The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, Kwame Holman and Ray Suarez report on today's OPEC decision to pump more oil. Susan Dentzer and Gwen Ifill look at the risks and benefits in putting new drugs on the market. Tom Bearden tells the story of an unusual academy for troubled teenagers. And Elizabeth Farnsworth talks to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney about his translation of "Beowulf." It all follows our summary of the news this Tuesday.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: OPEC agreed today to increase oil production. Only Iran refused to go along. The others said in Vienna they would raise output by as much as 1.7 million barrels a day. The purpose is to bring down world oil prices without causing a crash. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. President Clinton talked Middle East peace today at the White House with Egyptian President Mubarak. Mr. Clinton had met Sunday in Geneva with Syrian President Assad, but there was no progress in reviving Israeli-Syrian talks. He said what happens now is up to the Syrians.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I went to Switzerland to meet President Assad to clarify to him what I thought the options were and to hear from him what his needs are and I asked him to come back to me with what he thought ought to be done.

JIM LEHRER: Mubarak said he's still optimistic.

President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt: Concerning the Geneva meeting, I cannot say it's a failure. It's a step forward or no progress between the Israelis and the Syrians. That doesn't make us pessimistic.

JIM LEHRER: The Israeli-Syrian talks broke down in mid-January. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators concluded a week of meetings in Washington today. State Department Spokesman James Foley said they agreed to resume negotiations on April 6. He was asked if there was progress.

JAMES FOLEY: We believe that these talks were successful in achieving a real exchange of ideas and a greater and deeper understanding of the needs and requirements by each side of the other side, and that's thecritical predicate, as I indicated, to achieving the concrete negotiating progress that we're going to need in a very accelerated fashion over the course of the next six months.

JIM LEHRER: That's because Israel and the Palestinians have set a September deadline to reach a final peace accord. Another mass grave was dug up today in Uganda; 28 bodies were found at the home of a Christian cult leader. Police believe he died in a church fire along with about 300 followers two weeks ago. Officials said many more bodies appeared to be buried at the house. Nearly 600 now have turned up on property owned by the cult. At the U.S. Supreme Court today, the Justices ruled police generally cannot stop and frisk someone for a gun based on anonymous tips. They said that violates constitutional guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures. The unanimous decision came in a case from Miami. The National Association of Police Organizations said it will put officers and the public at greater risk. George W. Bush offered a plan today to combat childhood illiteracy, which he termed a national emergency. The Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate said the goal is to get youngsters reading by the fourth grade. It would hold local governments and school boards accountable. He spoke in Reston, Virginia.

GEORGE W. BUSH: I believe the federal government ought to fund this program along this criterion, to the tune of $1 billion a year over the next five years - a $5 billion program that says we will not tolerate illiteracy amongst the disadvantaged students in the great country called America. I know this is something a little new. Others have proposed throwing money at the problem, but they have proposed resources without reform. That approach has no history of results and really no prospect of success.

JIM LEHRER: Vice President Gore dismissed the proposal. He said Bush's tax cut plan would actually force cuts in education spending. On the Elian Gonzalez story today, a meeting between U.S. Immigration officials and lawyers for his Miami relatives ended in deadlock. The family refused to sign a promise they'd surrender the six-year-old for return to Cuba if their legal appeal fails. Without that promise, his permission to stay in the U.S. expires Thursday morning. Immigration officials said they'd meet with the family again tomorrow. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the OPEC decision, the risks of new drugs, a different way to teach, and poet Seamus Heaney.

FOCUS - OPENING THE TAP

JIM LEHRER: The coming of more oil, and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: Just in the last few hours, word came from Vienna that after long negotiations, OPEC was going to move forward and raise its production quotas without Iran. The price hawks from Iran resisted pressure from other members of the oil cartel to agree to an alliance-wide increase, just as Iran fought against the cut in production last year. OPEC members, who pump just under a half of the world's daily oil supply, will add about 1.5 million barrels per day to current production. For more on today's OPEC decision, we are joined by Phil Flynn, a senior market analyst at Alaron.com, a brokerage house, and Phillip Verleger, a partner at the Brattle group, an economic consulting firm.

Phillip Verleger, let's start with you. A million-and-a-half barrels going to satisfy the world and especially the United States' thirst for oil?

PHILLIP VERLEGER, The Brattle Group: No, sir. Very simple answer: Too little and too late. OPEC will increase production by, they say, a million-and-a-half barrels a day but after you allow for cheating, it's 500,000 barrels a day. We probably need a million barrels a day just to keep prices stable in the next quarter.

RAY SUAREZ: Won't the cheating on the quotas still go on giving you a net increase of a million-and-a-half barrels?

PHILLIP VERLEGER: If past is any prologue, no, you'll probably get a little increase but not a great deal of increase. Then you gradually get more cheating towards, say, June or July.

RAY SUAREZ: Phil Flynn, what do you make of a promised increase of a million-and-a-half barrels?

