The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer : WETA : September 11, 2001 12:00am-1:00am EDT

Good evening, I'm Jim Lara. On the news hour tonight, some assessments of the just completed UN Conference on Racism. A newsmaker interview with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, the opening of a series on whether smaller means better for the schools and a new book conversation about how women saved the city. It all follows us on some of the news this Monday. Major funding for the news hour with Jim Lara has been provided by A major in the world where no child bakes for food, while some will look on that as a dream, others will look long and hard and get to work, ADM, the nature of what's to come. And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, this program was also made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you. Americans are healthier today than 25 years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said so today in an annual report. It credited reduced levels of smoking, hypertension, and cholesterol among other things, but it also found people in small towns tend to smoke more, lose more teeth as they age, and die earlier than urban residents. That's partly because they have less access to preventive care and other medical treatment. David Secretary Rumsfeld promised today to declare war on bureaucracy in the Pentagon. In a speech there, he said he'd combined some civilian and military positions and cut duplicate military jobs. He did not give details, but said Congress had mandated a 15 percent cut in headquarters staff by 2003. He said overall the cuts could save up to $18 billion a year. Prime Minister John Howard of Australia pressed today for talks on a free trade agreement

with the United States. He did so in a meeting with President Bush at the White House. Afterward, Howard said preliminary discussions would begin by the end of the year. In his public statements today, Mr. Bush was non-committal. He's currently asking Congress for greater general authority in trade negotiations. The UN Security Council today lifted its arms embargo on Yugoslavia. It was the last of the international sanctions imposed on that country in 1998. They were meant to end a served crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The United States and European nations also imposed economic sanctions. They lifted those penalties after then President Slobodan Milosevic was voted out of power last year. And that's it for the new summary tonight. Now it's on to Prime Minister Howard of Australia. What happened at the racism conference, smaller schools, and women in the city? The Australian Prime Minister comes to Washington.

Ray Suarez begins. The island continent of Australia may be 8,000 miles from the west coast of the United States, but a year ago it was the center of the world, as the site of the Summer Olympics. The nation of 18 million people, once a British colony, used the occasion to show the world its ethnic and cultural diversity, and to prominently showcase its native Aboriginal population. Australians and Americans have fought side-by-side in five wars since World War I. And today in Washington, Prime Minister John Howard observed the 50th anniversary of the formal alliance between the nations the so-called ANZUS pact, a ceremony was held at the Washington Navy Yard. Australia is a strong and peaceful presence in East Asia and the Pacific. Australia is a generous land, mindful of the struggles of poor nations, always helping when and where it can.

Your government and your good people are an example of democracy, individual liberty, and the virtues of free trade amongst all nations. Later at the White House, Howard met with President Bush to discuss trade and other issues. Australia wants a free trade agreement with the United States, but the Bush administration is not yet committed to that idea. Two months ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made an unusual joint visit to Australia to discuss forming tighter security bonds among countries on the periphery of China, including Japan and South Korea. But since that visit, members of the opposition Labor Party have warned against being drawn into an anti-Chinese alliance. Australia's major security issue is to prevent the possible collapse of its next-door naval Indonesia, with its population of over 200 million people. Two years ago, when Indonesia ended its occupation of East Timor and chaos ensued, Australia

took the lead in forming an international force to restore order. Australian troops still are the largest component of the UN peacekeeping force there. The government was left with no alternative. Howard's right-of-center liberal party controls parliament and new elections may be called within weeks. Even as Australia's emphasized its role as an Asian nation and absorbed more than 800,000 ethnic Asians, immigration issues remain a flashpoint in domestic politics. The government's poll ratings have jumped since it refused to admit a cargo of more than 430 mostly Afghan refugees on a Norwegian ship off the Christmas Islands. After a week of diplomatic maneuvering, a deal was worked out for Australia to pay for the refugees to go to New Zealand and the Pacific Island nation of Norru. And now, too, Prime Minister Howard, who joins us for a newsmaker interview, Mr. Prime Minister, welcome. Good evening, Gene. On this Afghan refugee situation, why did you not allow those people into Australia?

