Middle Class

WASHINGTON -- Maryland is at the forefront of a radical educational experiment that Congress is now considering making permanent: Providing a right for low-income students to transfer from failing schools to better performing public schools. The federal right was established by an obscure provision of the 1999 budget bill. In Maryland, which has been particularly aggressive about implementing the legislation, more than 100 schools have been identified as troubled, the majority of them in Baltimore.

To anyone following Washington Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon's struggle to slash 2,000 mid-level managers from her city's payroll, Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke's effort to prune the size of municipal government must seem almost modest.Washington, it must be remembered, has nearly 100,000 fewer residents than Baltimore, yet its 48,000-member work force is more than half again as large as Baltimore's. Of the nation's 200 largest cities, the district ranks first in the number of government employees per capita.

BOSTON -- By the eighth week of the longest running un-morality play in modern memory, all sorts of bit players had walked onto the stage in reversible roles.One week we heard the Rev. Billy Graham forgive the president for his alleged infidelity, because "I know the frailty of human nature."The next week we heard writer David Brock ask the president to forgive him for starting a "witch hunt" because "what the hell was I doing investigating your private life in the first place?"The absolution and the mea culpa were just part of the plot of this so-called scandal -- an unpredictable drama that's stumped even those who make their living speculating.

In an effort to make sense of the great angry convulsion that has given us the candidacy of Ross Perot, political theorists are busily squinting backward trying to detect any patterns in our history that no one noticed before.As a way to predict what'll happen Tuesday, about all that can be said with confidence is that the process is more respectable than peering at tea leaves. But even so, some of these surveys by people with 20/20 hindsight have produced interesting results.The economic historian Tracy Herrick, for example, notes that there have been only three periods in American history in which middle-class living standards declined for a decade or more.

America's fading middle classThe financial stability of this country will be in serious jeopardy because of actions taken in recent years by business and industry. Hardly a day goes by that we do not read about thousands of jobs being eliminated. Two years ago, this was done in the name of ''restructuring'' to be able to compete in the world. Now it is done via mergers.Many of the organizations doing this are enjoying banner earnings. Looking more closely at the details, the bulk of these jobs are well-paid positions held by the middle class.

Washington -- SEVERAL THEMES run through the Contract With America: promotion of free markets, objection to government regulation, concern for the middle class.But when it comes to the passage on reforming securities law, the contract is oddly in conflict with those objectives.Adam Smith, in the most famous sentence in economic literature, said that "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

That was quite a riveting speech Sen. Bob Kerrey delivered in casting the deciding vote for passage of President Clinton's budget bill. It was riveting, right-on in its moral message and quite wrong in suggesting that a president alone can overcome the political cynicism of institutional Washington.If Mr. Kerrey instead of Mr. Clinton had been elected president last year, would he still be on the "high road" of "shared sacrifice," or would he, too, have taken "the low road of the too-easy compromise or the too-early collapse"?

Sixth District congressional candidate Thomas Hattery has spelled out his call for tax relief for middle-class Americans.Hattery is challenging seven-term incumbent Rep. Beverly B. Byron in the March 3 Democratic primary."

JESSE HELMS'S eleventh-hour resort to open racism in his North Carolina Senate campaign may have provided Republicans the tool they've been seeking to keep Reagan Democrats on board in 1992.William Bennett made that clear at his first meeting with reporters as President Bush's choice for next GOP chairman. The ex-drug czar commended as "perfectly legitimate" Helms' TV ad showing white hands crumpling a rejection slip for a job that went to someone of a minority race, presumably because of civil rights laws.

The intensity in this room could lift you out of your seat. There are seven people here, five men and two women, all of them black, all vowing that the thing that has happened elsewhere in ** this city will not happen in Northeast Baltimore, because they will not let it happen.Listen to Emmanuel Holmes. He is president and executive director of this group, the North East Regional Tenant Community Association (NERTCA), gathered this morning in a little office in the 5300 block of Moravia Road.