The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, Terence Smith and Jan Crawford Greenburg look at today's Supreme Court argument over gay Boy Scout leaders; Margaret Warner runs a post-raid Elian discussion among Charles Krauthammer, Robert Scheer, E.J. Dionne, and Richard Rodriguez, Betty Ann Bowser tells the story of teachers who cheated on some important tests; Elizabeth Farnsworth profiles a jazzman with a horn; and essayist Roger Rosenblatt parses poetry month. It all follows our summary of the news this Wednesday.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today over banning gays from being Boy Scout leaders. The issue is a New Jersey court's ruling that it violates a state anti-discrimination law. The two sides talked to reporters after the arguments.

EVAN WOLFSON, Lawyer for Gay Scout Leader: The members of scouting do not come intothis organization for purposes of discrimination or bigotry or exclusion. It offers valuable programs and New Jersey has an important interest in assuring that gay people, like non-gay people, are able to take part in that program.

GEORGE DAVIDSON, Lawyer for Boy Scouts: It's a fundamental issue of freedom of association. The society has room for the Boy Scouts, and it has room for the Gay Men's Chorus. The government doesn't have the power in the voluntary sector to remake every organization in accordance with the political fashion of the day. That's for the private organizations to make their own decisions about.

JIM LEHRER: A decision is expected by late July. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. The governor of Vermont today signed a bill giving gay couples nearly all the benefits of marriage. It's the first law of its kind in the country. It allows homosexuals to create civil unions, and it gives them the rights married couples have in areas such as taxes, inheritance, and medical care. The law takes effect July 1. On the Elian Gonzalez story, the boy's kindergarten teacher and a ten-year-old cousin flew from Cuba to Mexico City today. They were headed to the United States to visit Elian. He's now staying with his father on Maryland's Eastern Shore. We'll have more on the Elian story later in the program tonight. Overseas today, there was a threat of new violence in Zimbabwe. A political opposition leader warned that his backers would retaliate for attacks on them. He said he decided to act after ruling party militants killed three more people in recent days.

MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, Opposition Leader: The ministers and members of parliament actually condone that killing people is the right way to do things, from the Vice President, from some of the members of parliament. We know who is involved. Now, we are taking this violence to that step. All those MP's who are sponsoring violence, we know where they are, we know what they are involved n. We know they have protection of the police.

JIM LEHRER: The attackers have targeted white farmers and their black workers. Back in this country, Broadway showman David Merrick died yesterday. He produced more than 80 plays and musicals, including "Gypsy" and "Hello, Dolly," that won numerous Tony's and other awards. In 1983, he suffered a stroke that severely affected his speech and mobility. His cause of death was not announced. He was 88 years old. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the Supreme Court arguments over gay Boy Scout leaders, a four-way discussion of the Elian aftermath, high- stakes testing in classrooms, jazz on the horn, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay.

FOCUS - SUPREME COURT WATCH

JIM LEHRER: Terence Smith has the Supreme Court story.

TERENCE SMITH: The issue before the court today was whether a New Jersey anti-discrimination law could compel the Boy Scouts of America to include in its ranks a gay scout leader without abridging the group's first amendment rights of freedom of speech and association. For more, we turn to NewsHour regular Jan Crawford Greenburg, national legal affairs correspondent for the "Chicago Tribune." Jan, welcome.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Thanks.

TERENCE SMITH: Tell us a little of the background of this case and how it got to the court.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: The dispute arose in 1990 when James dale got a letter from the local Boy Scout Council telling him that he was being expelled from the organization. Mr. Dale wrote back and asked why, and they informed him that it was because he was a homosexual. Now, by all accounts, James Dale had been an exemplary boy scout. He joined the organization when he was eight years old in 1978, and over the years, he won many awards and badges. He became an Eagle Scout, which only I think 3% of all Boy Scouts receive that honor. And he had never made an issue out of his homosexuality. In fact, the organization learned of it only after reading a newspaper article. The article was about a seminar for gay and lesbian teens, and it quoted Mr. Dale and identified him as co-president of a gay and lesbian organization at Rutgers, where he had gone on to become a student. Mr. Dale said that scouting was an important part of his life. He had become a scoutmaster, assistant scoutmaster, 16 months earlier. So he sued. And he argued that the Boy Scouts had to comply with the New Jersey law that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. The trial court disagreed. It said the Boy Scouts didn't have to comply with that law, and in fact, they had a First Amendment right to exclude him and to associate with whoever they wanted to associate with. The appeals court and the New Jersey Supreme Court disagreed with that lower court ruling. They said, first of all, the Boy Scouts did have to comply with that state law; and secondly, the state's interests in prohibiting discrimination were so great that it would trump whatever interests the Boy Scouts might have, their First Amendment interests, in an expression and in association. So that's how it got to the Supreme Court today. The Boy Scouts appealed that ruling, and argued in the court today that the Supreme Court should come down for them and allow the boy scouts to select the leaders that the group chooses.

