DATE: Tuesday, July 22, 1997                TAG: 9707210224

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Perry Morgan 

                                            LENGTH:   75 lines

ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT: A NEW SHAKESPEAREAN ART

What's going on with state regulation of the environment may not be good management, but it's passable theater featuring lawsuits, cutting remarks and much pawing of bureaucratic turf.

Becky Norton Dunlop is Gov. George F. Allen's secretary of natural resources. Her opinion of her counterparts in Washington contrasts sharply with an admiring view of her boss. Dunlop says Allen is the best-ever governor in handling the environment, excellent on ``all fronts.''

The governor says the feds in charge of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are a bunch of overbearing ``nannies'' up to no good. To the contrary, says EPA: It's up to a takeover of clean-air-and-water enforcement in Virginia unless the state stops coddling such polluters as Smithfield Foods.

The feds sued Smithfield even though a state suit - since aborted and re-filed - was pending. The firm termed extortion the EPA's suit for $125 million in fines and said the state, with its suit, was engaged in a muscle-matching contest with the feds.

Regarding policy, of course, both sides could be right. The state could be lax and the EPA overzealous. Some light may be shed by evidence offered in the federal court action against Smithfield. Maybe the Pagan River itself, which takes Smithfield's slaughterhouse waste off to the James and thence to the Bay, will get some attention. The waters, air and earth keep the most reliable record of their afflictions.

Regarding management, the state's Department of Environmental Quality seems to be thoroughly ``shook up.'' There has been a sizable reduction in staff and a recent layoff of senior managers. Coupled with the governor's expressed hostility to ``the heavy, grimy boot . . . of regulation,'' the department's mission appears be-smogged.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch quotes James Campbell, executive director of the Virginia Association of Counties, as saying the department ``has gone through evolution after evolution since this (Allen) administration began.'' The picture emerging from a Times-Dispatch survey is that of a department trying to square off against the feds while managing its own affairs with considerable difficulty. What a show!

* * * *

Mandatory school busing never worked out as intended. With scarce regard for detail, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the federal courts fostered busing as a means to make schooling equal, to erase the effects of segregation-by-law and to improve learning among disadvantaged students. Busing did least for the last goal, and, nationally, not much over the long term for desegregated classrooms. White flight has tended to put things back as they were.

Though given little prominence, the failed promise of busing was a large topic at the NAACP's annual convention in Pittsburgh last week. Polls now show strong support among black Americans for school vouchers and school-choice initiatives. These are Republican doctrines which hold generally that public schools are seized-up with bureaucracy and unionism and that the remedy is competition. Therefore, give tax support to private schools. The view is gaining ground nationally; teacher unions, feeling the heat, are signaling some willingness to relax job-protection rules.

But if politics is the right means for conveying unhappiness with schools, it also tends to generate ideological lather and glittering promises. Like busing perhaps.

While judges were interpreting the Constitution, sociologists clothed court rulings with educational significance. These ``expert witnesses'' testified that lagging students would make better grades if mixed by race or (in a later interpretation) by economic class. Which is to say in part that students would learn better if they were arranged differently.

At its most fetching, the political argument for tuition vouchers pictures private schools as the way out and up for ghetto children. Is this still another new arrangement, or does it offer real promise?

The answer awaits a demonstration that a private school enrolling a cross section of students can do a better job than a public school enrolling a similar cross section. The difficulty of making such a comparison leaves too much room for prophecy.Environmental management: A new Shakespearean art MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

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