Well, because they were legal immigrants, we're very happy to take refugees and on a per capita basis, we take more refugees in any country except Canada, but if you allow a legal immigration of that type to interrupt the refugee flow, you really are allowing those people to go ahead of others who may be assessed by the UN HCR as being more in need of refugee acceptance into Australia. Even 430 people would have meant that big a difference and a come to mind. That's not that, I mean, that wouldn't have been the end of it, there are estimates of thousands of people wanting to come to Australia. And we have a very large coastline, it is an island continent. And if you continually have a situation where we're seen by people, smart gloises being an easy touch, a number of people wanting to come will grow rather than diminish. What do you say to those who say there were domestic political ramifications of this, that if you had not been approaching a probable election, you might have taken a different

turn? Well, I would say that we can hardly be accused of having a range for a vessel out of Indonesia to founder and be picked up by a Norwegian freighter, been those circumstances were impossible to organize, that's what I'd say to them. But there is no question that your decision was politically popular in Australia, the majority of the Australians had gotten what those people to come in. Well, whether it ultimately turns out to be politically popular or not as beside the point, we did it because we thought it was the right thing to do, and we did it against the background of having taken refugees on a very generous basis, indeed a more generous basis, and many of the countries around the world that are positioned to criticize us for what we've done on your trip to Washington. Because the unwillingness of President Bush to start free trade negotiations immediately, that must be a great disappointment to you.

No, I understand there are domestic political reasons here in Washington for that. I mean, I'm a realist, I appreciate the domestic political challenges of fellow leaders. He's got it again. Everybody has them in other words, right? Of course they did. I had him, George Bush has got them, you've got to be realistic in his business, and he's got him to go see a mandate, a trade mandate from Congress, trade promotion, and that end right at the moment those negotiations might be compromised by any commitment in principle. But once that issue is resolved, I would hope that we'll return to the question of a looking at the possibility of a free trade agreement between our two countries. I think there could be a lot in it, and I hope when the other issue is resolving that back to it, why is this important to you and Australia? Well, because there's a great problem in charity between Australia and the United States where both modern, sophisticated, highly educated, very progressive economies, obviously there's a huge difference in size.

But things like internet usage and those types of things are almost as high in Australia as they are in the United States, and on a per capita basis we're very similar. And I think there is great potential, there will be a lot of hurdles, particularly in the area of agriculture, and we may not in the end find it with the candle, but we will at least have a go and see if we can find the basis of a mutual agreement. What would be in it for Australia? What would be the advantage of having a free trade agreement with you now? Well, access to an enormous economy. What is it that you have? You can't sell here now in an open way. Well, obviously we would like some progress on agriculture, like what? What products? The whole range, right across the board, but when you have a level of sophistication and technological skill, which is very similar, I think the potential is an enormous week, get a lot of investment from the United States, the US is our largest foreign investor. We invest quite a bit back, so I think it's a natural fit for the future.

When you have a close relationship, as we do with the Americans, it's always a mistake to sort of just sit on it and assume that it will look out for itself. You've got to keep, like friendships, you've got to keep good relationships and good repair. What is the relation, the economic relationship between Austria and the United States, beyond trade? How do you... Well, there's a lot of linkages in the financial sector. I mean, many of the banking houses of America operate in Australia, and of course, it comes back the other way. You're taking an organisation like news corporation and started in Australia. So that's so Rupert Murdochs, we're going to do it. Of course. So it goes both ways. Now, our economy, the US economy right now, is having its problems. What's the state of the Australian economy? Very strong at the moment. We're actually growing at a very strong clip, and I think if things go as predicted, the next calendar year, we could grow faster than any economy in the industrialized world. We've had solid growth of around average around 4% for the last few years.

We have a big budget surplus, we've seen employment growth, although our unemployment rate is still higher than yours. So right at the moment, the outlook in Australia, economically, is very strong indeed. How have you escaped the problems of the United States, even Japan, which is even closer to you and other problems in Asia? How have you escaped this, the economic role of the days here? Oh, a number of reasons. One of them is we've run a very flexible exchange rate, and we're able to shift a lot of our exports out of Asia to North America and Europe when the Asian downturn hit a few years ago. So you were selling things to Asia? Things went bad. Yeah, we shifted. We shifted quite a bit. Not all of it. Yeah. But we're able to avoid the hit from Asia, and on top of that, we've reformed our tax system and taken about $3.5 billion Australian a year out of the cost of our exports, because we have an across the board, value added tax now, goods and services tax, and that doesn't apply to exports. And that's given our exports as an enormous boost, where we've reformed our waterfront,

which has made our export sector a lot more efficient. So a lot of those things have come together to enable us to absorb the shock of what happened in Asia. Now, obviously, we're watching what is happening here in America because America is the dominant economic power in the world, and so it could hurt you in the law. Well, everybody can be affected, but we've done everything we can domestically to insulate ourselves against it, and the moment of very positive for Australia economically. All right, the security issue. You and President Bush observed the 50th anniversary of the military alliance today. How do you read security threats in your part of the world? What is it that... We don't think anybody's waiting to attack us, but we do live in a region which is very unstable, and there will, I think, be in the future, be the potential for outbreaks of political and domestic instability in our immediate region.