TERENCE SMITH: And what was their argument, the lawyer for the Boy Scouts?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Mr. George Davison argued for the boy scouts and framed it in very simple terms. He said the case is just about that, whether an organization can pick its own leaders or whether or not the state, in this case the state of New Jersey, will select which leaders and which men will wear scouting uniforms. He emphasized that the Boy Scouts believe that all their scouts should be morally straight, as the Boy Scout laws refer to it, and clean. And that is contrary to, he said, having a homosexual serve as a troop leader. To do so, he said, would convey the notion that Boy Scouts saw nothing wrong with homosexuality, and that is just not the case. That's not the message that they want to convey.

TERENCE SMITH: And so, in response, the lawyer for James Dale?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right, Evan Wolfson stood up and said... He saw the issue in completely... Completely differently, and in fact it was about whether a large organization like the Boy Scouts could be exempt from a state antidiscrimination laws, could discriminate against someone solely because of their identity. He noted that James Dale had never advocated or espoused to any kind of homosexual views in meetings with his Boy Scout members. And so to Mr. Wolfson, this case turned on whether or not this law would apply and whether or not the Boy Scouts would have to comply with it and allow someone who didn't advocate contrary views.

TERENCE SMITH: So the Justices heard two strong arguments. How did they react?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: It was a very intense hour of questions, and they clearly struggled with this issue, which was, as you said, very difficult. And it was different in many ways because sometimes on controversial cases, a Justice will hammer a lawyer that he disagrees with to expose weaknesses in those arguments. But today, the Justices hit the lawyers from both sides and didn't clearly indicate how they felt about this issue. They asked, you know, "Try to assess what were the scouts' moral views and who could the scouts exclude? Could they exclude adulterers?" Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked if the scouts could exclude unmarried people who live together. What about heterosexuals, Justice O'Connor asked, who espoused the view that homosexuality was okay? Justice...

TERENCE SMITH: So putting these questions obviously to the lawyer for the boy Scouts?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Exactly. Justice Stevens asked "what about the homosexual Boy Scout who wanted to keep his sexual identity secret? Could he be in the Boy Scouts?" The lawyer said, "no. The Boy Scouts can choose the leaders that they want to choose ...

TERENCE SMITH: So in each one of those cases, his answer was yes, they can choose to exclude those people?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Exactly right. They also looked at the impact that this ruling could have and seemed concerned about the consequences. Justice O'Connor said, "if the Boy Scouts could exclude... if the Boy Scouts, you know, could exclude gays, what about girls? Could the Boy Scouts be forced to admit girls in that situation?" What about gay and lesbian organizations -- could they be forced to admit non-gays? Justice Breyer said, "could Catholic organizations be forced to admit Jews," all, again, trying to get to the point that, if the Boy Scouts were forced to admit a gay troop leader here, what impact would it have in these other situations? Now, the lawyer for James Dale pointed to a series of cases that the court handed down in the 1980's that say the Jaycees and the Rotarians and other large organizations cannot exclude women under certain state antidiscrimination laws. He pointed to those cases to bolster his claims here, and he said the Supreme Court at that time noted that these organizations weren't organized to oppose women or exclude women, that wasn't their message. The same thing, he says, should apply here because the Boy Scouts aren't organized to oppose homosexuality. So that was his strongest case. The lawyer for the Boy Scouts presented other Supreme Court cases, notably one in 1995 in which the court said a parade in Boston could exclude gays and lesbians because...

TERENCE SMITH: A famous one.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right. ...It went against their message. And he said, "here, being forced to admit a gay troop leader would go against the Boy Scouts' message. So it depends a lot on which the way court's going to go with this.

TERENCE SMITH: Yeah, because in other words, there were examples on both sides?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right.

TERENCE SMITH: ..Of relatively recent cases?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Exactly.

TERENCE SMITH: This was the last day for oral arguments, this term.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: That's right. Yes.

TERENCE SMITH: What's this term been like so far?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, it's appropriate that I think the court ended the term arguments anyway on not such a controversial case because this has been an incredibly controversial term. There are a host of issues that have great import to Americans' everyday lives. People have said that this is the most significant term in a generation. Over the next two months now, the court will begin handing down decisions in a variety of areas: whether or not the federal government can give aid to religious schools; whether or not HMO's can be sued: whether or not the Playboy Channel can be seen during daytime hours, a host of very important rulings, grandparents' rights. All of these will come down in the next two months. And we ended the term today on a controversial note in what's been a term of contentious cases.

TERENCE SMITH: So we better stay tuned.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right.

TERENCE SMITH: Jan Crawford Greenburg, thanks so much.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Thank you.

FOCUS - THE ELIAN DEBATE

JIM LEHRER: Now the continuing preoccupation with a little Cuban boy, and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: Controversy over the fate of Elian Gonzalez and the government's handling of the case has roiled the editorial and op-ed pages of the nation's newspapers. Now, four columnists who've weighed in on the issue: Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, "Washington Post" columnist E.J. Dionne, "Los Angeles Times" contributing editor Robert Scheer, and Pacific News Service editor and columnist Richard Rodriguez, who is also a NewsHour essayist.

