For many of us, three years' harrowing experience with Senate Bill 380 have confirmed the wisdom of Kristol's First Law of Education Reform. Penned by Irving Kristol, the brilliant neoconservative author and editor of a quarterly issue publication called The Public Interest, here it is: "Any reform that is acceptable to the educational establishment, and that can gain a majority in any legislature, federal or state, is bound to be worse than nothing."

Enormously expensive, tied into federal straitjackets, corrosive of local control, based not in sound academics but in teaching politically correct "attitudes" and a failed theory of Outcome Based Education, SB 380's "reform" process is radically changing public education in Missouri. This depressing process I have written about in a series of columns dating from Feb. 5 to early May of this year.

Education reform, however, doesn't occur in a vacuum, in our state or anywhere else. All these issues, including the lawsuit that struck down the school foundation formula for distributing state aid, have been fought out in other states, such as Kentucky. Kentucky was widely acknowledged, at the time of passage of SB 380 and since, to be the model for Missouri's reform process.

Kentucky passed its education reform act in 1990, so it is three years ahead of us on this reform track. In Kentucky reformers openly acknowledged they were doing Outcome Based Education, unlike our Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which is engaged in an elaborate, ongoing campaign to deceive Missourians. Kentucky used most of the same thousand-dollar-a-day experts who consulted on the writing of SB 380 and still consult on its ongoing implementation.

To say Kentucky has problems with its education reform would be putting it mildly. The state commissioner of education has resigned amid a reform process in shambles. No gubernatorial candidate in either party has defended the 1990-passed reforms in this year's campaign. Resignations of local superintendents are at a record pace as they hunt jobs in other states. Costs, already in the billions, are skyrocketing. The KIRIS statewide test around which the reforms were built has just been the subject of a sharply critical report by an outside panel of experts and is being challenged in court by outraged parents. The KIRIS test looks to be going the way of the infamous CLAS test in California, an expensive joke that was scrapped last year by Gov. Pete Wilson. Dr. Bob Bartman, commissioner of education at Missouri's DESE, thinks so much of the kind of folks who produced the CLAS test that he brought some of their experts to Jefferson City to tell us how to do education reform. And, as previously reported in this space, an explosion of home schooling is occurring, as horrified Kentucky parents vote with their feet. As reported earlier this year in the Paducah Sun newspaper, the Kentucky's education department reports that home schooling jumped 30 percent in just the 1994-95 school year alone.

Missouri's school reform experts from Gov. Mel Carnahan on down, who chattered excitedly about Kentucky back in 1993, have lately fallen silent on the subject.

At every turn, the education establishment in Missouri and elsewhere opposes full parental choice in education. This is the real reform: the one that would wrench power away from Bartman-style bureaucrats and give to parents of poor and middle income children the same choice that wealthy parents have always been able to exercise -- the right to choose their own children's school.

Next: The coming breakthroughs in parental choice in education.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.