We've seen a lot, we've seen these Timor, we've seen Bergenville, we've seen difficulties in Fiji. So we do live in a more unsettled region, paradoxically, it's more unsettled since the old divide between the Soviet Union, which used to be in the United States has disappeared. So you do need to have a defence position which protects your quite an adult position, but also gives you a capacity to help when help is needed in the region. What is your view of China as a threat in your area, part of the world? Well, I tend to take a positive view about the relationship with China and the relationship between China and the United States is obviously critical of stability in the whole region. And our regimes are always for very constructive dialogue, and I think that's the president's view too. Yeah. Well, Richard Amataj, who's deputy US Secretary of State, made a speech in Australia last month and caused a stir when he said, Australians must understand that being in this military

alliance with the United States means being willing to fight and to die. And there were a lot of people jumped on him. What was your reaction? Well, I didn't jump on him. I mean, I know Rick Amataj very well. He's a passion at the death of sea of the Australian United States relationship. He was expressing the passion of his feeling. I don't think any of us in this situation in the near term, we're fighting side by side in those terms. And we could have remembered in the past Australians and Americans who fought side by side. We, by the strength of our alliance, hope to avoid the necessity of it happening again. Some people interpret that as his saying, hey, we may have to come to the aid of Taiwan against China. We want our streams there by our side and we're going to ask for it. Did you interpret it? No, I don't interpret it that way. I just interpreted him as a, it was a dramatic and rhetorical way of emphasizing what a close alliance means.

And we do have a close alliance. I mean, there is no country that we're closer to in a strategic and ideological sense. So from your point of view, he was telling me what you were already knew, is that right? That's right. Well, what he was, he was expressing the reality that it's a very close alliance and a very close friendship, neither he nor I would indeed anybody wants to do anything to provoke a conflict between China and Taiwan, it's in everybody's interests to engage China in dialogue, it's in everybody's interests to reach out consistent with defending our own values and our own system and our own position. I mean, we have a pragmatic approach to the Chinese. We're very different. We tend to focus on the things that we have in common, rather than the things that divide us. But you don't have any problems with the Chinese, not only our standing country, but we don't. In fact, we have, you know, there are hundreds of thousands of Australians of Chinese to send particularly living in Sydney and other major cities. We have a very different philosophy.

I mean, we're an open democracy. China's not. But what you do in a situation like that is focus on where you can move forward together. But you don't see them when you sit down at your desk every day as a potential enemy that I don't know, I don't think anybody wants to attack Australia. But we do live in a region that has the potential for a local instability in a number of spots. And that's a very different world in a way from what it was a few years ago. All right. Well, Mr. Prime Minister, thank you very much. Thank you. Now, the UN Racism Conference, Gwen Eiffel, has that story. By the time the contentious meeting of the United Nations Racism Conference due to a close this weekend, participants had agreed on this much, a 27-page declaration condemning anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, religious intolerance, and slavery.

May I take it that the well-conferenced wishes to adopt the debent declaration and the debent program of action as submitted by the main committee. But getting to even the most sweeping agreement was anything but simple. Before the meeting even began disputes flared about efforts to equate Zionism with racism and to call for reparations for slavery. It took nine long days for a meeting called for a remote racial tolerance and diversity to work through the fundamental disagreements that sparked a U.S. walkout. The United Nations, Mary Robinson, chaired the conference. It has been, as I said, exhausting. I know I've missed my plane, and I'm sure that everyone will benefit from a break. But not for too long. There is much work to be done. We have made a beginning. Thank you very much. Robinson applauded what she said was the meeting's chief accomplishment, the carefully broke redecaloration, condemning slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade as a quote

crime against humanity. But African delegates wanted an explicit apology for slavery, plus specific promises of compensation or reparations for slavery's victims. The delegation from the European Union refused to accept such language, arguing that reparations would open the door to massive lawsuits. Durban was an opportunity to express a very strong act of repentance. I said to you that and also maybe to, it is not important to know if we speak about regrets or we speak about remorse or we speak about apologize, that's not the question. What is important to me is that it is the recognition of an injustice that we cannot accept. Diplomats from Europe, Africa, and Latin America, as well as African-American attendees ultimately accepted the compromise as an important sign of atonement.