PHIL FLYNN, Alaron.com: I think the most interesting thing about it is there is dissension in the ranks. One of the reasons why OPEC has been so successful over the past year raising the price of oil has been their unity. And now with this break with Iran, you know, on the front this obviously... this raise in production, they had to bring it in kicking and screaming. And on the record, Iran is against it, and they're not going along with it. But there are other OPEC members who were just as much against it but are bowing to U.S. pressure and going along with it. So I think the big issue here is, are they just saying that they're going along with it and not really raise production? Maybe we'll see cheating in the opposite direction -- as opposed to more barrels we may see less. That's going to be the interesting thing to watch as we get a little further along.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, how could we probably not know? I mean a million and a half barrels is 45 million gallons of oil, I guess. I mean that's a lot of oil. It's either there or it's not. When would we know?

PHIL FLYNN: Well, what we do to monitor, we have independent agencies that continually monitor. We have our weekly stocks reports in the United States that will start showing up in about six weeks. If this oil is here, we're going to see also not only OPEC oil, we're going to see Mexican oil, probably Norway oil and of course in other areas. So we're going to see some more oil. The question is will it get to the United States in time? And the other big question that we're going to have to deal with is this 1.5 million going to be enough to satisfy the Clinton administration and the U.S. Congress? This is going to become a very, very hot political issue. The last couple of days, Bill Richardson went on a barn-storming tour. He may have hurt some feelings along the way. One of the reasons why Iran is not going along is because they don't want to appear that they're bowing to U.S. pressure. Now, the big question is, is this going to be enough to appease the Clinton administration and how critical is the U.S. Congress going to be? The Congress, Trent Lott has gone on saying that he believes that we're letting OPEC walk all over us. Essentially right now that's what we're going to have to deal with. What is going to be the U.S. response and that could be as important as how much oil that OPEC is going to pump.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Phillip Verleger, this is the time of year when demand is supposed to be going down. Does that ease this any?

PHILLIP VERLEGER: Demand for the final consumer goes down a little bit this time of year. Demand for crude oil goes up normally as refineries build inventories. I think we ought to make a couple or correct a couple of things that were said. One, we really don't have very good information on ho much oil is moving. I participated with the Secretary of Energy in a debate over what were called missing barrels. About a year-and-a-half ago we lost track of a million-and-a-half barrelsa day of production. So we're really not going to know until June or July what's going on. And we need more oil. We need more oil now to build up inventories to avoid very high gasoline prices. As I said, it's too late, we're not going to get it. The other point that I think we need to think about is going forward to December whether there will be enough capacity within OPEC, if OPEC wants to use it, to keep prices below $35 a barrel. You can make a case that we're going to need all the production in the world, not just eliminating all of the quotas over the next six months in order to make it through keeping prices at $30-$35 barrels a day through December and into the springtime. Now, the problem is in 1979 and 1980 when we hit a situation like this, several of the OPEC countries cut production. As Phil said, there could be some cheating in the other direction. This is a historical pattern of several of the OPEC countries enjoying some market power, cutting production to jack up prices. I think we're going to see that in the coming months. So I think we're just at the start of things regardless of what the administration does.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, one of the things that kept this announcement until so late in the day in Vienna where it's about, you know, the middle of the night is that there was real disagreement in the negotiations -- the Saudis trying to hit a target of $25-$27 a barrel; the Iranians saying, "no, let's keep making money." What are the two different motivations here? What are these two different countries looking at in order to take these very different positions?

PHILLIP VERLEGER: Well, one of the things, this is not the first time OPEC has gone several days. There was once a 23-day meeting. So this is short by historical standards. The Iranians clearly maximize their wealth from high oil prices, and they don't really care about the situation in the U.S. economy. The Saudi Arabians have a much longer life reserve so they want to maintain an oil market for the next 100 years. They don't want prices to be so high that essentially oil gets squeezed out as it did in the '80s. And the Saudis also are cognizant of their role in the U.S. economy not just in terms of defense -- as we hear commonly -- but because the Saudis have between, oh, 500 billion and maybe $750 billion invested in the western economy. And they know that high oil prices could really bring down the infrastructure, bring down the stock markets and hurt them financially. The Iranians have nothing at stake.

RAY SUAREZ: Phil Flynn, the countries that are not part of OPEC and they pump a lot of oil, the Britians, the Norway, Americas and the United States and Mexico, can they become big players in this as well, keep prices down on their own by opening up the taps?

PHIL FLYNN: Well, they're not going to be able to pick up with OPEC pumps. And that's the problem that you have here. I also want to, you know, discuss the political situation within OPEC a little bit more carefully. The bottom line is right now is that the smaller OPEC countries are in a desperate situation economically. When oil prices were down below $10 a barrel or not below $10 but near $10 barrel, their economies were really, really suffering. They're very, very concerned that this raise in production is going to cause the same thing that happened back in 1998 and cause another oil glut and put them back into the same type of situation that they were in previously. So I think that's the main thing that we have to, you know, concentrate on here. Right now, I think the main thing that we have to see here out of OPEC, they're walking in very, very fine political tight rope right now. The only reason that OPEC agreed to any raise in production is because of U.S. pressure. But if you had to ask any one of the Saudi oil ministers off the record if they feel that a large increase is justified, they're going to probably answer you no. And the reason why they're doing it is to bow to U.S. pressure.

PHILLIP VERLEGER: Could I....

