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25 June 1983 Los Angeles Times A Good Time to Change Names of Public Schools? With all the talk (and possible action at long last?) about educational reform, it might be a good time to consider the very names of our public schools. Of course, changing a school's name cannot itself make a big difference, but times have changed and so have our neighborhoods and cultures, since the names of early presidents and other designations inspired automatic pride in students required to attend our schools. New names that mean something to today's "education consumers" could add an important dimension of affiliation, identification and pride to the more substantive improvements our Board of Education, parents, teachers and education researchers, hopefully, are beginning to develop. Just a few suggestions: Garfield could become Octavio Paz High; Manual Arts could be Computer Tech; John Muir Junior High could be renamed for Margaret Mead, or Zubin Mehta, or Sandra D. O'Connor; David Starr Jordan High could become Barbara Jordan High; and (with apologies to my grandmother whose nostalgia and school spirit may raise resistance to this one) Jefferson could proudly become Tom Bradley High. For precedents? How about John Wayne Airport, MacArthur Park, Claremont McKenna College, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard! | 
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