(FORTUNE Magazine) – COMES THE REVOLUTION

Your servant has been forecasting the end of affirmative action for, oh, a quarter-century and regularly finding out that the country wasn't quite as ready for it as he was. But this time is truly different. The California Civil Rights Initiative, although still 21 months away from getting voted on, is going to transform the political landscape, and not just in California.

The initiative forbids the state to use "race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group" in employment, contracts, or education. The initiative's promoters keep pointing out that this is precisely what its supporters, black and white, expected the 1964 Civil Rights Act to do before the courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began converting the act into an engine of quotas.

CCRI is wildly popular in California, and press commentary there takes it as axiomatic that the initiative will win in a walk in November 1996. Its trajectory will then take it national, and its logic will surely be imported into private-sector employment law. Affirmative action will be gone. Remember, you read it here first. Repeatedly, to be sure.

DOWN WITH EDUCATION

One's headline alludes, of course, to the U.S. Department of Education, not to the learning process itself, which actually turns out to be quite useful in one's present line of work. For example, the item you are now raptly reading could never have been composed if one hadn't recently learned a lot about the allegedly wonderful junior high/ high school program of Holocaust studies. Liberal op-edsters have been expressing enthusiasm for this program without seeming to know a whole lot about it, and the coverage thus far suggests they are inferring its wonderfulness mainly from three endlessly iterated facts: (1) back in 1987, when the Education Department was pondering whether to promote the Holocaust studies, it was urged not to do so by conservatives; (2) the studies were criticized by Education Department reviewer Christina Jeffrey for, among other things, not presenting "the Nazi point of view"; and (3) Christina was being hired by Newt as official historian of the House of Representatives. She was, of course, unhired fast when that incredible quote started getting flung in the Speaker's face. Still, it was always clear that a major appeal of the whole story was the opportunity it afforded some scribes to gleefully mention Gingrich and Nazis in the same paragraph.

In the two-week feeding frenzy occasioned by this story, we kept looking vainly for answers to two large questions, the first of which was: In a country committed to decentralized education, why is the executive branch going around promoting teenage courses about anything?

One should have known better. When we finally got around to the Nexis search, we instantly found stories about avalanches of programs funded and promoted by the Education Department for use in schools at all levels. The programs all sound cloyingly high-minded even when they are transparently fatuous. Many of them are disseminated by a departmental entity called the National Diffusion Network (NDN), whose annual budget is $14.6 million. The network describes itself as a Potomac-based gang committed mainly to the justification of its budget. Hey, just kidding. NDN's preferred definition is a "system that makes exemplary educational programs available for adoption by all levels of schools."

Its portfolio in recent years has included a program called Social Awareness, which tries to bolster the self-esteem of little kids (first- and second-graders) by teaching them "social decision-making skills." One of the skills is learning to keep calm even when things go wrong. Yet another program "empowers" seventh-graders by teaching them to become environmental activists. A 1993 news account speaks approvingly of the kids' influence in Hawaii, where they defended tiger sharks that other citizens wished to retaliate against after attacks on swimmers. Here is an ambitious program that tells teenage parents who are still in school "how to make practical decisions that control their lives" (to quote a program user in Columbus, Ohio). A program called Project Assist teaches first-graders "anger management," among other things.

One's other large question was about the Holocaust program itself. The program--portentously called Facing History and Ourselves--receives $70,000 a year from NDN, and its sponsors claim that it is now being taught to some 500,000 students in public and parochial schools. The principal sponsor is Margot Stern Strom, who is the main author of the books sustaining the program and is also executive director of the foundation that gets the grants.

Our question was whether it is really possible for educators, in an age when they are already doing so much politically correct navigating through ethnic mine fields, to explain the Holocaust to 13-year-olds without major reality distortions. The evidence here suggests it is not possible, at least not via federal programs.

After spending considerable time with the program literature, one gives Facing History credit for not flinching at the Holocaust's horrors or magnitude. The problems arise when Facing History tries to weigh in on the meaning of it all--to provide suitable morals for the kids to take home, and to explain why the subject ought to concern the 98% of them who are not Jewish.

