THE BELL CURVE:

Four years ago, in the run-up to another election, one of the races for a seat on the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board offered a virtual test case of an issue-driven contest.

Tom Egan and incumbent Wendy Leece were on opposite sides in virtually every point of educational philosophy. Thus voters were offered the kind of clear choices that should drive every election. And seldom do.

Now, four years later, the same pair are still going in opposite directions — but not against each other.

Leece — strongly endorsed by her philosophical soul mate, Mayor Allan Mansoor — is running for a vacant seat on the Costa Mesa City Council. And Egan isn’t running at all. He has opted out, he says, “because I want to spend more time with my family and myself.”

That wry explanation only touches on his frequently edgy relationship with the other board members in which he sometimes came on as a bull in a China shop.

“I didn’t have the right background to prepare myself for this job,” he explained to me. “I wasn’t a teacher and was never involved with the PTA, and worst of all, I was an engineer and didn’t know how to speak the language of the school culture. For example, way too many times when I got home from a board meeting, my wife had to interpret for me what had really been said.”

Despite his translation difficulties, Egan was immersed in education issues, and he leaves behind a vision of a drastically changing world that he believes must be reflected strongly in the way we educate our kids.

“We’re right now in the middle of addressing a big issue of rethinking education,” he said, “so that Newport-Mesa kids can prosper in the brave new world of the 21st century. We call our project School Redesign, and it deals with education issues as opposed to physical structures, which the two recent bond issues are addressing.”

In his best-selling book, “The World Is Flat,” Thomas Friedman, says Egan, defines this new world as the combination of a globalizing mentality and powerful Internet capabilities, leveling the playing field for competitors around the globe.

Egan sees this as causing severe dislocations for workers on the local level — including our kids now in school. He points to the warning by economist Alan S. Blinder that the changing world trade patterns will keep most personal-service jobs at home, while many jobs producing goods and impersonal service will migrate to the developing world.

“That’s why,” Egan says, “it is prudent for us to rethink what and how we should teach our children — which is why we came up with School Redesign. The what-we-teach part is mostly what concerns me.”

He points out that the consistent message from national political and educational leaders is that the way to save our national bacon is for our young people to get more education, but he then asks, “As America faces huge new challenges from the globalized economy, does it make sense to stay the course of the past 50 years, only try to do it better?”

He thinks not.

“In my view,” he says, “we owe it to our children to provide them with the tools they need to prosper in this new world. And to achieve that, we need serious, lengthy and brutally honest community discussions in which all assumptions — and especially those based on pre-globalization history — have to be questioned.”

I asked him to offer some suggestions to this end, and he came up with the following.

No panaceas here, but guide posts — not only to survive in a world that we see only dimly now, but also to flourish.

It was a hard decision for Egan to pass up the opportunity to be a part of Newport-Mesa’s School Redesign, especially when he was just beginning to get the hang of school culture.

“I thought it was going to be collegial,” he told me, “but it turned out to be hard-ball politics. I did my best, and I’m at ease with these four years. But it took too much energy from other things I want to do.”

One can’t help wishing, nevertheless, that Egan might have brought those engineering assets to another contest with Wendy Leece in her run for the City Council in November.