Every once in a while, Jerry Murphy says, he tries to give himself "kind of a shot of public schools."

This fall, the new dean of the Graduate School of Education visited a New York City school whose students were specially selected: They were all 17 1/2 years old and had all done poorly in the public school system.

Murphy sat in on a journalism class where the students interviewed each other, sharing stories of violence in their neighborhoods, of experiences with pregnancy and childbirth. The class, he says, was a success.

"There's such a gap between the publicity...about the schools and what's really going on in some of the schools," Murphy says.

In this election year, as politicians and private citizens loudly lament the state of American education, Murphy is hopeful, even optimistic.

And as presidential candidates debated the future of the nation's education system on television last night, Murphy may have been thinking about his own bully pulpit.

"I think it's appropriate for me and for members of the faculty to speak out on issues of educational reform," Murphy says.

On that subject the 53-year-old scholar of education has no shortage of opinions. He spends a lot of time thinking about such topical educational issues as the Edison Project, the experimental, for-profit school system for which Benno Schmidt abandoned the Yale presidency last year.

"The concern that I have is that these schools need to make a profit in order for the whole system to work," Murphy says.

For that reason, Murphy says, the project may lack the capacity to handle some of society's toughest--and therefore most costly--problems.

Murphy also thinks about election results in general. The November 3 vote will shape American education for the next four years, he says, and will partly determine programs and priorities at the Education School.

If Clinton wins, Murphy predicts, Americans can expect "more governmental support for some of the things that we really care about." A Bush win, he says, would bring less monetary support from the government, and a push toward vouchers to improve private and public schools.

"Independent of who's elected, in American public education, we're...in this very turbulent time," Murphy says. "One role [the Education School] can play is to help push the debate along."

The school, he explains, should "try to help frame the debate and also to be a venue for kind of reasoned discourse."

Toward this end, Murphy plans to hold a "Forum for Schooling and Children," modeled after the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics Forum. He hopes to invite prominent players from the educational policy field to Harvard, for four to six major events over the course of the year. The visitors will "focus on an area of public policy and debate it," he says.