Many of the explanations illuminate the objections of conservatives to the program back in the Eighties. The teacher guides accompanying the program suggest that after getting heavy doses of murderous Nazi behavior, the kids should reflect on inhumanity and want of compassion in our own society. The guides fuzzily relate the Holocaust to contemporary issues such as homelessness and serve up the wisdom of such Great Society icons as Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund. After learning about Nazi war criminals who argued that they were only "following superior orders," the kids are encouraged to see an analogy in the behavior of American soldiers who took orders from Lieutenant William L. Calley at My Lai during the Vietnam war. We gather from a scathing review of Facing History in Commentary (published by the American Jewish Committee) in December 1990 that the program was also encouraging kids to be active on nuclear disarmament. This material has now been excised, and one senses that, in the age of Newt, further cuts are in order.

An interesting question is whether they will include the Department of Education.

O PIONEERS!

Paul Kara has worn women's clothing--including leggings and blouses--to his job at Hackney Council in East London for nearly eight years. But he ran into trouble with his bosses in the social services department when he turned up in a skirt.

After they banned him from doing so in April 1993, he claimed their action amounted to sex discrimination...

Yesterday, however, [an industrial] tribunal ruled that the council's action was not discriminatory.

Summing up, chairman Andrew Bano said the issue was of "appropriateness" of dress rather than equality.

After the hearing...Mr. Kara, a married 34-year-old training administrator, said: "I'm quite glad it's over, but I'm saddened that I didn't win the case..."

His wife, Helen, said of his interest in cross-dressing: "It is unusual, but there have to be pioneers in every field. A hundred years ago, it was very unusual for women to wear trousers."

--From a news report in the Daily Mail [of London].

STATS ONLINE

Demonstrating that he is a man of the Nineties or at least trying to act like one, the present scrivener recently made his debut in Compuserve's Fortune forum. Most of one's colleagues were cavorting in cyberspace well before him, but this was only because they got the right stuff from the Compuserve organization, whereas the introductory packet received by Keeping Up contained two copies of Disk 1 and no copies of Disk 2, thus ensuring yet another extension of a consecutive-game streak that must now rival DiMaggio's except that ours consists of at least one screwup in every installation of new software.

When we finally got to it, the debut itself proved quite memorable. We instantly learned, for example, that when you type out some comments online and then nonchalantly click on send, your analysis (a) suddenly looks to be deeply flawed, and yet (b) cannot possibly be retrieved, edited, or deleted by even the wiliest writer. It is for this reason that we now propose to have another swing at the very first question we tackled online: What are the three most common abuses of statistics?

As revised and extended, our remarks feature three abuses:

False precision. This is a widespread failing among statistics neophytes, who think they are inspiring confidence in the data when they put forward extremely precise figures instead of approximations, as New York mayor Rudy Giuliani did recently in claiming that crime in Gotham was down by 12.3% in 1994. Given the massive imprecision built into the reporting and measurement of depravity in the Big Apple, that ".3" has to be rated a howl.

Coupling of any figures, precise or approximate, to undefined terms. Very much onstage since the early days of the O.J. Simpson saga are figures on "domestic violence," and you have doubtless seen the estimate that two million to four million women are victims of such violence every year. Making the estimates essentially meaningless is the lack of agreement on what constitutes domestic violence--on exactly what it is that's being added up to arrive at those figures. Some of the stats plainly include pushes and slaps and even dirty looks.

The widespread refusal, especially among sportswriters, to accept that deviations from expected performance are probably just random fluctuations. When a .220 hitter gets hot for a week, you always read about his newfound motivation, or confidence, or batting stance, or whatnot. It always pays to imagine penny-flipping contests, and to wonder what the sportswriter would say about the stance or determination of the flipper who had just thrown five heads in a row. In a contest where the player had 100 flips, this sequence would in fact be expected to come up quite often--95.254% of the time, to be precise.