RAY SUAREZ: Go ahead. Please.

PHILLIP VERLEGER: I actually think that if Bill Richardson had stayed home, we probably would have gotten a larger increase. The Saudis have been and all the members of OPEC have been trying to focus prices at around $35 a barrel, $25 a barrel. And prices were up at $35 a barrel a few days ago and they were on their way towards $40. So that I think all the oil-producing countries, all the members of OPEC, Norway, Mexico, recognized that some production increase was needed to compensate for the growth and demand that has been stimulated by this tremendous economic recovery we've had on a worldwide basis. So I think we would have gotten a production increase and I think the meeting would have been much smoother and we probably would have gotten a slightly larger increase had the U.S. just been very quiet about this whole thing.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, given that you agree that not much is going to change on the supply side, what are Americans going to see at the pumps through Labor Day?

PHIL FLYNN: I would have to say that right now that the way it stands right now that prices are probably going to continue to go up. As Phil said, it's too little too late. Even if we start pumping oil today, it's going to take at least six weeks to get to the U.S. consumer. So there is going to be that lag period in there. We have seen gas prices just drop modestly last week but as soon as the summer driving season kicks into high gear, we'll probably see prices start to edge higher again. Trent Lott might get his tax holiday at $2 a gallon. It may be coming. So let's look forward to the holiday.

PHILLIP VERLEGER: I absolutely agree with Phil. We're going to $2 gasoline. The big problem we really face now is that we have a constraint on our U.S. refineries. EPA is introducing a new type of gasoline for much of the country this year and refiners are going to have more difficulty making it. That's going to put upward pressure on prices. Inventories are low and refineries tend to break at inopportune times as we see out here in California every spring and summer. So, you know, I think it's going to be a very, very difficult season for vacationers. They're going to be paying a great deal more for gasoline and we're not near the top of the price.

RAY SUAREZ: Gentlemen, thank you both. We have to end it there.

FOCUS - RISK VS. BENEFITS

JIM LEHRER: Now, benefits versus risks in putting new drugs on the market. Susan Dentzer of our health unit starts with some background. The unit is a partnership with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

SUSAN DENTZER: In the space of just three days last week, two widely used drugs were withdrawn from the U.S. market following reports of dangerous and even deadly side effects. The first announcement came last Tuesday, when the drug company Parke Davis/Warner Lambert said it was withdrawing the drug Rezulin at the request of the federal Food and Drug Administration. The drug was approved for sale in 1997 as a treatment for so-called type-2 diabetes. Formerly known as adult-onset diabetes, the disease afflicts nearly 16 million Americans. Rezulin was considered a breakthrough drug because it made diabetics' bodies more sensitive to the hormone insulin; that enabled them to use the hormone effectively in the all important process of metabolism. Demand for prescriptions grew quickly, and an estimated two million people eventually used the drug. But just eight months after Rezulin was approved for sale, the FDA began receiving occasional reports of liver damage apparently caused by the drug; also reported were some sporadic deaths. A handful of critics, including at least one within the FDA, wanted the agency to withdraw Rezulin from the market immediately. But the FDA declined after others, including the manufacturer, argued that vast numbers of people were using the drug successfully. As a result, they said, the benefits to millions outweighed the risks to a relative few. Pressure to withdraw the drug began to mount again last summer, after the FDA approved two new diabetes drugs that seemed safer and as effective as Rezulin. So last week the FDA asked Parke Davis to withdraw the drug and the company agreed. In total, the agency concluded, Rezulin had possibly or probably contributed to 90 cases of liver failure, leaving 63 dead, 20 patients alive but with serious liver damage, and seven who survived only after undergoing liver transplants. The second withdrawal came on Friday, when the manufacturer of the anti-heartburn drug, Propulsid, announced that it, too, was removing its drug from the market. Approved in 1993, Propulsid attacks the condition known as gastro-esophageal reflux. That's when a faulty valve at the entrance to the stomach allows the stomach's contents to flow back up into the esophagus; that leads, in turn, to the symptom known as heartburn. Propulsid works by speeding the emptying of the stomach so there's less to flow back. Tens of millions of Americans have taken the drug. But just a year after its release, Propulsid was also linked to growing reports of abnormal heart rhythms in users of the drug, many of whom had more serious conditions than heartburn. Eventually the drug was implicated in 80 deaths. Last week, as the FDA contemplated proposals to ban the drug or sharply restrict its use, the manufacturer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, announced it would take the drug off the market next July after patients and doctors had time to switch to other medications.

JIM LEHRER: And to Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL: Joining us now are Raymond Woolsley, president of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. He's also a professor of pharmacology at Georgetown University; and Thomas Moore, a health policy analyst at George Washington University medical Center. He is author of the book "Prescription for Disaster: The Hidden Dangers in Your Medicine Cabinet."

Mr. Moore, only a few years ago, the FDA was accused of moving much too slowly in approving drugs. Now it's accused of moving too quickly. Which is it?

THOMAS MOORE, George Washington University: I think it's not simply fast or slow. It is what are the risks of the drugs that are being withdrawn. In the case of Rezulin in particular, it seemed that this drug from its early testing really had unacceptable risks and it just took us several years to get the drug off the market.

