THE `YES' MACHINE

A useful study for this state's taxpayers would be how the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education masterminded its propaganda effort leading up to the expected adoption Thursday of new academic performance standards. Surely the department's methods in its intentional and unrelenting efforts to mislead the public, thwart dissent and fabricate support for its agenda is unprecedented in Missouri history.

The final straw in the DESE campaign to steamroll the standards while pretending to seek public input came during the seven hearings held around the state on Jan. 4. Prior to the hearings, educators and business groups received carefully worded guidelines on what to say and how to say it. Every effort was made to make sure proponents of the standards would outnumber the opponents.

Based on news reports from the various hearing sites, DESE's campaign succeeded. In most of the hearings, educators in favor of the standards outnumbered the opponents, mostly parents and other concerned taxpayers. The educators, of course, depend on financial support from the state. To oppose the standards would have been regarded as bad manners and lousy politics within the confines of public education. So the educators dutifully showed up at the hearings and said what they were told to say.

Some of the news reports reflected this lockstep testimony. Nearly every newspaper account of the various hearings mentioned the fact that support came from toe-the-line educators who had received a prepared script in advance. The Kansas City Star went a step further in its reporting by devoting an entire story to the critics of the scheduling of the hearings. The post-holiday date and the 4:30 p.m. time for all the hearings was seen as an attempt to limit attendance from all but those educators who were told to show up.

And most of the new reports mentioned the letter sent out seeking favorable comments about the standards. The letter was from the Missouri Partnership for Outstanding Schools, which purports to be an independent rallying group interested only in good education. In fact, the group is so closely aligned with DESE and the State School Board -- names of the members of these agencies are interchangeable with the partnership -- that it would be safe to say the letter came from the very same state agency that contended, straight-faced, that it was seeking open and honest comments about the proposed standards.

The crowning touch, however, came a mere four days later when DESE issued its news release that summed up the hearings. The release crowed that supporters outnumbered opponents 2-to-1 and that the standards "received widespread support last week, not only from public school educators, but from parents, school board members, representatives of higher education and members of Missouri's business community." This in spite of the fact that newspapers consistently reported that support came from educators for the most part and opposition came from parents for the most part.

Why is all of this important to taxpayers? Because they are footing the bill for the most expensive education experiment in the state's history, outside of the multibillion-dollar desegregation programs in St. Louis and Kansas City. For the record, those costly plans didn't work either.