Dear Editor

...The new focus on results emerged in the '60s, when a galaxy of programs with names such as Headstart and Upward Bound boldly sought to assist disadvantaged youngsters by providing extra services to correct their shortcomings, yet they have had little effect in closing the "achievement gap'' between lower-class and middle-class children The output standard of equal educational opportunity was also advanced to serve a protective function?to keep school reform honest, as it were By ignoring this standard, the advocates ot Serrano expose themselves to a rather serious charge Should they be successful, educational expenditures will undoubtedly increase (for Professor Lekachman is certainly correct to observe that thts country rarely equalizes downward) But if current patterns persist, some 60 per cent or more of each new dollar will be spent on teacher salaries With a median family income of $13,000, teachers are among the most affluent groups of the population Far from mitigating the penis of plutocracy as Professor Lekachman would have it, the advocates of Serrano might be accused of exacerbating them—by taxing the poor to increase the earnings of the less poor, and doing so in the name of equality We do not suggest a moratorium on new educational expenditures However, insofar as we do spend on education, heroic experimentation is in order so that, in time, our attempts at equal educational opportunity may be more than merely fanciful This is not an unrealistic prospect as the recent establishment of the National Institute of Education attests But it will be necessary to prevent the apparent complexities of Serrano from clouding our vision of what has been done and what remains to be attempted Cambridge, Mass Leslie Lenkowsky Chester E Finn, Jr Robert Lekachman implies As did their recent Commentary article, the letter from Messrs Lenkowsky and Finn embodies a currently fashionable neoconserva-tive attitude as well as an interpretation of Serrano that i sharply disagree with Accurately read, Serrano v Priest does neither more nor less than set a minimum legal standard for the financing of public education by requiring that differences in the wealth of school districts do not of themselves result m differing educational expenditures per child The Serrano court did not argue that equalization of resources would inevitably generate equal 'outputs," any more than I made that claim in my original article One can...

...The old answer was a school that maintained high standards of plant and equipment, that had a reasonable number of children per classroom [etc ] [Now] apart from the general public interest in providing teachers an honorable and well-paid professional career, there is only one important question to be asked about education What do the children learn...

...as I do, applaud the Serrano decision and simultaneously encourage attempts to improve the education of disadvantaged pupils It is surely a non sequitur to suggest that because money alone does not guarantee literacy and numeracy, attempts to rectify the legal and practical inequities that currently disgrace school finance are therefore unimportant There is an additional merit in Serrano Great Neck and Scarsdale parents fund their schools generously not only because they want their youngsters to get into the best colleges and professions, but also because they want them to enjoy themselves while growing up We all spend an inordinate amount of our short lives in schools Swimming pools, band instruments and athletic equipment, not t?mention decent school libraries and individual attention from teachers adequately justify themselves by the immediate gratifications they provide not by the prospect of "outputs " Slum schools typically exist as poverty-stricken environments as well as inefficient educational factories If the major effect of Serrano-style, equalization is "only* to distribute more evenly the good things of childhood and adolescence, the decision will deserve every bit of admiration that has been lavished on it A word about the pay of teachers Median family income is now somewhat above $10,000 The less than $3,000 margin over that figure earned by teachers is probably less than that enjoyed by any other group that has spent five years or more in colleges and graduate schools It is, incidentally, only $1,000 above the breaking point in McGovern's original income redistribution scheme Nearly as many teachers would have been paid additional benefits under that plan ("because their incomes were low) as would have been assessed additional taxes (because their incomes were high) If teachers are 'affluent," what would Lenkowsky and Finn say about doctors, lawyers, and business school graduates...

...Dear Editor Financing Education With his usual reasonableness, Robert Lekachman has ably uncovered "the legal, tax ideological, and political complexities" of Serrano v Priest and kindred judicial and legislative actions concerning school finance ('Schools Money and Politics" NL, September 18) That is also the problem For it is all too common when studying the intricacies of educational finance to lose sight of the forest because of all those trees As we pointed out in Commentary recently, the latest reform movement in education really has one main objective to equalize educational opportunity among schoolchildren It is our contention that the standards decreed in Serrano are inappropriate to this objective and likely to retard the cause of real reform The Serrano rule implies that "equality of educational opportunity" can be translated into a relatively simple and traditional calculation based on money Equal money will provide equal chances But over the last decade, a considerable body of research has been accumulated demonstrating that spending more on education seems to produce very little improvement m scholastic achievement More important, equality should no longer be gauged by the distribution of educational facilities and services, but rather by what and how much children actually learn This is not so "imprecise and emotional * a standard as Professor Lekachman would have us believe That meticulous and sober sociologist, James S Coleman, has written that the massive report, Equality of Educational Opportunity "has had its major impact in shifting policy attention from its traditional focus on comparison of inputs to a focus on outputs, and the effectiveness of inputs for bringing about changes in output" No less a radical ideologue than Richard Nixon accepted this new premise and made it the key point of his 1970 message to Congress on educational reform "What makes a good' school...