GWEN IFILL: But obviously there are far more people -- there are people who swear by Rezulin, who said it really helped them, far many more of them than people who had adverse effects.

THOMAS MOORE: Well, that's true but the problem here is we have safer alternatives. There were 11 other drugs for adult onset diabetes that were available that didn't have these risks and weren't as dangerous. And so why should we expose people to the possibility that the drug will destroy their liver when we have safer alternatives available?

GWEN IFILL: Dr. Woolsley, is it possible that drugs like Rezulin and Propulsid should never even have been on the market in the first place?

RAYMOND WOOLSLEY, Georgetown University: No, Gwen. I think the data were compelling and supported approval of these drugs. I think Tom is correct that there were alternatives available but there was a serious concern about the safety of those drugs. A lot of studies have shown that they may actually increase mortality. And there was a major push in the medical and drug development to find replacements for those drugs. I would quickly add though that it was known when the drug Rezulin went on the market that it could cause liver damage. The fear was that it could be a major problem and it turned out that it was a major problem. Unfortunately, I don't think the mistake was made in putting it on the market. I think the mistake has been that the FDA has not been given adequate resources that it's asked for to monitor new drugs once they go on the market to get that data that they really need. They delayed taking this drug off the market or encouraging it to be taken off because they were concerned that the two replacements may be just as bad or perhaps even worse. And that's because we don't have mechanisms in the community to allow us to compare the relative effectiveness of drugs. It's very clear, as you reported, that this drug had a major problem. We didn't know the magnitude of it. That's the big problem.

GWEN IFILL: And is the major problem, Mr. Moore, perhaps, is the major problem that people aren't administering these drugs correctly or is the major problem that they're being approved too quickly?

THOMAS MOORE: Well, in the case of Rezulin, I think I have a slightly different view of this than Ray Woolsley does. A year ago I sat in a meeting in which David Graham, the senior drug safety officer for the FDA, gave a presentation that showed this drug was much more dangerous than any other drug we had on the market. It was an excellent kind of safety analysis. But the FDA didn't pay attention to him. Instead, they believed the company that argued the drug wasn't so dangerous. It turned out that David Graham and the FDA's experts were right and the company was wrong.

GWEN IFILL: Let's take a step back, Dr. Woolsley. Is this a question of when you're balancing risk and benefit and human lives are involved, how do you begin to do that?

RAYMOND WOOLSLEY: Well, you'd like to do that with data. And that's been the problem. The FDA makes risk-benefit analyses all through the life of the drug, and when the drug is being developed, we have very good data on its relative safety and the risk-benefit within limits of the number of people that have been exposed. But once it goes on the market, that's when we don't have the adequate data to make those risk-benefit assessments. And they have to use very crude tools. The voluntary reporting system that they have had to rely upon is a good system. It picks up a signal and it will tell you very correctly if there is a problem with the drug, but it doesn't tell you how big the problem is.

GWEN IFILL: But it sounds like you're using the general population as guinea pigs in this process.

RAYMOND WOOLSLEY: That's something the general population should always... the public needs to understand that these are chemicals. They're being put on the market as prescription drugs because they are complex. They have known toxicities and they have unknown toxicities. And until a drug is used in hundreds of thousands of people, we will really never know whether it's another Rezulin or another Propulsid. And that is something the public has to understand: That the FDA cannot protect them against those kinds of rare events.

GWEN IFILL: Buyer beware, Mr. Moore?

THOMAS MOORE: Well, I would just like to enlarge on an important point that he was making. The numbers we showed about deaths on the show in the lead-in, those were spontaneous, voluntary reports. Our post-market surveillance system is so weak today that we think that anywhere depending on the drug and the condition, anywhere between only 1 in 10 and 1 in 100 and in some cases for smaller adverse effects, 1 in 10,000 ever get reported to the FDA. So take every number you've heard on this show and multiply it by at least ten. That means that, for example, for Propulsid or for Rezulin thousands of people, thousands, not a dozen, not a hundred, but thousands suffered serious injuries. We don't know how many thousands because we don't have a good enough system.

GWEN IFILL: Well, let's talk about Propulsid for a moment. Five times they changed the label so that doctors and patients could try to administer that better. But that still didn't work and they still had to pull it off -- the heart burn drug -- they still had to pull it off the market. Was it worth the risk that we now saw to leave it on the market for something like heartburn that people can basically live with, as opposed to a heart medicine or a diabetic medicine, Doctor?

THOMAS MOORE: I believe that with five safer alternatives, this drug at best should have been restricted to only very serious cases while other drugs had been tried first. It shouldn't have been the best seller with literally billion-dollar sales a year because in some people it caused cardiac arrest. No matter what your doctor did, in some people you couldn't stop them from being killed.

GWEN IFILL: Dr. Woolsley.

RAYMOND WOOLSLEY: Well, I think that's true. You would never accept this type of toxicity from a drug for heartburn but the FDA'S advisors and practicing physicians were telling them that it's a very effective drug in people who failed to respond to other drugs and the pediatric community especially, premature babies often were given this drug. So they were being told that there is a need for the drug above and beyond the treatment of heartburn and that was, I think, a large basis for them to leave it on the market as long as they did. I think... I'll go back and say Tom and I would agree on one thing. That is, that we need to find these problems much more quickly. We need to respond to them more quickly to save more lives. We need for Congress to give the FDA the resources that it's asked for and needs to get these data more quickly -- to save lives from these drugs with known side effects.

