Jerry Brown--making a difference

Praise for Jerry Brown from George Will, and well deserved. Excerpts:

Brown has disdain for "the resistance to change'' on the part of people and factions that fancy themselves "change elements.'' So he is encouraging parents to prod the public education bureaucracy by organizing charter schools. That is, he thinks, one way to improve the abysmal performance of Oakland's public schools, where only about 1,600 of 4,000 ninth-graders will graduate from high school, and only 400 of the 4,000 will even take the courses required for applying to the University of California system. "If I could make it residential, I would,'' says Brown, whose next project, coming in September, is a similarly elite school for the arts. ...

Ronald Reagan once said that an economist is someone who sees something working in practice and wonders if it will work in theory. Brown, who entered California's governorship when Reagan left it, has shed a lot of theory en route to his current happy immersion in urban practicalities.