But we feel that it really is a partial victory for us because many of our issues people were laughing at 20 months ago that the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and colonialism are crimes against humanity and reparations are owed as victims. What this document does is it says that the transatlantic slave trade should have been a crime against humanity at the time. The Middle East conflict provided fuel for the conference's major sticking point. As Israel and the U.S. refused to sign on to any document that seemed critical of Israel. The final document did not equate Zionism with racism, but it did express concern about what it called the plight of the Palestinian people, asserting their right to self-determination. We are not completely satisfied as everybody knows. We thought that the text was not satisfactory, but we nevertheless went along in the interest of the conference and the interest of our friends in Africa and other places as well. The final document also spoke out against a grab bag of other issues, including racial

and ethnic profiling, AIDS discrimination, and matters affecting gypsies, curds, migrants, and refugees. In the end, what was accomplished at the UN racism conference? For answers and opinions, we turn to Hillary Shelton, director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP. He attended a non-governmental organization session of the conference in Durban. Former ambassador William Lewis, he is now the chairman and president of the United Nations Association of the United States, a group that advocates stronger U.S. UN ties. He was a foreign service officer for 31 years, and we will be joined shortly by representative Tom Santos of California. He was a U.S. delegate as part of the delegation to Durban. Mr. Lewis, was this conference with all of its drama in all of the setting? Was it a success or a failure? I guess you can ask that about any U.N. meeting. My sense is that it's a tremendous success that 165 nations can sit together for 10 days and talk about what is arguably the most contentious issue among human beings, racism, and

disorderly, passionate, unbalanced unfair. But nonetheless, an effort to reflect so many people, the concerns of so many people who are not heard anywhere in the world. And I think from that standpoint, one has to say that the U.N. is the only place where this could happen. Do a voice, give voice to worries and concerns and passions? Well, let's follow up on that point. You say that so many people who are not heard anywhere else in the world got to be heard, but all we heard about in this country were the debates over Zionism and slavery and were there other things which were obscured by those debates? I think so. I think I wasn't there, but we had a delegation from U.N.A. there. And from my understanding is many of the issues virtually every country came under some observation on the part of the NGOs and the member states with regard to problems within

their countries. I think this is the first time in which countries have tried to put the blame on other people, but have recognized that within their own societies they have problems. I mean, the Roma issue, which has not talked about very much the gypsies of Europe. Explain to us what you mean. Explain to us because it's not heard about what we'd like to know. The gypsies of Europe have been a downtrodden group discriminated against for many hundreds of years. And now their cause is being addressed openly within these countries and was discussed at the conference and was specifically listed as they should be given the rights to education and to housing, and the black Brazilians got a voice about the problems they're having in Brazil. The whole range of issues of Africa, it wasn't simply about slavery, particularly in the

NGO conference, I understand, that in country after country, individual Africans spoke of discrimination within their country against them. Now this type of thing is important to most of the world. We were in this country obsessed this summer by the sexual habits of one of our congressmen, and these issues are important issues that they were talking about in Durbin, and I guess I would have to say that they're disturbing the way they were discussed. I think some of the more outspoken members of the delegations captured and almost carried the conference away, but the good news is that it ended okay. Well let me ask Mr. Shelton for his take on that. I agree with the ambassador, there are so many important issues there were to be discussed at this conference. There were discussed at this conference to sit down with so many people from across the world to talk about their struggles to address issues of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia was very interesting to us.

We learned a lot from speaking to them and wish that our delegation had been led by our head-to-state, like 17 of the delegations that participated in the conference. Issues like AIDS, issues like the disparate treatment of people of color, they're different from the majority of the population in the country. I sat down in my office with representatives from the Romans, from the gypsies of Czechoslovakia, as we talked about their issues and concerns, their disparate treatment in their own country. It was so similar to our own that we just laughed because we had so much in common. Excuse me, but one of the issues, one of the big issues, which American civil rights groups like yours, took to Durban and didn't get satisfaction on, was this issue of reparations or even an apology for slavery in the slave trade? Well we actually did get some satisfaction, we have advanced those issues. The issue of reparation for the transatlantic slave trade was very much front and center. Those discussions are very much alive. It's very clear that they need to be continued to be discussed. There's also very clear that we have nations, heads of unions, that still refuse to

have those discussions. One of the biggest problems with racism today is the refusal of countries, the refusal of legitimate leadership, to talk about these issues that affect smaller segments of their societies. Well speaking of a nation that decided not to participate, at least after the first few days, Congressman Tom Santos joins us, you were part of the delegation in Durban that decided in fact to walk out. You said at one point that you felt that the participation in this conference made a mockery of the subject. Do you still know that it's over and you've seen the final document, do you still believe that's true? I certainly do. This was a conference which showed enormous promise. What would be more uplifting than to begin the 21st century by saying that racism, discrimination, persecution, slavery are things of the past and we are moving ahead in a constructive direction. But the extremists in the Islamic and Arab world hijacked the conference and the conference designed to deal with discrimination itself became a discriminatory conference.