GWEN IFILL: As a patient and not an expert here, I assume when I hear know the FDA has approved a drug that it is safe. Is that not true?

THOMAS MOORE: No drug is safe. What the FDA has done has been to require very extensive testing, usually now in thousands of patients, to have its independent experts review that testing, and if the system is working right-- and I don't think it has been-- to make a judgment that that drug has benefits that outweigh its risks. And we understand what those risks are. And my criticism of the FDA in recent time is there have been too many judgments that were wrong. Since 1997 there have been nine drugs withdrawn for safety reasons. And it's hard to find another four-year period in which there are more than two or three.

GWEN IFILL: So what's your suggestion about how to fix this problem?

RAYMOND WOOLSLEY: Well, Gwen, I think Congress had a chance in 1997 and did make a major step forward in fixing this - and that is to invest in the community, to have academic medical centers working as centers for education and research on therapeutics -- to actually be in the community, monitoring the way medicines are used, looking at the people, the patients that are actually receiving these drugs and giving the FDA feedback on their relative safety. Unfortunately, there are only four of these centers now created. And we need many more of those. We need for the community to be more educated on the appropriate use of medications, and we need for physicians to be given balance in the information they receive about medications. These centers could make a difference. I know that John Isenberg who is the head of Agency for Health Care Research on Quality is eager to increase these if, again, Congress will give them the budget to do so.

GWEN IFILL: Is it possible, Mr. Moore, that we just have to get used to the idea of acceptable risk?

THOMAS MOORE: Absolutely not. These drugs cause thousands of serious injuries when, in most cases, safer alternatives are readily available. The reason why we have a safety system is to eliminate preventable serious injuries and deaths. The safety wasn't system wasn't working and so we experienced thousands of them. And we need better policies to correct those. Now, Dr. Woolsley named a very good start. We do need to better work to get better information to patients and physicians about what drugs do and don't do. But we also need a much stronger post-market surveillance system at the FDA And we need a new attitude. Something has gone wrong when the industry, when the FDA seems to be paying more attention to industry than to its own experts. And that needs to be addressed. That was the story of Rezulin.

GWEN IFILL: Final word, Dr. Woolsley. How does the FDA fix this, if it's the FDA's problem?

RAYMOND WOOLSLEY: Well it's not an FDA problem entirely. I think it's a public health problem. It's a need for the community to recognize that these medications are dangerous. They can harm some people. There is a relative risk involved in every foreign chemical you put in your body. We need to invest... we need for Congress to give the FDA The resources that they need to make sure that we respond to the safety needs of these drugs.

GWEN IFILL: Ray Woolsley, Thomas Moore, thank you both very much.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the "NewsHour," a different way to teach, and poet Shamus Heaney.

FOCUS - POSITIVE PRESSURE

JIM LEHRER: A different way to teach troubled teens. Tom Bearden reports.

TOM BEARDEN: 17-year-old Kenneth is from the Bronx. He's threatening to quit school and move back home with his mother.

KENNETH: I am leaving. I am leaving today. I am being discharged.

TOM BEARDEN: The staff and his peers are trying to convince him to stay.

STUDENT: No, no, no. Why won't you listen to that? Why won't you listen to that? Why do you want to hurt yourself?

TOM BEARDEN: Kenneth is one of 170 teenagers at the Edwin Gould Academy in Chestnut Ridge, New York, about an hour north of New York City. But Gould isn't what most people would think of when they hear the word "academy.' It's not a posh private school, but rather a publicly funded residential treatment facility forteenagers from New York City's toughest neighborhoods. Only a small fraction of the more than 40,000 kids in foster care or juvenile detention in the city get to be a part of the Gould program. About 25% of the kids at Gould have committed petty non-violent crimes. If they fail here, the alternative is either getting locked up in a juvenile detention center or being sent back to the same streets where they got into trouble. The other 75% have been abused or neglected by parents or relatives, and have been sent here as a refuge. All of them are troubled, and Gould offers a chance to turn their lives around. Tom Webber runs the academy.

TOM WEBBER, Edwin Gould Academy: Edwin Gould Academy believes that kids can really become something great. And it sounds corny, and it sounds like words that we have in our mission statement, but we really believe it, and we try and get the kids to believe that not only can they be great, but they can be something special.

TEACHER: Yeah, what's another word for "failure?"

TOM BEARDEN: Outside observers think Gould is pretty special, too. Last year the school won the prestigious Harvard School of Government Award for innovation in government. Dr. Webber says the numbers show the school a proven success, with 150 kids graduating from high school in the last five years, and 50% of those kids go on to college or technical training. That's far higher than other programs in New York and elsewhere. Like most residential centers, the kids live together in a group house. This one is called the Alex Haley House, on the second floor of a building that was an orphanage in the 1920'S. The core of the Gould program is something called "positive peer culture." Each evening, students meet to discuss their problems and try to help each other solve them. The technique isn't new. But unlike most residential treatment facilities, the staff only observes the group sessions. The kids are in charge. The idea is to teach the teens to think about others before thinking about themselves. On this night Kenneth-- we omit last names because of the students' ages-- was despondent. He had just gotten his grades, and was failing everything. He was ready to give up. The group was trying to convince him to stay in school and graduate, so that he could achieve his goal of joining the Marines next fall.

