For several months, the editors of The Montana Professor have been working with other interested parties to stage a conference on school choice. With the generous support of Rocky Mountain College, MSU-Billings, and the Montana Committee for the Humanities, we have arranged a planning conference to be held in September on the Rocky Mountain College campus. If additional funding is forthcoming, we hope that the planning conference will lead to our sponsoring, in the spring of 2000, a major conference titled: American Schools and Public Choices.
The planners are devoted to the proposition that only by frank acknowledgment of the related problems and through open discussion of them can we discover the means to enhance parental choice effectively while concurrently maintaining support for the public schools.
The state of public education has become a politically sensitive, often emotional, point of discussion. For some time, we have seen powerful signals of public unease, if not outright dissatisfaction, with our public schools. We have heard complaints about declining test scores, questions about the validity of standardized assessments, and concerns about the separation of church and state--or the lack of separation. Understandably enough, non-academic events like the violence in Littleton, Colorado, and elsewhere have intensified these concerns. Insofar as these disturbing developments move us more determinedly to careful analysis and sincere reassessment of public education, these tragedies have yielded positive outcomes. We must be careful, however, that they do not become yet another pretext for divisiveness or another tool for political extremists. Clearly, the debate is fraught with hazards.
In the proposed conference---at the beginning of the millennium--we hope to provide a forum for vigorous yet civil discussion, for painstaking and thoughtful debate, and for personal engagement on the subject of public education in Montana. Our primary goal for the conference is to foster greater understanding, if not total agreement, among the several educational stakeholders in Montana and to clear the air, so to speak, for further dialogue.
Additional information about the conference will be forthcoming in our winter issue and in various other announcements.
We urge our readers to attend the spring conference; in the meantime, we invite them to communicate with us on the topic and to share their ideas and comments.
Recently the editors learned that our assistant editor and book review editor, Paul Trout, has been asked to write a regular column for the National Forum. The National Forum is the quarterly journal of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. Circulation is 120,000. The Society is one of the oldest and largest interdisciplinary honor societies in the United States. Since 1970 it has invested over five millions dollars in fellowships and awards.
Paul's responsibilities will be to the column on Education and Academics. He has been given the freedom to write on any topic within that area. He welcomes suggestions of topics from our readers.
We are pleased that Paul's work is being so well recognized and are happy to say he will continue in his current vital role with The Montana Professor.