Charles Krauthammer, you used the word "disgrace" in writing about this. What is it about this case that generates this kind of controversy, this kind of passion?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, Syndicated Columnist: Well, I think the reason is that it generated the passion it has is because it's got all the elements. At the center is a beautiful young child who arrived here in a kind of a mythic condition, washed up on our shore on Thanksgiving Day in a vain attempt by his mother to escape tyranny -- a rather classical American story. The overlay on that, a custody dispute between two wings of a family. And then you overlay on that an ideology and here's where I think it's so interesting because this is a fight about the nature of communism ten years too late. The Cold War ended ten years ago. It's a rather anachronistic argument, and I think it gives a lie to the idea that how many somehow we all were anticommunist, that we all were on the same page in the cold war. What you have here is a struggle between Cuban Americans, who are very strongly anticommunist and people, like, say the National Council of Churches who are what you might call anti-anticommunists. The overlay on that the extraordinary aggressiveness with which the Justice Department has pursued this boy, this case, that picture which I think will be indelible and will be the legacy of this administration, of a commando pointing his machine gun at the boy and his rescuer, and you have combustion.

MARGARET WARNER: Robert Scheer, a couple of words you used, "shameful and cynical." How do you explain the passion? Do you see it the way Charles does in terms of the elements?

ROBERT SCHEER, Los Angeles Times: No. I think it's the dying gasp of the right wing Cuban migr community to prevent normalization. I think they're partners in that, in some respect, with Castro, himself, who also must fear normalization. I think a good number of Cubans in Miami must favor it because they send lots of money to Havana, they visit, and I think what would solve this whole problem is trade and tourism. And the embargo never should have been slapped on way back in October of 1960. It's made no sense, and I think with normalization, will come the same sort of relationship between migr communities here and, say, the Vietnamese and Vietnam or the Chinese Americans and China.

MARGARET WARNER: But if I could just interrupt you for a second, you're making it sound like just a foreign policy debate. We wouldn't have columns in editorials like this if we were just having a normal discussion about whether we should normalize relations with Cuba.

ROBERT SCHEER: Well, we wouldn't be having this debate if in fact the Miami exile community had not intervened, and the leadership had not intervened to heighten passions about this and in fact do something that I don't think any other immigrant community can do, which is tell the Justice Department and the Immigration Service to go fly a kite. They exerted a great deal of independent power. I don't know what this business is about, Janet Reno acting in an aggressive way. It seems to me she hesitated an awful long time, and I don't think we'd extend that to Mexican Americans or any other group, Haitians or any other group that we're trying to protect someone who came here for freedom. They would be back, sent home. And certainly if there was a father... What happened to Republican family values? What happened to being concerned about preserving a family? Here is obviously a fit father, wants to take care of his child, was taking care of his child before the mother made this reckless trip, and yet somehow conservatives are silent about the family values in this case.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let me let E.J. Dionne on in this. Do you think that this case raises issues significant enough to warrant this level of public attention and controversy?

E. J. DIONNE, Washington Post: Well, I think some of the attention owes to what you might call a cable news environment. This is a classic story for our time, where you have a combination of politics and real political issues, as we just heard, and at the same time the personal saga, the family saga, the story of this beautiful little boy. And so I suspect that at some level, when we look back, compare the treatment on certain cable television shows to the treatment in the newspapers. I think that's part of it. But I think there are some very deep issues here. I mean if you are... I had Easter dinner with a Cuban friend. Her family sent her over here, her and her brother, without her parents because they valued freedom even more than they valued their parental rights. So to say that the Cuban American community has suddenly become inconsistent on family values I think is not true. On the other side, I find the ferocity of the response to Janet Reno and Bill Clinton, the product of what you might call Clinton poisoning in your politics, that whenever those two names get mentioned, I think people who are their enemies react in a much stronger way with words of outrage that I don't think you would hear if the same things had been done by somebody else. Those pictures are arresting and scary, there's no question about that. On the other hand, you can also be certain that if Janet Reno had tried the soft entry into that house and some agent had been hurt, then the world would have come down on her for that, too, in not using enough force. So I think it says something about the political polarization of this moment in the country.

MARGARET WARNER: Richard Rodriguez, how do you explain the tempest that's been created by this case?