It decided to discriminate against one country and one country only and that was the state of Israel. There was no discussion of slavery in the Sudan. There was no discussion of the outrageous behavior of the Taliban in Afghanistan, no discussion of Chinese suppression of Tibet, no discussion of Saudi suppression of women, just the issue of the Middle East. It was an outrage and I'm very proud of Colin Powell who recalled the American delegation. Now Mr. Congressman Lantos, Mr. Sheldon just said lots of other things were discussed. Mr. Lewis just said lots of other things were discussed and that the United States did not serve a purpose by now participating. Well, that's absolutely untrue. The whole focus of the conference was to be a punitive expedition against the state of Israel. That was the issue which mesmerized the conference. There was a lynch mob atmosphere there and while in some committees there were all kinds

of discussions, the focus was to single out the state of Israel for international appropriate and denunciation. That is what the conference was all about. The final document was not as bad as some of the earlier drafts but even the final document is an outrage because the final document does not deal with discrimination in all of the countries which had political pull at the conference. The notion that Sudan, a country practicing slavery as we speak is not criticized is an indication of the unfairness of this conference. This conference stands self condemned and it will be a dark chapter in the history of the United Nations. Ambassador Lewis, I'm sure you couldn't, you couldn't be more opposite than Congressman Lantos in your assessment of this conference but a chance to respond at least to his comment that for instance there was a lynch mob mentality toward Israel and friends of

Israel. Well Tom Lantos was there, he was part of it and I think thanks to a large degree to his efforts and persistence, the language against Zionism and against Israel was removed and I think the fact that he stood there and he argued the case for this single-minded concentration which was unjust, there's no question about it. The purpose of this conference was not to single out individual nations but to talk about the generic issues and how they affected the whole range of countries that were involved. And I think the fact that the Zionism as race andism was removed should remove a lot of the problems that I think Tom Lantos mentioned. But did that debate, Ambassador Lewis, did that debate stop the conference from accomplishing even more? I think at least for the American media and for the United States that issue alone casts a very powerful spell over any interest in furthering the work that was done at the

conference. It was a negative. On the other hand, it didn't appear, Zionism as racism was eliminated. And I remember that from 75 to 92 that was in all resolutions of the UN. Today it will not be and I think Tom Lantos deserves a lot of credit as to the delegation and the U.S. delegation and particularly the European delegation too finally had it removed. OK, let me turn to Hillary's Shelton here for a moment because I'm curious about two things. One is Congressman Lantos commented about Sudan and slavery right now, which wasn't addressed. And also, Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, was on meet the press yesterday. And she said that she thought that reparations was an issue of the past that we shouldn't be involved in at all. We'll respond to those. Let me start with the first point. First, the issues of slavery was addressed in broad, the final language in the UN document speaks very clearly to slavery being an abomination across the board, whether we're talking about the U.S. or any other country, including the Sudan.

So no country should have been singled out. Exactly. That's the same argument as a matter of fact that we made going in about Israel being singled out. We don't believe Israel should have been singled out of going in. We did believe the language of Zionism equals racism was unfair and not germane to the scope of the conference. So very clearly those issues are on the table, and very clearly we're to do two things that we were successful. One is removing that very troubling language, and the other is making sure that issues of slavery across the board were addressed, including in the Sudan. I think Mr. Lantos was a little misleading as he talked about those issues not being addressed at all. For indeed, they were. Your last question, if you would be- About Condoleezza Rice's comments about reparations. I think that she misses the point. The point of addressing issues of reparations are repairing the damage that was created through the transatlantic slave trade is something we live with even today. It's not just an issue of the past, but it's an issue of today. That is, if we look at almost every measuring spoon of our society, whether it's education, employment, home ownership, we find that African Americans, the descendants of transatlantic

slaves are behind the curve of just about any other group in this country. So not to draw those conclusions and to see the direct correlation to the transatlantic slave trade. I think it's just missing the point. Tom Lantos, a chance to respond to what Hillary Shelton just said, but also I'd like you to give us an overview about whether we should have gone in the first place, whether everyone wasn't just biting off more than they could chew on this issue. Well, I thought that we should have gone, and I know that no one wanted to be there more desperately than Colin Powell, who made it clear before this conference began in Durban that he will not go if obnoxious language and the singling out of a country is part of the document. Now, I find it amusing that some of my colleagues on the panel are so proud of the fact that Zionism is racism as a phrase is not part of the document. Well, that's true, Zionism was a response to centuries old of persecution of Jews in Europe.

