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encouraged me not to resign. Her argument was, look, you resign, so who will take your place? Something like that, you know. You've got to stick it through. You can't win, but you've got to keep these issues before them.

I don't know what happened, but certainly within the last-- I've been on the Regents now twenty years. Within the last five, six, seven years there's been a change in terms of my relationship with my colleagues. It's a more positive kind of relationship. Not that things have changed significantly in terms of race in our schools. The decentralization problem is behind us and the schools of New York City are as segregated as they ever have been, if not more so. Schools in Yonkers are segregated. The only real positive change that has come about in that area has been in Buffalo. But somehow the more conservative members of the Board and the Board, in general, and I started to have a working relationship, a working agreement, you know.

And now your question about whether larger educational problems took precedence over the more narrowly racist is more likely to be true. For example, we started concentrating on academic standards. We spent a number of years developing a Regents Plan, a Regents Action Plan, to raise the standards of all the schools in the state. Elementary and secondary. I'm still worried about whether-- and I keep saying that without being argumentative. I keep reminding my colleagues that we have to monitor the Regents Action Plan in its implementation very carefully, in order not to permit the discrepancy between the