KINDER'S COMMENTARY: IT IS TIME TO SHIFT FROM MONOPOLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

In his column published alongside here today, former Sen. Tom Eagleton writes of the travails of Missouri's inner-city public schools. Sen. Eagleton comes right out and says that, because of urban troubles, dwindling tax base and rampant crime, our state's two largest cities can't properly fund their own local public schools and are highly dependent on state taxpayers to keep their doors open. Implicit in the sad rhetorical questions in Eagleton's column is that this is a permanent state of affairs.

What is the way out of this trap? Are we outstate Missourians destined to watch as our two urban school systems become permanently dependent on state taxpayers? Are we destined to be locked in an encounter of mutual frustration, bitterly resenting what we perceive as the siphoning off of much-needed funds for urban schools for an ever-dwindling population of urban students?

My answer is "No." Make that "No, but." My qualified answer offers an escape from this trap, but it presupposes what the futurists and management gurus call a paradigm shift. This is a fancy term for a radically new way of looking at things -- a new model, if you will. Essentially, what is involved is a breakout from the parameters that up to now have defined the terms of the debate.

What we need is a paradigm shift from government monopoly schools, with a stranglehold on your tax money, to freedom and full parental choice in a competitive educational marketplace.

Re-read Sen. Eagleton's column. Listen carefully to what he is saying. He is saying that government's monopoly schools in the inner city have failed. He and most other liberals have quite literally no solution for this deplorable state of affairs. I don't make that statement critically. I take it, rather, to be a statement of fact: Liberals have come up against what may fairly be called the end-of-their-world view. Quite literally, they are out of gas, out of ideas. They had quite a reign, Sen. Eagleton included -- nearly three generations of leadership of American life. But today they are simply incapable of offering anything close to a credible plan for escaping from the trap into which urban schools have fallen. This isn't the first column Sen. Eagleton has written that flirts with despair about inner-city schools in the once-vibrant city of his youth (1950 population: 800,000-plus. 1994 population: approximately 380,000 and falling). I have in my files an Eagleton column we published in the summer of 1991 that is just as despairing in tone.

The answer to the awful travails of inner-city schools will not be found in government schools, with their monopoly funding and their bureaucrats, their metal detectors and their children told, as St. Louis public high school students were last year, that they must "run for your lives" when a gang took over the place.

I took it as an enormously hopeful development in 1993 when the first-ever African-American mayor of St. Louis affirmed the need for neighborhood schools, "because if you don't have neighborhood schools, you won't have neighborhoods." Mayor Freeman Bosley should take the next step. He should join with me and with my colleague, Sen. William "Lacey" Clay Jr., D-St. Louis, to promote an urban pilot program featuring scholarships that parents could take to the school of their choice -- public, private or parochial -- to effect full parental choice in education. I have been working on Sen. Clay for two years, and he has told me he will support a pilot program next year.

This is a paradigm shift to embrace the magic of the competitive marketplace: a breakout from the grim prison in which we currently find ourselves. I am firmly convinced that inner-city public schools would be the clearest beneficiaries. It is also a civil rights issue of the first magnitude.

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