June 10, 1992

Continental Airlines has added a new dimension to the industry's fare wars by filing a Federal antitrust suit accusing American Airlines of "predatory pricing" by cutting fares with the intention of eliminating its competitors. The suit, filed on Monday in Federal District Court in Galveston, Tex., asserts that under American's new fare structure, which took effect last month, American will be unable to make a profit until one or more of its competitors is driven from the market.

Vice President Dan Quayle today presented the sequel to his attack on the "Murphy Brown" television show, portraying the 1992 campaign as a war between traditional values and a cultural elite that mocks families, religion and patriotism. "I wear their scorn as a badge of honor," Mr. Quayle said in a speech to the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis that reflected his role as the ideological point man for President Bush, who feels compelled by political pragmatism to try to strike a bipartisan tone. 'We Have Two Cultures' Mr. Quayle's speech, in which he criticized abortion, homosexual parents and sex education in elementary schools, also reflected the increasing urgency that the White House has assigned to shoring up its sagging conservative base in the face of the unexpectedly strong challenge from Ross Perot, the undeclared independent candidate.

The view from the rear of Cardinal Hayes High School stretches across a tangle of railroad tracks, then toward the towering grayness of housing projects in the South Bronx. And in a whisper-quiet classroom, Lamene Davis talks of how his life outside is tugging him in one direction, his education in another. "From my building I'd say I'm the only kid who still goes to school," said Mr. Davis, a thin and earnest 17-year-old who wants to be a lawyer or psychologist. "So it keeps me on the right track."

Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez unveiled a plan yesterday to drastically overhaul science instruction in New York City's public schools, including adding an extra year of laboratory science to high school requirements and more than doubling the number of science periods offered to elementary school students. Mr. Fernandez said the plan aimed at invigorating science education for all students, not just the most talented, so that the city's public school graduates would be able to get jobs in an increasingly technical society. In particular, Mr. Fernandez hopes the changes will lure more black and Hispanic students into careers in science and engineering, where they make up only 4.5 percent of the professionals. The plan, which comes at a time when the school system is struggling with overcrowded classes and a shortage of supplies, does not include any estimate of its cost. Nor does it have a timetable. Mr. Fernandez said a team of school officials would now begin studying those aspects. Mr. Fernandez's vision will also demand radical changes in how teachers are trained and recruited; right now high schools cannot find enough licensed high school science teachers and elementary schools are hiring teachers who may have taken no college science. But in forging ahead, Mr. Fernandez is heeding alarms that have been sounded by experts nationwide who are concerned about how poorly American students fare in science in comparisons with those of other industrialized nations. In Chicago, Dr. Leon Lederman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, started a program two years ago that pulled hundreds of elementary school teachers out of their classrooms for 16 weeks at a time and taught them how to perform beguiling lab experiments. "Teachers can't teach science because they're terrified of it," Mr. Lederman, an alumnus of New York's James Monroe High School, said in an interview. "Science is put off to the seventh and eighth period and then they pray for a fire drill." Leland T. Jones, the press secretary for Mayor David N. Dinkins, said the Mayor, as a onetime math major, applauded efforts to bolster math and science education. But, he added, "we need to find good and great ways to pay for them." Mr. Fernandez is basing his plan on a report issued yesterday by a task force headed by Dr. George Campbell Jr., president of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. The report criticized many of the past efforts to draw students to science, which had focused attention on only the most gifted students. "Earlier efforts were too often based on the premise that science ability was innate, reserved for the intellectually elite," the report said. "We know now that all students can and must achieve the level of scientific literacy required for life in the 21st century." The report urged that all high school students be required to take three years of science instead of two, and that those three should be laboratory-based courses like chemistry and physics rather than the more amorphous courses like general science that are now accepted for graduation. Such a requirement would place far greater demands on New York students than their counterparts nationally. Fewer than half of American students study chemistry and only 20 percent study physics, the report said. Some educators believe that raising the requirements will push more students to drop out, while others believe that students respond well to tougher challenges. But H. Carl McCall, the president of the seven-member Board of Education that will eventually have to vote on the plan, said he was "prepared to take the risk" of toughening requirements as long as schools "make sure the kids are prepared to meet them." In elementary school, the report said, at least one period per day, or 45 minutes, should be devoted to science, with the stress on solving problems and on visible or palpable demonstrations and not just on textbook information. The average American student, the report said, is given 19 minutes per day of science in kindergarten through the third grade and, by the sixth grade, the amount rises to only 38 minutes. Raising Requirements Increasing science instruction in elementary school requires a staff comfortable with doing so, the report said, but it noted that many teachers had taken just one science course in college, and often that was a teaching methods course. "As a result," the report said, "far too many people graduate as teachers with the false impression that science is simply a compendium of facts to be memorized." The report urged the chancellor to talk with officials at the City University of New York -- which trains 80 percent of the city's teachers -- about raising the requirement for an elementary school teacher's license to a minimum of two semesters of laboratory science and one science teaching methods course. To turn out more licensed high school teachers, the report recommended a City University-based program to retrain teachers of other subjects as science teachers, by requiring them to take three college-level science courses. The report was democratic; it said almost nothing about programs to help talented students who show an early passion for science. Pointing to the success of New York City high schools in the annual Westinghouse science competition, the report seemed to take as a given that the needs of such students were filled. However, many experts, including Dr. Lederman, said that not enough was being done for such students, and they reject criticism that focusing on talented students constitutes elitism.

For the thousands of weary and bewildered Sudanese boys, the desolate refugee camp here a few miles inside the Kenyan border is the latest stopping point in a four-year, 1,000-mile barefoot odyssey of starvation and endurance across three countries. The 12,000 boys, most of them 10 to 16 years old, are part of the wave of civil-war refugees that has swirled around the Horn of Africa, and now into Kenya, in the last several years. 'I Saw Lots of People Die' For many of the boys, their first trek four years ago left an indelible memory as they followed the trail of bones of boys who had died of starvation, en route to Ethiopia.