[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 8 (Tuesday, January 23, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Page S326]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            ERNEST L. BOYER

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, in the early part of December, the 
Nation lost one of the finest public officials it has ever had, Ernest 
L. Boyer, who was a commissioner of education under President Carter 
and head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
  I have had the opportunity of working with him on a number of issues. 
He was a genuinely fine human being and an unusually competent and 
dedicated public servant.
  Those of us who worked with him know that in addition to everything 
else, he was simply ``a nice guy.''
  His loss is a huge loss to the Nation.
  I was pleased with the editorial comment of the Washington Post which 
I ask to be printed in full in the Record.
  The article follows:

                       [From the Washington Post]

                            Ernest L. Boyer

       The progress of ``education reform'' is always hard to 
     track: Where are all these ``reforms'' going, and how can we 
     tell when they get there? One of the few voices that helped 
     answer the latter question was that of Ernest L. Boyer, who 
     died last week. Mr. Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation 
     for the Advancement of Teaching, had been commissioner of 
     education under President Carter and before that the 
     president of the State University of New York. He was once 
     introduced to a Washington gathering as ``a man who has never 
     had an unpublished thought.''
       But Mr. Boyer's real contribution, in a debate that tends 
     to be by turns faddish and cacophonous, was not just to be 
     widely heard but to cling tenaciously over the years to a few 
     simple principles. One was that the high school diploma 
     should mean something: Schools, school systems and state 
     legislatures should cease giving graduation credit for 
     shopping-mall-style electives or ``business math'' and insist 
     on solid fare such as four years of English, two of algebra, 
     history in place of ``social studies.''
       That insistence prevailed in enough places and has been in 
     effect long enough to have produced results, as high schools 
     report toughened standards and a few colleges say students 
     are better prepared. Another strongly held Boyer view was 
     that early childhood education and nutrition made a dramatic 
     difference in children's futures; yet another, that the large 
     schools so popular in the 1960s and 1970s were bad for 
     students who, especially in urban systems and at the critical 
     junior high school level, were suffering already from a lack 
     of adult attention in their lives. ``Too often when students 
     `drop out,' '' he wrote, ``nobody has ever noticed they had 
     `dropped in.' ''
       These ideas, neither complicated nor trendy, can be all the 
     harder to focus public attention on for their lack of drama. 
     But they need to be stated, and stated over and over as the 
     wave of ``education reform'' launched by the 1983 report 
     called ``A National At Risk'' gets increasingly diffuse and 
     degenerates into political quarreling. More than anything 
     else, education--real education that gets somewhere--implies 
     long and low-key effort, sustained attention to the child at 
     hand. Mr. Boyer was such an educator, whose patience and 
     consistency carried as much influence as the quality of the 
     ideas he put forward.

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