Why are the public schools doing such a poor job? Are the public schools doing a poor job? Four educators with a variety of perspectives--plus their host, who first came to nationwide attention writing on modern college education--go back and forth over these and related questions. Mr. Anrig: "The major push in American education in the post-World War II world seems to me to have been to reach out to hold onto more children, to keep them off the unemployment lines, to keep them off welfare, to keep them off street corners and the drug traffic.... Now in doing that, our performance is not as good as when we didn't deal with these populations.... If you hold onto the youngsters with problems, your scores are going to reflect it." Mr. Crosby: "Every kid that comes out of the Detroit public schools is immunized, because by law we must do that. But there's no law that says he must read." Mr. Down: "Are we really suggesting here that we should have different curriculums for different sorts of people? Everybody needs to know how to read, to write, to think independently, to appraise critically and analytically."