In interviews with The Washington Post in 2001, Texas Republican Tom DeLay dismissed evolution as unproven, said that we shouldn't need an EPA because "God charges us to be good stewards of the Earth," and denigrated scientific Nobel Prize winners as "liberal and extremist."

Many of the charter schools fill narrow educational niches. Marriott Hospitality, for example, is a high school providing training for the hotel and restaurant industry. The Elsie Whitlow Stokes elementary school has immersion programs in French and Spanish. And the Integrated Design & Electronics Academy gives teenagers a mix of vocational, military and college prep classes.

The menu of specialized offerings appeals to many parents, who say that the regular school system, in addition to its long-standing management problems, is not flexible enough to develop their child's particular interests or learning style.

"I don't think my son would do well in a traditional school with lots of rote work and lots of drill," said Julie Doar, explaining why she enrolled her 8-year-old son at the Children's Studio School, an elementary school where the lessons transcend traditional subjects, the classes are multi-age and the instructors are professional artists, some with no previous elementary teaching experience.

On a typical morning at Children's Studio this spring, a painter and a choreographer were guiding a dozen students in a sun-drenchedclassroom through lessons in geometry, dance and 17th-century architecture. One group of youngsters was weaving a loose lattice of string. Another was measuring floor tile. At each stage, the two teachers were making connections between mathematical symmetry, the Palace of Versailles and the invention of ballet. Outside the classroom, the hallways were crammed with mobiles, paintings, sculptures and chimes.

There are no charters in the most affluent neighborhoods of the city, where most of the top-scoring traditional schools are located. Parents in those neighborhoods are likely to send their children to private school or to raise money to pay for additional teachers and programs at their neighborhood public school.

Apart from Reagan’s inner circle, no one alive between World War II and the Reagan presidency could have imagined such a magnificent conclusion to the Cold War accomplished with such speed. Reagan was the first authentic conservative in the White House in over fifty years. That’s all it took.

We should, of course, be duly grateful to other American presidents for their feeble and impotent public statements in opposition to Soviet expansionism -- except Jimmy Carter, who was not remotely opposed to Soviet expansionism.

Still, the Soviet Union could have stumbled along for a few more decades, waiting out the Reagan administration and hoping for a Democrat president to come in and help the Soviets restore their hegemony. But Reagan wasn’t going to let the USSR outlast him.