...Fascism Lewis Feuer's review of my book, Mussolini's Italy The View From America (NL, September 18), reflects his ideological antipathies at the cost of misrepresenting my intellectual curiosities Coming from a scholar I respect his statements left me wondering whether I authored the book he reviewed His distortions of my generalizations cry out for clarification First of all, Feuer reproaches me for not developing a "coherent theory of Fascism" The truth is that no such theory exists and since the definitive meaning of Fascism continues to elude scholars, my aim was to study the various meanings Americans gave the phenomenon Thus the idea of Fascism as the consequence of modernity and anomie, or of collectivized militarism, or of mass politics and the like, belonged respectively to Talcott Parsons, Walter Lippmann, and Eric Hoffer Neither these nor other interpretations seem convincing to me, but I have no "coherent theory" to explain an incoherent, complex, and ambiguous political movement Similarly, Feuer accuses me of taking the "current New Leftist idiom" by asserting that "the Fascist impulse is to be found 'when the full depths of the bourgeois psyche' are plumbed " My actual statement is as follows "Dissecting the uglier side of the American character, these scholars seemed less certain that when the full depths of the bourgeois psyche were plumbed a Fascist impulse would not be found " The scholars I was referring to were Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, the late Richard Hofstadter, and others who m the '50s amid the atmosphere of McCarthyism and Birchism, began to study what they called "The New American Right" Feuer also accuses me of taking the " 'pragmatic liberals' to task for not having seen early enough the portent of Fascism " Nonsense I stressed that "retrospective omniscience comes cheap to students of history," that the liberal "flirtation with Fascism" was shortlived and confined to only a handful of intellectuals, and that elements on the entire political spectrum, from Marxists to conservative humanists and Catholics, could see something constructive (read for Marxists, "contradictory") growing out of Fascism I did focus particular criticism on "pragmatic liberals" because of what I believe is a flaw in their ex post facto epistemology To judge either Fascism or Communism as an "experiment" seemed to me to ignore the lesson of Hobbes' definition of truth—hell seen too late "More seriously," Feuer writes, "in viewing the events of Mylai, where a group of soldiers tan amuck, as equivalent to the calculated horror on a mass scale of totalitarian governments, he makes an ideologically unbalanced judgment" The imbalance lies in Feuer's complete mishmash of my statement "On a more subtle but nonetheless more profound level, America's encounter with Fascism called up from the depths a darker moral vision as Americans began to rediscover the strange deceits of human depravity Those who learned well the lessons of innocence realized that evil lurks in every man's banal existence, from the soldiers who liberated Italy to the soldiers who 'liberated' My Lai" New Leader readers familiar with Reinhold Niebuhr will understand perfectly the ironies of "American innocence " "Finally," Feuer concludes, "Diggins engages m polemics against those writers who saw similarities between Fascism and Communism, saying that they did so to 'propagandize the urgency of the Cold War ' " Once again we must return to the actual context of my statement "In the postwar period it was tempting for writers to begin to equate Fascism with Communism in order to propagandize the urgency of the Cold War and to transfer America's hatred of Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia, and it was even more tempting for an older generation of Americans to see the presumed Ethiopian and Munich parallel in subsequent events occurring in Southeast Asia If it is ironic that Stalin's own system of terror made the analogy between Fascism and Communism possible, it is even more ironic that America's struggle for the 'free world' began to take on the crude power politics and anti-Communist hysteria that went far toward making Fascism possible " This statement is followed by an excerpt from a debate between Senators Dirksen and Ful-bright (taken, by the way, from The New Leader, Oct 23, 1967), in which the attitude expressed by Dirksen legaidmg the military coup in Greece reiteiated the veiy attitude Amencans used almost a half-centuiy ago to justify the March on Rome Has he considered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who writes that Stalin's labor camps were a model for Hitlers concentration camps...