It had nothing to do with racism. It was a gerbils-type propaganda slogan, which the UN kicked out a long time ago. But even the final document is tendentious, it is unfair, it is inappropriate. And the fact that there is a historic recognition of slavery does not deal with the issue that slavery, as we speak, is being practiced in the Sudan. There was silence about it. There was silence about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. This is a generic issue. My feeling is that the conference was basically a failure, and my judgment is that our government handled our participation and our withdrawal in a singularly principled fashion, and I congratulate Colin Powell. Congressman Santos, Ambassador Lewis, and Hillary Shelton. Thank you all very much for joining us.

Still to come on the news hour tonight, smaller schools, and a new book conversation. Is smaller, better when it comes to education? Well, we begin a new series tonight, and Betty Ann Bowser reports on a small school experiment in Denver. By almost any measurement, manual high school is at rock bottom. It has the worst test scores in the Denver Public School system. A third of the kids have difficulty speaking, reading, or writing English, and just 67 percent actually graduate. Even the students themselves seem troubled by the school's reputation. This ninth grader said she almost didn't come to manual because of what her middle school teacher said. She told me that it would be better for me to go to another school. So why would she say something like that?

Well, let me tell you something. We do not do well on standardized tests as a school. We do not succeed. In fact, we'll fail for the state standards, but that's not because of you students who are here now. But unfortunately, we have a lot of students on our class role that don't take the test and they get a zero. Where is that even? Over the years, manuals administration has tried a number of things to turn the school around, but so far, nothing has worked. We're breaking it down into three schools to make your education more personal. This fall, they're trying something drastic. Instead of having the 1200 students all in one school, manual has been turned into three smaller schools. 9th grade English teacher Mario Giardiello explained it to his students on the first day of school. That's all what this whole reform is about, a personalized education so you guys feel more comfortable being students here and succeeding here.

And we're going to make sure no one falls through the cracks. When you're smaller, you're better because nobody can just sit in the back corner and try to drift away and be invisible. Most of the money to create these smaller schools came from a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It provides $600,000 over the next five years. The transformation began over the summer when each of the school's three floors was turned into a separate school. One has been a principal or is currently a principal. The faculty of each school poured over resumes looking for the right principal. Hopefully it's with all of you guys, blessing. One for the leadership and business school, one for the Arts and Cultural Study School, which also houses the English Acquisition Program. Bring technology or medicine into it because that's the theme of the school.

And one for the science and technology school. Each of the schools teach a basic core curriculum, but with special emphasis on leadership, science, or the arts. A fourth principal was hired to manage the building operations and logistics for sports and other after school activities, which were not divided. Nancy Sutton has been principal of Manuel for the last five years. Splitting into smaller schools was her idea. And she is now in charge of directing the reform effort. If ever there was a compelling reason why a principal would want to get into this. It's because you stand back and you say, I'm not providing the leadership that I need to provide for my teachers. She said she used to spend too much of her time on operational matters. Now she says principals can focus on teachers and students. We have this intense personalization, so you know what every student can do, can't do,

will do, won't do. What the family issues are, you have this trust built up. And you can really, I think, make a difference in the life of, you know, a group of students. In each of the schools, ninth and tenth grade instructors work in groups of four. One each for English, Math, Science, and Social Studies. Let's say I'm working on percentages so I can gire, if you might say, what percentage of the population of this country, do this, and then I work that, you know, we could do, I think there are nice cross. Sure. And they'll get hit with it every period. Laura, you're in the right spot, come on in. The four person teams have just over 100 students, and they stay with them for their freshmen and sophomore years. Hey! I got you again, huh? With teacher Carrie Schultz teaches in the Arts and Cultural Studies School. I'm really feeling a lot more support this year than I have in the past, that, you know,

there's teachers that have the same kids, that they're all in the same floor, so if I'm having a problem with the kid, they're easy to access, I don't have to chase them up and down the floors. How is this going to improve your kids' ability to learn? In some classes already, I know, like, there have been teams of teachers that have met and talked about every single kid, and what's going on with them already. And this is only a week and a half into school. And that's usually something that, if we were lucky, would be happening in December, you know, four months from now. Isaac, are you liking classes in English? Sort of. Kinda. This is the second year Schultz has taught sophomore Isaac Gonzalez. Last year, he took his classes in Spanish. This year, they're all in English. Homework. How old are you, Jimmy? You have what? I need two equations. Why you only have three equations? He hopes the fact that he already knows and trusts her will make him want to continue to work hard at math and at his language skills. Okay.

