KINDER'S COMMENTARY: MISSOURIANS FOR ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE TRUMPET CHANGE

Across Missouri, in the two years since 1993 saw passage of Senate Bill 380, the propaganda organs of Big Government have been working overtime. They have been busy relentlessly churning out lofty pieties about that law, which, in the Orwellian manner of Big Governments everywhere, was christened "The Outstanding Schools Act."

Nor are supporters limited to tax-paid resources. Last year a private foundation, featuring prominent citizens and state school board members and modestly calling itself "The Partnership for Outstanding Schools," sprang into being. Its purpose: to further tout what I have long believed to be one of the worst legislative enactments of my lifetime. This partnership publishes a periodic, slick newsletter featuring uncritical chirping about the alleged benefits of SB 380, Gov. Mel Carnahan's education tax-and-reform bill. In its pages, as in the press releases from Dr. Bob Bartman's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, no dissent is brooked and not a discouraging word is heard. Where SB 380 is concerned, happy talk is all these folks want to hear.

Well, I'm terribly sorry to drop a dirt clod into their punch bowl, but the last chapter on this one hasn't been written. Missouri is a big state of 5 million people, and the SB 380 happy talkers aren't going to go unchallenged after all. Quietly -- gathering steam and energy to go along with knowledge, confidence and numbers -- a genuine grass-roots uprising is under way across our state. Mark down Feb. 1 as the day this grass-roots uprising came to Jefferson City to speak for the genuine Missouri taxpayers and voters largely shut out of Bob Bartman's cozy little echo chambers.

Missourians for Academic Excellence is the name of a grass-roots group, admittedly small, that I believe to be expressing the vast majoritarian sentiment of Missourians where education is concerned. (Missourians for Academic Excellence, P.O. Box 6516, Lee's Summit, Mo. 64064.) Dismissed this week by one of Dr. Bartman's minions as "a small minority," they mean to make their voice heard. Once MAE's principled case is heard by Missourians, these folks will have an enormous impact that could literally change the face of Missouri politics and government.

What is happening -- what MAE is responding to -- is this: Our schools are being hijacked by an elite-driven movement of educational professionals, many of them well-meaning, who are bent on imposing one version or another of the latest educational fad. It is called Outcome Based Education, or OBE, and it was all made possible by SB 380 and the process it set in train.

SB 380 set up something called the Commission on Performance, where most of the implementation of SB 380's OBE-inspired "reforms" is occurring. After more than a year of work, this commission and its sub-groups produced proposed academic performance standards. Intended for all Missouri schools, these "standards" abandon our nation's tradition of rigorous academic excellence, centered as it is on individual achievement, in favor of teaching mushy self-esteem, cooperative group learning and "attitude assessment." (More about these proposed "standards" and the work of the Commission on Performance in my next column.)

As this discussion ensues, we must continue asking ourselves: Whose schools are they? Are our schools the exclusive preserve of the teachers unions and the professional bureaucrats in Jefferson City, of an increasingly arrogant and insular educational elite? Two years in our capital city, and a year on the Senate Education Committee, has convinced me that it is these groups who don't want full and fair disclosure of what is happening to our schools, and an open debate about their real agenda.

Or do our schools belong as well to consumers of education -- to taxpayers, voters and locally elected board members who cherish the local control now so gravely threatened by SB 380, by an unelected school state board and by the heavy hand of Dr. Bartman's department?

On the answers to these questions will hang much of the future of this state. I know where I stand: With Missourians for Academic Excellence. Let the Great Debate begin, and let it ring across Missouri, on television, on radio and in the pages of our newspapers. And let it involve not just the bureaucrats in Jefferson City and the teachers unions and their lobbyists, but every thinking Missourian.

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