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Well, the interesting thing is that a lot of friends of mine insist that this is a boring story, that they're not interested in this story. But in fact, everybody's riveted by it. And I think for some of the reasons that some of the other voices have suggested. I think we're getting very close to some Central American story in this tale of Elian. It seems to me, however, that the political voices on the left and the right aren't able to grab hold of what's bothering us. On the one hand, I think the political left is very sentimental about Uncle Fidel and Castro... And Castro's Cuba and does not see it in quite the dark way that, say, John Kennedy saw it 30 years ago. On the other hand, the right wing, as Robert was suggesting, has caught themselves in this tangle of what they call family values and is unable really to challenge the logic of sending the boy back to his father. But I keep thinking that, you know, the real heroine in this story is Elian's mother, who gets me to some central point about immigration and that is that when the immigrant, the 19th century immigrant told her Irish grandmother or her Sicilian grandfather that she was leaving for America, those relatives knew that they were losing her, that to go to America was to leave your family, was to leave your past. That's an extraordinarily radical move. Now we act as though, you know, that that's somehow unsuitable. But I remember as a son of immigrants, Mexican immigrants, when I was handed by my beloved Irish nuns a copy of the Adventures of Huckleberry Fin as a child and told that this was the great American romance, it was the story of a teenage boy on a raft who leaves home. Now we tell the story of Huckleberry Fin but we want Huckleberry to go back to his Pappy. We have changed the American myth, and that's probably what most interests me about this ambivalence we feel.

MARGARET WARNER: Yeah, how do you explain that, Charles? I mean the polls show a remarkable public consensus on this -- I mean they may not have liked the level of force, but they really think the boy, 2-1, 3-1 they think the boy belongs with his father even if he was going to go back to Cuba. If this was sending a boy back to Nazi Germany, as the Cuban Miami family has been saying, the public wouldn't feel that way. How do you explain that?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, first of all, I think there is... As Richard was pointing out, there is in many precincts, again, ten years after the cold war, a kind of a sentimental look at communism, a way of saying, you know, was it really that bad, or what was it all about? There was a headline in the "New York Times" the other day that said, "Cuban Americans still see communism as evil," as if this is a kind of an odd perspective. You know, and so the idea of Cuba as a kind of Sweden with beaches, as opposed to how the Cuban Americans see it, as a Stalinism without factories. But I think more interesting than public opinion is, in reaction to the raid, is people I think principled liberals like Lawrence Tribe, who's the leading liberal jurist in the country, one might say, who was outraged by the raid and who said unequivocally in writing in the "New York Times" that this struck at the core principle of constitutional government and that it was unwarranted and that, in effect, it was a trampling of what we understand as constitutional safeguards, that you don't send an armed command owe in, in settling a custody dispute.

MARGARET WARNER: Robert Scheer, that is true that the criticism of the administration has come not just from republicans, as E. J. pointed out, but also from liberals.

ROBERT SCHEER: I think it's nonsense to suggest that the INS acted in an unprecedented way. They probably acted much more carefully than when they crashed into Mexican American homes in Los Angeles looking for immigrants, when they arrest kids they claim are gang members. We have sweeps of the streets in this city all the time. They don't observe the niceties. Families are broken up, children are arrested, strong-arm measures are used all the time. They knew they were under public scrutiny, and they did this job probably as efficiently as can be done and with as much concern for the niceties. I would also point out that the American public is probably concerned that, if you have the principle that you will accept all six year olds that are freeing a less than free society, what happens to Chinese six-year-olds, what happens to Haitian six-year-olds? We've had people taking risky boat yards from Haiti and be returned. So there's that element of hypocrisy. I think the other thing is that we're not serious about having a debate about Cuba policy. The Pope went to Cuba two years ago. He said we should have normal normalization. He demanded that Castro from lighten up on religion. Certainly Cuba is freer on religion than China, with which we have no relations. If you didn't have the ohm embargo, you'd have free movement between Miami and Havana; you would not have this terrible tearing apart of families.

MARGARET WARNER: E. J., go back to the issue that Richard raised, if you would. Why do you think that the public wants, as he put it, for Huck Finn to go back to Pappy?

E. J. DIONNE: Well, I think there are different issues here and not all of them are flattering to us. I do think there is some anti-immigrant feeling. And I think also there is a great unease on the part of other communities, as Bob Scheer just said, where they say Cuban Americans get certain treatment, Haitians-and-Dominicans and other would get other treatment, and there's a real split between those communities. You can see it down in Miami. The third thing is the old family values argue. I think a lot of people look rat the case and say, "yes, Castro's Cuba is a terrible place." I don't think most Americans, in these same polls, if you asked "what do you think of Cuba as a regime?" Americans would overwhelmingly say it's a bad regime, it's a dick that editorial regime. They have weighed these factors and say that under these circumstances the child's mother died-- and I disagree with Bob. I don't think you can say it was reckless. It was courageous. It was a mistake for her and it could have been a mistake for her son, which is what a lot of other people did-- but I think they weigh these values and they end up on the family values side. The problem here -- everybody has been guilty of some inconsistency on this. Sometimes progressives sound like they were Gary Bauer when talked about the sacredness of the family. And you've heard arguments on the anti Castro side that said that courts should interview that sounded like Hillary Rodham Clinton's essay that was condemned in the republican platform.

MARGARET WARNER: Richard, how do you answer your own question that you put on the table: Why do you think a majority of Americans want... Want to see this boy return to his father, even if it means going back to Cuba?

