Clinton’s Race Panel Asks for Debate, Gets It

ANNANDALE, Va. — Accused of avoiding controversy, President Clinton’s panel on race relations invited William J. Bennett, the conservative former Education secretary, to Wednesday’s session at a suburban school. He quickly challenged the relevance of it all.

“Race matters less than family,” declared Bennett, trying to steer the meeting toward his own social message of traditional values and rigorous education standards.

An audience member suggested that local schools should invest more in conflict resolution.

“I’d get the math scores up before we talk about conflict resolution,” Bennett retorted. He said the panel should listen to parents in the District of Columbia who are worried about drugs and criminals jeopardizing their children’s learning.

Another speaker, Gary Orfield from Harvard University, had harsh words for racial integration in American schools. He said they are becoming resegregated at a rapid pace, with two-thirds of blacks and three-quarters of Latinos in segregated schools.

And he said efforts to expand school choice in places like Chicago are lost on the poor, who have neither the time nor means to go through the confusion and expense of finding magnet or other alternative schools.

“What’s going on in these markets is not free choice,” he said. “We can’t assume equal knowledge, equal access or equal transportation. We have to build those in.”

The meeting’s location, Annandale High School in Fairfax County, outside Washington, was chosen because of the area’s multiracial, multiethnic character. And that led to a new range of comments for the panel’s series of meetings.