So you're going to come visit me after school today? Okay. Promise? Okay. After school. Giard Yellow, who teaches in the science school, also thinks the smaller size will help him keep his kids engaged. Here the class is discussing the plot and themes of the movie, Titanic. I don't know, what's the moral? Don't fall in love with the husband and your daughter. The person in love with Titanic died, except for the girl. No, no, Juliet died. Both of them. You don't believe in love. Those memories are so obvious that even though bad things have never been in love, because I'm afraid I die. All right. Is there anybody here who believes in love? Really? We still have some people not been tainted. Good. I think a lot of our students today, you know, if they don't feel like you care, they're not going to work for you. I don't know how many times we used to hear. You know, I don't like that teacher, so I'm not going to do their homework, which is a really immature idea, of course, but it's a reality. Our kids have to know that we care about them in order for them to care.

Shields and Giard Yellow both began their teaching careers at manual four years ago when the reform effort was just starting to be discussed. They were excited about the prospect, but not all of the teachers were. About a third of its veteran teachers left because of the proposed reforms. Who would like to read, Luis, want to try it? Special education teachers Stacy Blennis May has been at manual for 16 years. She chose to stay in the leadership school, but she does have some concerns. When you upset the balance and there are all these novice teachers who are fabulous and wonderful and very few veterans, it's difficult. It makes things a lot harder. There are things that you know that you've learned when you've taught a long time. It doesn't make you better.

It makes you experienced. And it has been her experience that too many times reform efforts come and go like fashion trends with no real commitment to make them work. Oftentimes we've tried many things and we've never had the opportunity to see it grow, change, fail, or succeed. And so I think that our best chance to really evaluate is to give it some time. Good job today, guys, but they won't have much time. The state of Colorado has said that if manual does not raise test scores by 25 percent over the next three years, the three schools will be shut down. This is part of the problem with our reform is that we're feeling a little schizophrenic. Are we a school of personalization or are we a school of test takers? And I think there has to be a really firm distinction between raising our scores up 25 percent and developing and nurturing lifelong learners, curiosity in our students, all the focus on the tests worries me and in fact the schools that are improving by 25 percent in three

years. I'm suspect of those schools. What are those teachers doing? Are they only teaching to the test? But Marsha Poiter, the principal of the leadership and business school, says she doesn't worry about that. Everybody has to produce. If you're in private industry, you have to produce or either your business goes out of business, you know, and we just have to produce. That's just about in line. And if the test scores are what we're going to be judged on, then we have to do a better job at the test, you know. And I'm not saying teach to the test, but we need to improve our kids' test-taking abilities. Sutton agrees. I think if we have really important work that the students are doing, that we address that around the standards, that the tests are going to have to take care of themselves. It's the best we can do. It's the best we can do. Students at the three schools will take a series of tests all year so that teachers can

track their progress. And Betty Ann will have updates on manual high school throughout this academic year. Finally, tonight, a conversation about a new book and once again, to Ray Suarez. The book is How Women Saved the City. And it tells a little-known story of a key period in the history of the American city and women's growing public role at the turn of the 20th century. Author Daphne Spain is a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia. And implicit in your book's title, and of course, copiously told in the book itself, is this idea that the city needed saving? What did it need saving from? It was a pretty chaotic time as the nation was undergoing industrialization, people were moving from farms into cities, and there were a number of newcomers or strangers that were

entering cities. So we had European immigrants arriving. We had large numbers of African-Americans coming from the south and to Midwestern and northeastern cities. And there was a group of women who were learning to earn their own way independently of their families, and they were called Women Adrift, ADRIFT, Women Adrift, because they seemed to be a new category. They were not within their typical family status that was expected of women at the time. And then there were also these women volunteers that were a type of newcomer to the city, and those were the ones that I was writing about, the ones who created places. What were the institutions that were created at this time by the women who were these volunteers? The YWCA created a number of boarding houses and vocational schools to teach women how to become typewriters, and that's what they were called at the time.