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: I think America is growing middle-aged in. We're also embarrassed by the people we've become, I think. I think in some startling way we think that Elian would be better off as a boy being raised in Cuba than in Miami, that there is a sense... here locally, there is a cartoonist in the morning paper, mediocre talent, who every time he had a chance to draw Elian, would put him in sunglasses with his Nike shoes, you know, the consumerist nightmare child. And I think that, if you really were to ask a lot of American parents, would this kid be better off in Havana or would he be better off in South Beach on roller-blades with sunglasses, a lot of Americans in our middle-aged caution, would say we would not want Elian to end up like our own children?

MARGARET WARNER: So you say that it is a in a way it is a revulsion to our own culture?

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: It is about American that Americans are preoccupied. It is not about Cuba. The Cuban Americans embarrass us. They keep telling us what a wonderful country this is and their praise, as it gross more garish and loud, makes us only embarrassed by the reality of what we see.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you so much, all four of you.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, important testing, jazz with a horn, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay.

FOCUS - HIGH STAKES TESTING

JIM LEHRER: Students are feeling the heat to perform well on standardized tests, and as Betty Ann Bowser reports, so are their teachers.

STACEY MOSCOWITZ: Yeah, and that's Joseph, and they must be about...

CHILD: This is Joseph?

BETTY ANN BOWSER: When she looks at the pictures of her former students now with her own two kids, Stacey Moscowitz has painful memories.

STACEY MOSCOWITZ: I think about it now and I have, like, a lump in my throat. I was entrusted with these bright-eyed eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds, and I just feel like I betrayed them so badly.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Moscowitz feels she betrayed the kids because she cheated. She gave her students the correct answers on New York City exams, which boosted their scores as well as her school's academic standing. The tests that Moscowitz and other teachers P.S. 90 in the South Bronx cheated on are called high-stakes tests because their results are used to make students and teachers accountable for their performance. The tests are growing in popularity in school districts around the country because educators say they are an objective way to measure what kids are learning. But they're also being used to punish teachers and administrators when the kids don't do well. Moscowitz, here entering P.S. 90, where she still teaches, says her school's former principal encouraged the cheating. But over time, the 37-year-old third-grade teacher felt guilty about what she was doing. Most of her students at P.S. 90 were from poor families, and many of them were low achievers. Since the cheating gave them artificially high test scores, these children became ineligible for the remedial help they needed.

STACEY MOSCOWITZ: The day of the test would come, and I was... I was in essence denying them of some help, if they needed it. There were remedial services, there were special programs, but because their scores were not legitimate, they couldn't get the help that they needed to help them down the road. That's really what bothered me the most.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: So in 1998, Moscowitz blew the whistle, at a time when some New York elementary schools were reporting dramatic gains in student performance. One newspaper story said reading scores at P.S. 234 had jumped from 29% performing at grade level to 51%. Moscowitz went to Ed Stancik, the New York City school's independent investigator, and after an 18-month investigation, he said he found cheating at 32 schools in all five boroughs; 52 educators were implicated. Stancik found that in some schools, cheating so dramatically skewed student performance that the test was rendered all but meaningless.

EDWARD STANCIK, Investigator, New York City School District: We would go where schools had received a great deal of attention for these sudden, miraculous turns... turning of the scores around, and what and in fact happened was that in many of these cases, there was cheating.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The 45-year-old former city prosecutor described how the cheating was done. In one scheme, children wrote their answers on a piece of scrap paper.

EDWARD STANCIK: What the scrap paper method does is to get rid... gets rid of the erasures. The kids take the exam on scrap paper first, then that's corrected, and then those answers are put on the bubble sheets, as we call them. That way there doesn't need to be a lot of erasures.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: In another scheme, the test became a class project.

EDWARD STANCIK: We had teachers who gave the test in sort of a group format where people would call out the answers. Individual students would call out the answers, and then they would agree on the right answer and everybody would fill it in.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The Board of Education's chief counsel, Chad Vignola, doesn't dispute Stancik's findings, but says the cheating was not that widespread.

CHAD VIGNOLA, Chief Counsel, NYC Board of Education: What in fact were the numbers that he identified were 52 individuals out of 135,000 employees at the Board of Education. He looked at 4.3 million tests, in essence, over a four-year period, and was able to identify 1,200 of those that were in fact suspect. And that's only suspect. So that's 0.03% of the total tests over a four-year period.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Stancik disagrees.

EDWARD STANCIK: I don't feel at all confident that we got all the cheaters. I think there is more of it out there. How much, I don't know. But when you've uncovered cheating in roughly 5% of the city's elementary schools, you can't say it's isolated.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: New York City's Teachers union was even more skeptical about Stancik's report.

RANDI WEINGARTEN, United Federation of Teachers: The allegations are appalling, and we take the report very seriously. But the concerns about the accuracy of the allegations must be looked at as well.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: President Randi Weingarten hired her own investigator.