STUDENT: You... You have no discipline at all.

KENNETH: I don't care no more. I just don't care no more, about the program... Nothing to do with the program.

STUDENT: Why is the program...

KENNETH: If I have a problem then I will deal with it myself, and if I can't, hey, hey, I have to deal with it. The program says we have to work to become independent.

STUDENT: Yes.

KENNETH: And I am leaving, and what has the program been giving me to become independent? Nothing. (Several kids talking) and I have tried... I have been working the year and eight months I have been here.

STUDENT: That's your attitude right now... Change your attitude. Your attitude is not with us... Your attitude is with yourself, because you don't know how to handle your problems. If you really sit right there... Sit right there and observe yourself... You gonna say real good, you gonna say, yo, my problem is not with my head, it is within myself.

STUDENT: It seems like you want things to just come to you... For people to feed you everything, and you just want to sit back and relax, but you got to strive just like everybody else is striving. You ain't the only one that got problems. If you're having so much problems, you need to find another way to deal with those problems, instead of acting childish, all right?

LUIS: You hear us at the moment, but you are going to keep on using... Keep on saying... Keep on going, doing the same mistakes. Take the help we're giving you and keep on using it, every time you are about to get into a problem, you remember the help we've been giving you. Then you are not going to get in that problem and that's what you got to do.

TOM BEARDEN: Positive peer culture is designed to counter the often negative peer pressure on the streets that got some of the kids in trouble in the first place. But it's not the only element staffers think contributes to Gould's success. Another key is the way the school is organized. The students are supervised by a coordinated team of adults that work with the boys to solve their problems in the classroom, at home, and with their fellow students. Each team consists of a teacher, a social worker, and a therapist. In most treatment centers, the educator and the social worker work in different departments, report to different bosses, and don't often communicate about the student. At Gould, they are all in the same organization. The team thinks that makes a big difference.

KATHLEEN FORDHAM, Teacher: I think that's very important is the consistency, and that what you're talking about is working with a team. It's because we do all know what the strategies are for each student, and it's carried through so that we're all on the same page, and the students have no opportunity to slip through the cracks, if you will.

TOM BEARDEN: In fact on this night, teacher Fordham took Kenny into a one-on-one session to give him additional help.

KATHLEEN FORDHAM: And you are not even listening to what they're saying to you. You have to stop a minute. Stop and relax and to regroup and think about what they're saying to you... That you are making a mistake. Nothing will work for you, if you leave under these circumstances. Nothing will go your way. What is... What is the goal? What is your big goal right now?

KENNETH: Finish school.

KATHLEEN FORDHAM: Okay. You think if you leave in the middle of the semester that you're going to be able to finish up school this year?

KENNETH: Hey, listen... I...

KATHLEEN FORDHAM: Listen to me. Listen to me. I have 15 years in the system... 15 years in education... I am telling you that that is not going to happen. You will not finish school on time if you leave here now. Even if you go to summer school, it's not going to happen. You will not graduate from high school this year.

KENNETH: All I need is eight credits.

KATHLEEN FORDHAM: Kenny, it is not going to happen. You have no credits right now. You have no credits.

KENNETH: And all I need is eight.

KATHLEEN FORDHAM: And you can get eight credits in a semester.

KENNETH: Yes... I know.

KATHLEEN FORDHAM: Kenny, it is not going to happen. What if you don't pass something?

KENNETH: I am not going to fail.

TOM BEARDEN: The staff says this approach often means working a lot more than nine to five.

HEWTON FIDER, Team Leader: Well, you're supposed to work 40 hours a week, but again because of the dynamics, and because of the unique program we have, it sometimes... It never really happens to be 40.

MICHELLE ISRAEL, Social Worker: It's a very emotional job. You're dealing with emotions all day long so, it can be stressful. But you have great days, and you have tough days, and then you have great days when you see some great things with them. And it just pays off.

TOM BEARDEN: Keith thinks the program has helped make him a better person. Are you better prepared now than when you came here?

KEITH: Oh yeah, a lot. I was a little hardheaded, you know what I mean? Didn't listen to nobody, didn't give respect, had no respect. I got a lot of respect now for other people. And trying to be successful, they are going to try to help me.

TOM BEARDEN: Where did you get that respect from? Who taught it to you?

KEITH: You got to give respect to earn respect, so that is what they taught us here. So by me giving people respect, I earn respect.

TOM BEARDEN: Nancy Mahon, the director for the Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, follows the juvenile justice in America. She says programs like Gould should be an alternative to incarceration.

NANCY MAHON, Center for Crime, Communities & Culture: The Department of Juvenile Justice recently did a report in which they estimated that when a juvenile goes... basically falls out of high school system and goes into the juvenile justice system, we will pay, as a society, between $1.7 million and $2.5 million over the course of that juveniles life. Unfortunately, if we don't invest in kids at this juncture, and we put them in juvenile justice system instead of in facilities and programs and schools like Edwin Gould, we are going to be paying, as I said, for that child for many, many years to come in adult prisons.

