Parting Words

After two years as U.S. Commissioner of Education, Terrel H. Bell, 54, stepped down from the top spot in American public education last week. A straight-talking Mormon and ex-Marine first sergeant, Bell is going on to a better paid position as commissioner of higher education in Utah (TIME, May 3). Some excerpts from a recent interview with Bell conducted by TIME Washington Correspondent Don Sider:

SCHOOL FINANCING. The biggest problem in the American public school system is an ancient school-financing program that depends upon property taxes. The difference between one district's tax evaluation per pupil and another's causes an enormous amount of inequity. I would favor equalizing property taxes with state appropriations, usually coming from sales or income taxes, as Texas, California and New Jersey, for example, are finally starting to do.

BUSING. If you say that racial isolation is bad for schools--and I have to say that--and if blacks live on one side of town and whites on the other, it is hard to find another solution. The only one I can see is to take a look at the typical city school district and suburban boundaries and try to reorganize them.

THE COURTS. They have gone too far. Federal Judge Arthur Garrity is sitting in Boston making decisions that the court ought not to make. He has just taken over. But I also worry about the pendulum's swinging the other way, the Supreme Court's repealing Brown v. Board of Education, for instance.

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S ROLE.

Its responsibility ought to be to correct the gross national deficiencies in education. We ought to target our resources to try to beef up those areas where there are deficiencies. We've got to spend more money on the inner city. We are the only industrialized nation not to have elevated education to a level where a chief of state has an equivalent to a ministry of education: we ought to have a department of education.

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