RANDI WEINGARTEN: When I read through the report, there were things in it to me that struck a chord of not being correct. There were things in it that struck a chord of being correct. What happened was there was a broad brush here that suggests, as Ed has, that there is rampant cheating in the New York City public school system. My sense of it is, from knowing the teaching force in New York City, I don't think that cheating is pervasive.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The Board of Education has started disciplinary or dismissal proceedings against most of the teachers implicated in Stancik's report. The educators were unwilling to talk to the NewsHour, as were parents and students who cooperated with Stancik's probe. And the NewsHour was not permitted to take pictures in any New York City classroom. New York City is not the only place where there's been a cheating scandal. Other incidents have been reported in Texas, Connecticut, and Kentucky. And some educators say it isn't just cheating that's the problem. Part of the problem may be the emphasis placed on the tests themselves.

TEACHER: Take the next 20 minutes.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Union President Weingarten is one educator who thinks too many school systems emphasize test scores without giving teachers the resources they need to do their jobs.

RANDI WEINGARTEN: They're now being measured by the new high-stakes tests that now measure much deeper and more thorough understanding of both language and math, and we're doing it without the resources that are necessary to do it. So we haven't prepared the teachers to do it, we haven't lowered the class sizes enough to do it, we haven't made sure that people have enough material and supplies and whatnot, and yet we're saying, "okay, we're doing all of this right now"-- not incrementally, but in one shot. That's a huge change.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The federal government now requires all 50 states to identify low-performing schools, and most do that with test scores.

TEACHER: Who can call this special session?

BETTY ANN BOWSER: And in some states where there is high-stakes testing, teachers spend weeks teaching kids how to take the test.

TEACHER: Highlight, please, "clerk of the house."

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The federal government's top elementary school official thinks there is too much importance put on tests, but says it's the only way to know if kids are learning.

MIKE COHEN, Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Education: This is the first time in... probably in the history of American education that we are on the verge of putting into place real accountability for results, where if we don't get results, there are consequences for the adults involved. I think that's a good thing. We have had too many schools for too many years where there haven't been results, where they've been low-performing schools for a long time. They tend to be schools with high poverty. The kids are being cheated.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: John Katzman, who has written a book on educational standards, thinks there is too much emphasis on testing.

JOHN KATZMAN, Princeton Review: The pressures are enormous. At this point, depending on the state, low test scores can mean that your school is entirely eliminated, or that your kids are given vouchers to go to private schools. It certainly means that you're fired, and might mean merit pay or not for your teachers. New York principals have a new contract under which there are tens of thousands of dollars of bonus money on one end, or termination on the other end, based on test scores.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: But Chester Finn, a former Assistant Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, says the pressure of testing isn't also an excuse to cheat.

CHESTER FINN, Thomas Fordham Foundation: Pressure to perform is not a bad thing. Educators have been spared it for so long that they've forgotten that it's part of life in almost every other line of work. I mean, bus drivers are under pressure not to crash their buses. Prison guards are under pressure not to let their prisoners escape. Doctors are under pressure not to let their patients die. Lawyers are under pressure to win their lawsuits. Everybody is under pressure in their job. Educators have had this curious sort of charmed life in which results doesn't matter. This is just nuts.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Katzman disagrees.

JOHN KATZMAN: One of the things about these tests is that once you have a test, people start attaching things to it. The new principals' contract based on test scores. The teachers' contracts that will come up will certainly be tied to test scores. And, you know, all the real estate agents are looking at test scores. And it becomes impossible after a while to ever get rid of the test because it's a foundation of the whole system.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Stacey Moscowitz knows the pressure, and she understands her students' needs.

STACEY MOSCOWITZ: I do think it's an enormous challenge, especially where I work, where we have kids who are two, three, four years behind their grade level. Now you're asking them to perform on a test. So people are caught. Are we going to help these kids move forward, or are we going to make them pass the test with a decent score? And it's a very difficult problem now, I think nationwide. I don't know what the answer is.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Some educators complain that standardized tests discriminate against poor and minority children. But so far that has not affected the widespread application of high-stakes testing around the country. And in this election year, both presidential candidates are calling greater accountability in public schools.

FOCUS - THE ART OF JAZZ

JIM LEHRER: Now Elizabeth Farnsworth profiles a young man and his horn. (Playing saxophone)

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Saxophonist Joshua Redman and his band smoked at the Virgin Megastore in San Francisco as they played music from their new album, "Beyond." (Playing saxophone) Redman is one of the shining stars in the jazz firmament now. His discs routinely sell in numbers more common to rock than jazz. The "New York Times" last year called him one of the rare musicians who have both critical acclaim and cross-over appeal. And the Associated Press has named him the crown prince of the tenor saxophone. (Playing saxophone) He almost stole the show in Robert Altman's 1996 film "Kansas City," playing jazz great Lester Young. (Playing saxophone) This year Redman is spending a lot of time in San Francisco as artistic director of the spring season of San Francisco Jazz, a nonprofit group that produces and promotes jazz in the bay area.

JOSHUA REDMAN: Come on, right there. What's your name?

