists second. More men are intellectuals first, so there was a certain natural tendency to pick more men than women. At this point, you probably expect me to confront macho Mailer on his comments about women intellectuals. Not at all. My concern is another one: There are virtually no real male intellectuals in America today. The classic dictionary definition of "intellectual is thus: having its source in or being guided by the intellect as opposed to emotion or experience. And what, gentle reader, do we see among American male writers today? We see Italian boys hating their mothers, Greek boys hating their fathers, Jewish boys hating s their mothers and hating their prep schools. In short, we see American not only examining male intellectuals their navels but endlessly examining their testicles (some might add, with good reason). The person who made the most sense to me at the PEN conference, the international writers organization that gathers intellectuals" from all over the world, was essayist and novelist Edward lloagland. He scolded American writers for not knowing the world or America's place in it. Our fiction has become ingrown, repetitive and tired," he said. Without advocating that Anglo-Saxon- Americans start writing novels about Lagos or Sao Paulo, I am suggesting that breathing a little foreign air might infuse vigor into it. They might return possessed by a salubrious anger or a despair that no longer seems facile, or even a belief in God. Hoagland listed three agendas that Western intellectuals had to address after World War II: the evils of the Nazis; the new forms of totalitarianism and nuclear weapons; and the new societies and nations arising in an age like none before. Among Americans, he said, only the first of these imperatives has been gone into thoroughly. The dead have been memorial get enough adulation from it. I am not saying America should not be criticized (the Vietnam war) but that one must search their writings forever to find anything good about not to speak of any intellectual America comparison with human nature in the rest of the world. But I think there are genuine American intellectuals today; I just do not think they are found in the ingrown, miniaturist and minimalist (what delicious words) world of these emotional, wholly experience-oriente- d and posturing men. The real American intellectuals today are found among the sociologists (David Riesman, Amitai Etzioni, Christopher Lasch, William Schneider and others) and among the international and national journalists. Curiously, many of those journalists are women. I need only name women such as Flora Lewis, Meg Greenfield, Elizabeth Drew, Marianne Means, as starters. Curious and sad, isnt it, that we live in the American century with the enormous attraction for the world of American culture, political and economic structures, and and all the fascinating, comtechnology and we have plex questions that raises male writers so enormously Thank God for the sociologists and the journalists. ized, but the living in their myriad millions have been neglected to the point of bankruptcy . . . while many of our fiction writers self-limite- have allowed their temperaments to shrink to miniaturist provincialism and minimalist response." One might say "amen." Why American male novelists and poets (I am no longer calling them intellectuals) should have turned their backs so on the is a and on their own country world curious question. I believe many of these male writers hate the United States for its sheer egalitarianism; they are elitist, and democracy is not only too messy for them, but they also don't . . . Orbiting Paragraphs Records are made to be broken. Tapes are a bit more durable. For an appetite suppressant, its pretty hard to beat a porterhouse. We can assume that sometime hence, instead of writing on a wall, a kid will paste a printout from his word processor. Jack W. Germond and Jules Wi (cover Black Underclass for Dream Still Americas Dream Kings Chicago Tribune Service As you have undoubthave been full the noticed, newspapers edly of stories in the last few days describing the progress that black Americans have made since the death of the Rev Martin I.uther King Jr. 18 years ago. In the rush to celebrate the new holiday, however, one curious contradiction in the statistics has received far too little attention - the contrast between blacks political position and their economic progress. Consider the following: Since 1968, the year King died, the number of blacks holding public office at all levels has risen from fewer than 1,500 to more than 6,000. In the same period, black-vote- r registration has remained at 66 of those eligible while white registration has declined from 69 to 61 percent meaning that blacks now have mote relative clout in the electorate than they did then - But the unemployment rate among WASHINGTON ht-cen- t i r blacks today is 15 percent, more than 24 times the 5 9 percent rate among whites In 1968, the black rate was 7 percent, less than double the 4 percent rate for white workers at that same time. 1 Similarly, in 1984, the last year for which complete figures have been computed, the median family income for blacks was $15,432, compared to $27,686 for white families. That gap is greater than it was in the - in conyear of Martin Luther Kings death stant dollars, the figures then were $16,003 for black families to $26,882 for white families The obvious lesson in all this is that the rise in black political power over the last generation has not paid dividends in an equivalent improvement in blacks' economic position And that, in turn, suggests that those black political leaders most aggresJesse sive in demanding economic equity are clearJackson is the leading example ly on the right track None of this takes any of the luster off the real progress that has been made by blacks in terms of education and their success in business and the professions. The percent of blacks winning high school diplomas has doubled since 1968, and there are three times as many blacks earning college degrees as was the case then. But the figures also define a failure to provide adequate opportunities for those least equipped to compete in the world of high technology while jobs in the basic industries have been going up in smoke And that has been a failure of the political system in which, on paper, blacks have been acquiring a greater share of the power. This progress has not been matched, nonetheless, at the lower end of the economic scale On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that the United States is developing a permanent underclass of unemployed and chronically underemployed workers, a disproportionate number of whom are black Moreover, it is clear from these trends that blacks alone cannot correct this situation. Despite their gains, they still don't hold enough of the positions of genuine political power to accomplish their ends And that means that black leaders must rely to a on large extent - as King himself did their ability to either persuade or force the white political leadership to help end the inequities in the system To some extent, this is the predictable result of the transformation of the American economy over the last two decades. There has been a sharp decline in the number of jobs that can be filled without a high school education and some special training secure in the belief that it can play action politically on the notion that blacks already have been given too much by liberal Democrats in the past. So this is something the Democrats, in particular, should keep in mind as they run their campaigns for the Senate and House, for governorships and for before long the presidency. Anyone who understands the basic political demographics recognizes that the Democrats cannot succeed without holding black support, but the time is coming when they are going to have to deliver or risk the danger of blacks turning away from the political system. The celebrations of the first holiday honoring Martin Luther King have been a time for a great deal of national self congratulation about the extent to which his dream has been realized in the 18 years since his death Hut for the blacks in that underclass there is no reason for celebration. They are not even as well off as thev were the day he died - That imperative is particularly striking when it is juxtaposed against a Republican national administration that seems determined to mount an assault on affirmative A i f I t |