TOM BEARDEN: It costs the state between $65,000 and $80,000 to put a child in a regular juvenile detention center or a group home. Gould's program comes with a larger price tag: Almost $90,000 a year per student.

TOM WEBBER: All of our resources are combined, so the educational money, which is in the neighborhood of $25,000, $27,000 a year per kid; the foster care money, which is in the neighborhood of $45,000, 48,000; the Medicaid or medical money to provide both health services-- some of our kids come here and with no immunization records. We have to provide all medical service sometimes from the beginning. The state's giving that to all of these programs already any way, so the money's already being spent. We're just using it wisely. We're putting all the program pieces together.

TOM BEARDEN: New York's commissioner for children's service whose office gives the academy more than $9 million a year and sends them three-quarters of their students, thinks the money is well spent.

NICHOLAS SCOPPETTA, Commissioner, Children's Services: You are really saving these children's lives. It is about $80,000 a year per bed. It is a very expensive program, but if you don't do this, and the kids go homeless -- end up in the adult criminal system, you will spend a lot more then. And as they say, "pay now or pay later." But that doesn't even begin to measure the human cost, if you don't intervene.

TOM BEARDEN: Dr. Howard Polsky is a professor at the Columbia School of Social Work, who has studied and written about juvenile residential facilities for more than 30 years. He says the Gould program is working better than most and can be applied in many other situations.

DR. HOWARD POLSKY, Columbia University School of Social Work: What they have learned there can be duplicated, not only in other residential institutions, but I think it also can be duplicated in public schools in the prime and criminalgenic neighborhoods that are falling apart. The concept of team primacy, where they emphasize staff participation in the decision- making of the institution, to involve them as part of the community, are all programs and mechanisms that could be useful to other institutions, and also to public schools.

TOM BEARDEN: But academy staffers are the first to admit that they don't have a very good idea about what happens to the students who complete their stay at Gould. They've found it difficult to raise money for follow-up studies. Even so, the school has received more than two dozen inquiries from out-of-state agencies considering replicating the program. Back at the Alex Haley House, at the end of that tense group meeting, Kenneth decided to stay that night, attend more meetings, and try to graduate from high school.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, a conversation with a distinguished poet, and to Elizabeth Farnsworth.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: A new translation of the epic poem "Beowulf" by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney is improbably on bestseller lists in several major U.S. cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, among them. The poem was written in Old English more than 1,000 years ago. It tells the tale of the Scandinavian warrior, Beowulf, who slays two hellish demons and then in old age, brave beyond reason, is fatally wounded in a battle with a fiery dragon. The poet and translator, Seamus Heaney, was born on a farm in Northern Ireland, and now divides his time between Dublin and teaching at Harvard University. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995, for what the Nobel Committee described as "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."

Thank you for being with us, Mr. Heaney.

SEAMUS HEANEY, Poet/Translator, "Beowulf:" A pleasure.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Those words from the Nobel Committee might describe "Beowulf," too, with its ethical concerns and the past so alive in it. Have you always had an affinity for "Beowulf"?

SEAMUS HEANEY: Well, I read the poem when I was an undergraduate. I was actually made to read it as part of my English course. When I was in my teens, I actually knew the shorter Anglo- Saxon poems better, but "Beowulf" was the large, 3,000- line monster lying there at the very beginning of the tradition. And the language it was written in and the meter it was written in attracted me, partly because, as I say in the introduction to the translation, I think there's something in the very sturdy, stressed nature of that old language that matched the speech I grew up with in Ulster, in the countryside in the 1940's.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We don't know who wrote it. You're not even sure exactly when it was written, are you?

SEAMUS HEANEY: No, it was written, as I said, towards the end of the first millennium, maybe in the 700's, maybe towards the year 1000, but that's not... we're not very sure about that. We do know that whoever wrote it lived in two worlds, in a way-- lived in a past that belonged to the Old English ancestry, that is the people who came over from Jutland and the Anglos and the Saxons and the Jutes, they came across the North Sea to England. So they brought memories of a Scandinavian past with them. So the poet is someone with... who lived in that previous, as they say "pagan" past. And he's also a Christian, someone who has taken in the new Mediterranean Christian culture. And the two voices, the two things are in the poem. The story of is the old, previous archaic material, and the understanding and the voice that speaks is someone who is in touch with the new Christian culture.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And then how did you find the tone and the voice for your own translation? I read that a word, is it "polean," helped you.

SEAMUS HEANEY: Yeah, well, this poem is written down, but it is also clearly a poem that was spoken out. And it is spoken in a very dignified, formal way. And I got the notion that the best voice I could hear it in was the voice of an old countryman who was a cousin of my father's who was not, as they say, educated, but he spoke with great dignity and formality. And I thought if I could write the translation in such a way that this man-- Peter Scullion s name--could speak it, then I would get it write. That's, in fact, how I started it, yeah.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you found words that had actually been words that you knew from childhood, right?