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: He grew up in Berkeley, where he played in the Berkeley high jazz band, graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, and was accepted into Yale Law School; but he became a professional musician instead. We spoke to him on the stage of the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You told "Downbeat" Magazine, "jazz is a calling. It isn't a rational decision, but something that is spiritual and emotional." When did you know it had called you?

JOSHUA REDMAN: I realized it had called me when I sat down to inform Yale Law School of my decision whether to attend or not to attend. And at that time, at the time that I thought it was... It was supposed to be a decision, I realized I couldn't do anything else. I was having the opportunity to play with some of the greatest jazz musicians on the planet, both young and old. And the way the music inspired me, the feeling I got from playing the music, I felt like I had to do it.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How'd you learn?

JOSHUA REDMAN: I learned by listening and by doing. I'm not... I'm not really a trained musician. I'm not an academically trained musician. I think that there's a great place for academic training in music, but ultimately the real lessons you learn are through the sounds that you hear and the way you interpret those sounds.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So Berkeley High, for example, where you were in a jazz band that won... Constantly would win the first prize in jazz band competitions, was it important? Was it an important part of it all?

JOSHUA REDMAN: What the Berkeley High jazz band taught me was the fun that you can have playing music, and the importance of strong social bonds and camaraderie and community with music. I mean, music isn't just the notes that you play. Music is a set of relationships. You know, music is personality. Music is communication. And what Berkeley High taught me is that you have to have that kind of rapport with your fellow musicians, off the bandstand as well as on.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Redman's mother raised her son alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Berkeley. His father is Dewey Redman, also a highly acclaimed jazz saxophonist. Occasionally, he and his son perform together. (Playing saxophone) (cheers)

JOSHUA REDMAN: I did not grow up with my father. And so I grew up listening to his music and loving his music, but I also grew up listening to the music of John Coltrain and Sonny Rollins and Stevie Wonder and the Beatles and Aretha Franklin, whom I never met. My mother exposed me to music. She exposed me to the entire spectrum of the creative arts, and she exposed me to life and gave me kind of a creative instinct and passion for life.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Redman has been composing and performing almost nonstop since winning a major New York Jazz competition in 1991. Here he is last year with his band-- Aaron Goldberg on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Gregory Hutchinson on drums playing Redman's 1993 composition "Alone in the Morning." (Playing "Alone in the Morning")

JOSHUA REDMAN: There're some compositions that I wrote a long time ago that I would never think about playing now, and there are some that still have stood the test of time for me. And it's a very, very simple melody and actually, you know, a simple set of harmony. You know, it's a simple tune, but there's something about the feeling of it that still feels relevant to me and to the band. And it allows us to communicate a certain type of peace and lyricism and even romanticism, but at the same time, we can be adventurous within that and searching within that.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You've said that there's almost telepathic communication between you and the other musicians when it's working.

JOSHUA REDMAN: Mm-hmm.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What do you mean by that?

JOSHUA REDMAN: What I mean by that is that anything can happen at any moment. That's the ideal in jazz is to express the moment spontaneously, to capture that moment and to express it and to express it in terms of the group. You know? I mean, there is structure and form to jazz, and there's a vocabulary to jazz, and all those things are very, very important. But ultimately what we're trying to do, I think, is to transcend all those things. You know? So no matter where we are in the form or the structure of the music, there needs to be a feeling that all of us together are creating something which transcends that form and which is based in the feeling of the moment. (Music playing)

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You've said about jazz that it's high art, that it's America's classical music. What do you mean by that?

JOSHUA REDMAN: Well, I've said that it's high art, but that we shouldn't see it only as high art. I mean, it's high art in the sense that it's one of the most advanced, sophisticated, demanding musics out there. And I think it's worthy...

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Let me just interrupt, what do you mean, "advanced, sophisticated, demanding"?

JOSHUA REDMAN: It's really, really hard to play.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Really hard?

JOSHUA REDMAN: It's really... It's really hard to play. And on a certain level, it can be hard to appreciate. I mean, the harmonic and rhythmic language of jazz is very, very complex, you know -- more complex than maybe any other form of western music except for classical, European classical music. So I think we need to respect jazz and appreciate it as a high art, but also understand that it's... that it's music of the heart-- not just the art, but the heart and the soul. (Music playing)

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You're very inclusive in the kinds of music that you would consider jazz, or that you yourself use. You used a Bob Dylan song in one of your CD's, for example.

JOSHUA REDMAN: Mm-hmm. I want my music, as a jazz musician, to be expressive of all my experiences and all my influences. So I felt that, you know, if there's a Bob Dylan or a Joni Mitchell or a Stevie Wonder song that I love and that I can... that I feel I can interpret honestly and creatively as a jazz musician, why not try it?

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The SF Jazz evening concerts programmed by Redman this spring, like this one featuring guitarist Jim Hall, have sold out. Redman says he feels a strong sense of commitment to this new role.

