The Week

■ no offense dept.: Despite a few scare headlines, the Soviet satellite that plunged down into the Northwest Territory didn’t harm a soul—not even the two Americans who, encountering it, reportedly by chance, during a trek into those frigid parts, walked right up and touched it. But say . . . How fortunate it was a Russian. and not an American satellite: otherwise we’d have faced a hysterical united front, embracing everyone from the Sierra Club to the Symbionese Liberation Army, denouncing the rapacious space program for imperiling the grizzly and the caribou. And thank God it wasn’t a Chilean satellite.

■ The decision reportedly taken by President Carter to create a new Cabinet post, Secretary of Education, has nothing whatever to do with greater efficiency or better management, or even much to do with education. It has everything to do with the powerful National Education Association. The NEA considers that the new agency, to be prescinded from HEW and given Cabinet status, would be its very special baby. That, in turn, would mean, thinks the NEA, that more federal dollars would flow in directions desired by the NEA—to elementary and secondary schools and to junior colleges. This increased cash flow, of course, would be at the expense of other claimants on the federal treasury, or else would mean greater demands on the taxpayer—and the evidence does not suggest that it would increase the quality of education at all. This entire struggle is not really about education, but about power and status.

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Jimmy Carter

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■ no offense dept.: Despite a few scare headlines, the Soviet satellite that plunged down into the Northwest Territory didn’t harm a soul—not even the two Americans who, encountering it, reportedly by chance, during a trek into those frigid parts, walked right up and touched it. But say . . . How fortunate it was a Russian. and not an American satellite: otherwise we’d have faced a hysterical united front, embracing everyone from the Sierra Club to the Symbionese Liberation Army, denouncing the rapacious space program for imperiling the grizzly and the caribou. And thank God it wasn’t a Chilean satellite.

■ The decision reportedly taken by President Carter to create a new Cabinet post, Secretary of Education, has nothing whatever to do with greater efficiency or better management, or even much to do with education. It has everything to do with the powerful National Education Association. The NEA considers that the new agency, to be prescinded from HEW and given Cabinet status, would be its very special baby. That, in turn, would mean, thinks the NEA, that more federal dollars would flow in directions desired by the NEA—to elementary and secondary schools and to junior colleges. This increased cash flow, of course, would be at the expense of other claimants on the federal treasury, or else would mean greater demands on the taxpayer—and the evidence does not suggest that it would increase the quality of education at all. This entire struggle is not really about education, but about power and status.