SEAMUS HEANEY: Yeah, that's right. My aunt used a word. In fact, all the people around the district, in the countryside, use words that I gradually began to realize the more I read were Anglo-Saxon words. They would say, for example, of people who had suffered some bereavement, "well, they just have to thole." And they would say it to you when they're putting the poultice on your hand that was burning, "you'll have to thole this, child." Now thole... "Thole" means "to suffer," but it's there in the glossaries of Anglo-Saxon, "tholian." So between the secret dialect speech of my home ground and the upper level discourse of the Anglo-Saxon textbook in university, there was this commerce. And I felt my own ear, my own language lived between... lived between that country-speak and learned-speak, and therefore, that I had some way of translating it, of carrying over from one to the other. I felt there was, like, a little passport into translating it, you know.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Would you read something for us, please?

SEAMUS HEANEY: Yeah, I'll read a bit, one of my favorite little bits where it describes a poet in the Anglo-Saxon king's hall, a minstrel singing his poem, and the poem is a story of the creation of the world. And in this very... this very happy scene is surrounded by darkness where the monster is prowling, the monster called Grande. "Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark nursed the hard grievance. It harrowed him to hear the din of the large banquet every day in hall. The hearth beams struck in the clearing of a skilled poet, telling what mastery of man's beginnings, how the Almighty had made the earth a gleaming plain girdled with waters. In his splendor, he set the sun and the moon to be earth's lamplight, lanterns for men. And filled the broad lap of the world with branches and leaves, and quickened life and every other thing that moved."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now read a little bit of it in Anglo-Saxon for us.

SEAMUS HEANEY: Well, these are just a little, few lines at the beginning. (Speaking in Old English)

"Da se ellen-gaest earfoolice

brage gepolode, Se be in bystrum bad,

paet he dogora gehwam dream gehyrde

hledne in healle;"

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The metrics of it, the balancing halves of the line, explain that, because it seems to be, at least for me, what kept pulling me through it.

SEAMUS HEANEY: Yeah, well the line is in two halves. But there are two stresses and two stresses "telling with mastery of man's beginnings." "To be earth's lamplight, lanterns for men." "Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark." You've got the two stresses, but you will notice there's also a little loop from one half to the other of alliteration. "Powerful prowler, a hard grievance, it harrowed him." "A gleaming plain, girdled with waters." "Earth's lamplight, lanterns for men." The "l's"-- "earth's lamplight, lanterns for men"-- they end, "then the Almighty made the earth." The "p"-- "powerful demons prowler through the dark." So instead of rhyming, you have those different principles for repeating the pattern line by line right through.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And the world of "Beowulf"-- you referred to this earlier-- but this old world, the warrior.. the Germanic warrior culture that's evoked, which is honor-bound, blood-stained, vengeance-driven...

SEAMUS HEANEY: Yeah.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: ...Did it seem particularly familiar to you? Was it like Ireland?

SEAMUS HEANEY: Well, no. Ireland doesn't live by the sword and doesn't, I mean, we're in a kind of different cultural situation. We aren't commanded once somebody has killed to go out and kill someone else. That isn't the code. But it is true that the... that what does strike the contemporary reader of "Beowulf" is that that sense of small ethnic groups living together with memories of wrongs on each side, with a border between them that may be breached. I mean, after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, after Bosnia and Kosovo and so on, the feuds between the Swedes and the Gates, these little dynastic, ethnic, furious battles strike a chord. Not, it's not just... I wouldn't say it was just in Northern Ireland, where there is of course an ethnic energy and a vengefulness from the past. But it's more widespread than that. And I say in the introduction and I think it's absolutely true, towards the end of the poem there's a scene, a funeral scene, where a woman begins to wail and weep with her hair bound up. And she cries out a chant of grief. And I think, instead of it being very far away, it's actually quite close now-- through paradoxically all the modern technological means of television, which bring us newsreels of sorrow right into the drawing room. And that figure of the woman wailing because of grief, because of atrocity, it's quite familiar and very close. And the poem, I would say, is fit for this kind of atrocious reality. The poet understands he has a veteran's understanding that the world is not quite trustworthy and that we most be grateful for it when it is trustworthy.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And finally, Mr. Heaney, how do you explain the fact that "Beowulf," this old, old poem with its old, old code is so popular right now? I mean, it's number seven on the "San Francisco Chronicle" bestseller list. It's number three, I think, in Los Angeles.

SEAMUS HEANEY: Well, I'm glad to hear that. I don't think poetry has a tense, you know, past or present. The reality that it deals with is kind of the... what our consciousness contains and what, how we are fit for reality. And when you get something like "Beowulf" or something like "Homer," then you're dealing with the clear, present reality of human understanding and human action, and as I say, it's so true that the tense of past or present doesn't enter. It is the truthfulness of the representation of the kind of creatures we are, I think.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Seamus Heaney, thank you very much for being with us.

SEAMUS HEANEY: Thank you.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Tuesday. OPEC agreed to increase oil production. Only Iran refused to go along. President Clinton talked Middle East peace with Egyptian President Mubarak at the White House. And the U.S. Supreme Court ruled police generally cannot stop and frisk someone for a gun based on anonymous tips. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you, and good night.