...Feuer asked of me in reference to my questioning the Fascist-Communist similarity I ask ot Feuer Has he considered the writings of Marshall Shulman, George Kennan Hannah Arendt, and others who, while perfectly aware of the paiallels between Communism and Fascism as systems of total terroi, wisely refrained from infering diplomatic policy from domestic practice Knowledge of the history of Fascism the concentration camps as well as the international aggression, is a dubious basis on which to develop an understanding of Soviet foreign behavior, to say nothing of Red China s behavior The Fascist-Communist analogy was a legitimate moral response to Stalinism Beyond that it has limited intellectual value Laguna Beach, Calif John P Diggins Lewis S Feuer tepltes John Diggins does not develop a coherent theory of Fascism Beyond mentioning this, I would scarcely venture to make it a point of criticism What I do object to, however, is that he adds to the incoherence At one time he finds it latent in the depths of the bourgeois psyche', at another time it is potential in the evil that lurks in every man's banal existence " If Fascism is potential in all men, it is then latent in proletarians as well as bourgeois intellectuals as well as businessmen A social reality may be complex, but a complex reality can be discussed coherently, motives can be ambiguous, but even ambiguities should be written about clearly Diggins appeals to the support of such sociologists as Lipset for his remarks about the bourgeois psyche," yet the gravamen of Lip-set's work for instance, was rather 'working class authoritarianism" It may sound profound but is not very helpful for understanding Fascism to talk of the evil in every man For every social system in this sense is potential m every man, nonetheless some societies like the Communist and Fascist realize more of the potential for evil in men than does the American Diggins writes in the conclusion of his book Indeed, after World War II the militarism racism, and violence that had been the horror of European Fascism now seemed to emerge as the darker reality of American democracy ' This is his basic misconception?that 'the darker reality of American democracy' is equivalent to that of European Fascism This is the hoary Leftist device of what we might call 'equationim'-the equating of unequals, in the '50s, it was McCarthyism equals Stalinism, i e , the verbal attacks in the United States Senate equalled the millions killed m laboi camps dungeons, and the firing squads No wondei Diggins resents my mentioning Solzhenitsyn Diggins concedes that he ' did focus particular criticism on pragmatic liberals because,' he says, of a flaw in then ex post facto epistemology ' I don't know what an ex post facto epistemology' is every experiment, to be sure, is aimed to test a hypothesis Perhaps Diggins has discovered some new method which will replace the experimental, scientific one Perhaps he may have some organon of Dialectical Truth or Critical Theory He does not tell us But he does miss the crucial point namely, that the adherents to all the varieties of epistemology—the idealistic, intuitive realistic, and materialistic epistemologists—all went wrong and in far greater proportions than did the 'pragmatic liberals' in their evaluations ot both Fascism and Communism So trying to make a whipping boy of the pragmatic 'ex post facto epistemology" is just so much nonsense, fashionable though such attacks on "liberals" are among the New Leftists Diggins prefers to disregard the testimony of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the character of the Soviet regime One might bring in as witnesses a further array of the brave men such as Pavel Litvinov and Roy Medvedev, who have spoken out against the repressive dictatorship not to mention the thousands of Soviet Jews who find themselves held for ransom It is an undeniable fact that the repression of the intellectuals in the Soviet Union far exceeds what prevailed m the years of Italian Fascism before it committed itself to the Hitlerite alliance But then by way of parallelism, Stalin too was prepared to enter into u pact with Hitler that made possible the extermination of Polish Jewry Whatever the requirements of our foreign policy and our negotiations with the Soviet Union and China it is best that we negotiate with an understanding of these legimes Unlike Litvinov Medvedev, or his fellow historian Py-otr Yakir, Diggins may write off those who try to defend human rights against the organs of secret police terrorism He has perhaps decided m his own 'pragmatic fashion to ignore them The view from Laguna Beach is not that from the mines of Kolyma I must however make clear that Diggins' book is a valuable one and extremely worth reading The facts be presents are most important, and he has worked with diligence and devotion He has merited the support the American scholarly agencies have given him, and the recommendation of scholars who have judged him by his work, not his ideology It is this liberal spirit of American life which seems to me its more abiding reality All the more do I deplore the New Leftist ideology which has in the recent years thrown askew Diggins' historical judgment...