July 25, 1982

WHEN the New Rochelle Board of Education adopted a reorganization plan closing four of its 10 elementary schools in the spring last year, the Daniel E. Webster School remained as the lone elementary school in the center of the city. Underused and racially imbalanced, the school's future did not appear bright. But when Webster reopens this fall, it will do so with a full enrollment, including a number of students returning from nonpublic schools, a waiting list, a faculty that has competed for staff positions and a racial distribution almost perfectly balanced. ''I haven't been this excited,'' Ruth Broad, a teacher at Webster said, ''in 29 years of teaching.'' After a year of curriculum planning and discussions with noted educators and scholars, Webster is beginning what its leaders view as an ''educational renaissance'' for the school. At its meeting last Monday, the New Rochelle Board of Education put the finishing touches on plans to open Webster as a ''magnet'' school. The magnet concept is what New Rochelle educational leaders describe as ''one that attracts students from all parts of the community to a particular building, voluntarily, because it offers a unique and excellent program that is different from that offered in other schools.''

What's the point of a for-sale sign that can be seen only by birds, pilots and executives flying between Danbury and Hartford? Well, Alex and Shirley Vogel have been trying to sell their llacre estate in Newtown, Conn., for two years.

For about six years, until Israel invaded southern Lebanon on June 6, the Palestinians had something closely approaching an independent state. It had an army, a police force, a crude judicial system, an educational and welfare system, a civil service and a foreign policy. Those who lived within its rough boundaries said they were too terrified then to describe it to outsiders. Now, for the first time, they are describing what it was like, telling of theft, intimidation and violence.

For quite some time now the Venice Biennale has been the sick man of the international exhibition circuit. Its illness dates primarily from the tumultuous summer of 1968, when the pan-European student unrest almost forced the Biennale to shut down. A failure of nerve led to a failure of coherent intention, and although the Biennale did not in fact die it now leads the life of a distinguished invalid. Like many another such invalid, it snoozes for much of the time. It is superstitious about thinking too far ahead. It is wide open to quack doctors. It has trouble in following any idea through, and it is noticeably shaky in its coordination. All this being so, a firsttime visitor would have a hard time believing that in the 1950's and early 60's the Venice Biennale was the most powerful thing of its kind in the world.

DICTATORSHIPS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS Rationalism and Reason in Politics. By Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. 270 pp. New York: American Enterprise Institute/Simon & Schuster. $14.95. INTELLECTUALS in politics live dangerously. They run the risk of being neither good intellectuals nor good politicians. During the 19th century, American intellectuals were extremely rare in government; the great break in this tradition came in the 1930's with the New Deal. Now, however, politicized intellectuals go back and forth between universities or research institutes and governmental office. They are always on call; Washington is their promised land; they get there only to find that they are intellectually not what they once were. The latest star performer among intellectuals in politics is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, formerly of Georgetown University and now Ambassador to the United Nations. She is the second academic intellectual to serve in that post; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the first. Both owed their appointments to articles they wrote for Commentary magazine, which has proven to be, among other things, a highly specialized employment agency.