CAN URBAN SCHOOLS BE "TAMED?" Today the New York Times hails the new superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District, Paul G. Vallas. He has some good, basic ideas about what high poverty kids need from their schools; namely, what they aren't getting at home. That includes three square meals a day, eye and dental exams, and daily personal attention. Class sizes have shrunk at some schools from 50 students to 10. But the article is typical of the rather spurious "new superintendent is a godsend" genre. Lauding Vallas as a "veteran tamer of hard-case schools in Chicago and Philadelphia," there is no real assessment of his successes and failures in those districts. In Philadelphia, smaller class sizes across the board never materialized, although elementary school test scores did improve. Vallas also presided there over a controversial plan that turned the management of some public schools over to for-profit companies. In Chicago, some public education advocates criticized what they saw as Vallas' obsession with standardized test scores at the expense of children's well-being. It would be impossible to adjudicate between so many differing visions of Vallas, but isn't it better to present a reformer as a human being instead of a fix-all? --Dana Goldstein