JOSHUA REDMAN: I feel a responsibility to do the best I can, you know, and to present the best music that I can present. And that's the same responsibility that I feel with all areas of my life. You know, just do the best job I can. I feel like I'm... I feel like an army commercial, you know, "be all you can be." (Laughter) but you know, really that's all I would ask of anyone, and that's all I ask of myself. But that's a whole lot. (Music playing)

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Joshua Redman and his band are touring the U.S. and Europe this spring.

JOSHUA REDMAN: Aaron Goldberg at the piano. (Applause)

ESSAY - THE PEOPLE'S ART

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, some thoughts about poetry month from essayist Roger Rosenblatt.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Martin Amis wrote a funny and clever short story called "Career Move," in which all modern literary priorities have been turned upside down. A screenwriter suffers the humiliating and impoverished life normally accorded poets, and a poet is paid a fortune by Hollywood for a sonnet. He is summoned to LA to discuss prequels and sequels and all the other nonsense attached to commercial writers who write for movies. Amis' story is pure fantasy, of course. It is the poets of the world who yearn for publication in obscure, nonpaying journals; the poets who are the eccentric maiden aunts of literature; the poets who are caricatured as fops and weirdoes. Anyone who has ever seen Ernie Kovacs' Percy Dovetonsils will not easily forget him.

ERNIE KOVAC: For Adam and Eve wore fig leaves, in the earliest of earth's known years. They wore them through spring and through summer, labeling them "his" and "hears." (Laughter) You talk about your poetic license, huh?

ROGER ROSENBLATT: What greater proof could one have of their miserable social status than that April has been designated poetry month? Poetry month-- imagine a month dedicated to screenwriters. As soon as they name a month for your cause, be assured: You're cooked. And yet poetry is the people's art. It is very popular -- maybe not in total sales or in box office, sweetheart, but in the long, long run of generations. It sticks in the common language, which is common property. It sticks in the heart's memory. "Poetry," wrote Marianne Moore, "I, too, dislike it." Nonetheless, she wrote poems that survive:

The mind is an enchanting

thing,

is an enchanted thing

like the glaze on a

katydid wing.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: And all the eternal others: Yeats' "Second Coming"-

The best lack all conviction,

while the worst

are full of passionate

intensity.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: And Auden's:

Lay your sleeping head,

my love,

human on my faithless arm.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: And Roethke, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Ransom, Cavafy, Robert Penn Warren, back to Keats and Blake and Donne-- "Go and catch a falling star"-- to Milton to Shakespeare to "Beowulf" and Seamus Heany's new translation:

They said that of all the

kings upon the earth

he was a man most gracious

and fair-minded,

kindest to his people and

keenest to win fame.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: All these poets, all these lines hang in the air like hawks, as prose does not. Funny thing about poetry: It creates its own underground society of considerable size and zeal. Poetry readings: There's nothing like them in any other form of writing.

PERSON READING POEM: "When his boat, snapped loose from its mooring under the screeching of the gulls."

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Thanks to places like the Academy of American Poets, the 92nd Street "Y," and the Poets House in New York, poets like Frederick Morgan, Galway Kinnell, Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich can entice thousands to hear them read. When I was in the Soviet Union in 1987, Yevtochenko and others attracted audiences of over 14,000. The voices of poets sometimes account for this popularity. Dylan Thomas' built-in echo chamber...

POEM READ BY DYLAN THOMAS:

It is Spring, moonless night in

the small town, starless and

bible-black...

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Robert Lowell's New England patrician-cum-southern drawl...

POEM READ BY ROBERT LOWELL:

At Beverly Farms, a portly

uncomfortable boulder

bulked in the garden's center --

ROGER ROSENBLATT: T.S. Eliot's dry eggshells of a voice...

POEM READ BY T.S. ELIOT:

April is the cruelest month,

breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land,

mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: George Plimpton's "Paris Review" this month is packed with these riches, a groaning board, 430 pages. For an art form reputed to be remote and exclusive, it creates an impressive bang. New poems by young poets like Catherine Coy; worksheets of old poems and commentaries; interviews. The main reason for the mass appeal of poetry is that poetry comes closest to music. One does not have to understand it to understand it. In ancient Ireland, the poets were called the music. And when kings did battle, the lives of the poets were spared because they were more important than wars and politics, because they handled the truth, and because they were the music. That poem of Marianne Moore's, by the way, only begins, "Poetry, I, too, dislike it." Here's the whole thing:

POETRY

I, too, dislike it.

Reading it, however,

with a perfect

contempt for it,

one discovers in

it, after all, a place

for the genuine.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: I'm Roger Rosenblatt.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: And, again, the major stories of this Wednesday. The U.S. Supreme court heard arguments on the Boy Scouts' ban on gay scout leaders The governor of Vermont signed a bill extending marriage benefits to gay couples. It's the first law of its kind in the country. And a kindergarten teacher of Elian Gonzalez and a ten-year- old cousin left Cuba to visit him in the United States. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening, with an extended interview with Governor George W. Bush. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.