They were called, the women themselves were called typewriters. The National Association of Colored Women also created vocational schools with domestic skills and some liberal arts skills for African-American women. And the Salvation Army had a number of hotels and rescue homes for fallen women, women who were prostitutes or trying to, or unwed mothers and trying to get off the streets. So the range of facilities included both lodging as in the boarding homes and hotels for the Salvation Army and the settlement houses and the YWCA and NICW. And they provided places for meals. They provided places for bathing, as I mentioned, the public baths and playgrounds as well. So these were, I call them redemptive places because they served as a way station for newcomers to learn how to become urban Americans. Well, why were this class of women that you write about saving the city?

Why were they particularly poised at that moment in history to sort of rush in and create a whole voluntary sector? There were several things going on. Women did not have the vote at the time, the French Heisman. And so middle-class women and working-class women, both white and African-American women, had very few avenues outside of the home. Other than voluntary associations and religious work through the church. And when those combined, as they did in some of the organizations I studied like the Young Women's Christian Association and the Salvation Army, it gave them ways to establish public identities through creating actual places in the city where they came into contact with strangers, where they helped assimilate immigrants, where they helped young women find jobs, where they helped kids stay off the streets and playgrounds.

Many of the institutions you write about end up taking care of tens of thousands of families. They become enormous institutions and almost a parallel women's realm inside the city. I think that it's parallel, but interwoven at the same time because when we think about the era of urbanization, the real city building era between the Civil War and World War War I, we know about the skyscrapers. We know about magnificent projects like Central Park, but we don't know that much about the settlement houses that were in the Lower East Side to help immigrants assimilate. We don't know about public baths, where people had to go on a daily or weekly basis because they had no running water in their tenements. We tended to disregard playgrounds and yet they were very important spaces in between these other places, so they were parallel but also integrated into the fabric of the city in a way that facilitated the work of cities at the time.

The work of cities a hundred years ago was to assimilate strangers and to move from an agricultural into an industrial economy. But to the teaming slums of immigrants on Halsted Street in Chicago or the Lower East Side in New York, the fact that women volunteers were visiting their apartments was much more significant and much more tangible than the fact that the Woolworths building was going up downtown. I like to think so, and that's what I was looking for when I started the research because Salvation Army had a special brigade of women who were called slumsisters and they went into homes and did things as mundane as feeding children, making tea, preparing people to be buried actually because there were no funeral parlors and immigrants had very little money to be able to do that.

So the slumsisters were doing absolute daily routine tasks that had to be done in the immigrants' home, say. In settlement houses, the reason they were called settlement workers is that they went into the neighborhood and settled there as a way to promote some neighborhood change. The settlement workers were somewhat radical by the standards of the day. So there were some groups that were more paternalistic, more condescending, and some who suffered along with their charges and effect. Well, and there's a large literature on settlement house workers that claims that they were paternalistic and they were simply trying to voice their middle class white values on European immigrants, and that may have been part of the program. But there was also part of it that was motivated by the social gospel, by an attention to poverty as a public issue rather than a personal failing of an individual gospel. The social gospel was a Protestant theology, very activist theology at the turn of the century

that encouraged people to go out and become involved in changing poverty-ridden neighborhoods and changing social structure as opposed to trying to save the individual so that the salvation army was more evangelical. It was not associated with the social gospel. It didn't have that progressive reform agenda that the social gospel advocates did, but the two combined working in tandem or in parallel at the same time had the effect of imposing a fairly religious agenda on the nation as it was becoming a more secular nation, ironically. So I think that was a transition era. So here we are, essentially later, new big cities are growing up in America. We're arguing about the role of the religious in the secular realm and also assimilating a large number of immigrants again.

Exactly. Exactly. And the redemptive places that I identified from 100 years ago, the settlement houses and boarding schools and vocational schools and such, were important because they were actual spaces that people could gather together and they represented the types of issues that were most important to the day. They were religiously motivated then and we have charitable choice as a provision of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act now. It's quite controversial, certainly. And President Bush's faith-based initiatives, I see as taking us almost full circle back to where voluntary efforts originated 100 years ago. The book again is, How Women Save the City? Stephanie Spain, thanks for being with us. Thank you. Again, the major stories of this Monday, Americans are healthier now than 25 years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said so in an annual report.

Now, Stray and Prime Minister John Howard pressed for a free trade agreement in talks at the White House, but on the news hour tonight, Howard said he understands President Bush can't commit to that until Congress grants him broader negotiating power. We'll see you online and again here. Tomorrow evening, I'm Jim Lara. Thank you and good night. Major funding for the news hour with Jim Lara has been provided by... Imagine a world where we're not diminishing resources, we're growing with ethanol, a cleaner burning fuel made from corn, ADM, the nature of what's to come. And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, this program was also made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.

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