KINDER'S COMMENTARY: GUNNING FOR THE ORD AND MASTER OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN MISSOURI

This afternoon, at Tan-Tara Lodge at the Lake of the Ozarks, delegates to the annual meeting of Missouri Farm Bureau will gather. At 3 p.m., the resolutions committee will meet to consider adopting policy statements on a variety of issues. Among the issues to be considered will be whether to adopt a resolution that could be read as endorsing so-called academic performance standards for all Missouri schools. The so-called standards have already been tentatively adopted by the unelected members of the State Board of Education.

Reports are that Commissioner Bob Bartman of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will actually make a public appearance before the committee. Together with a Senate colleague or two of mine, I plan to be there, waiting for him. Who knows? This may just be a rare instance when mere mortals might actually have a chance to put questions to the lord and master of public education about what he is doing to schools that belong, after all, to the people of Missouri.

If, as expected, he shows up, Dr. Bartman can be expected to maintain the same misleading line he has kept up for going on three years now. He'll say, as he has so often, that there is no diminution of local control under current school reforms. I'll be there to point to the undisputed facts: that under Senate Bill 380, unelected bureaucrats such as Dr. Bartman have the power to declare a local school district to be unaccredited, to de-certify the election of local school board members, to order new board elections, to merge a school district with a neighboring district and in so doing to wipe that district off the face of the map.

Dr. Bartman will be there to say, as he did six weeks ago on KMOX radio, that what the state board is doing under SB 380 isn't outcome-based education. I'll be there to point, again, to the undisputed facts and to read from state board of education documents published and distributed statewide as recently as 1992 and 1993.

I'll be there to read from the 1992 "Conference Overview" of the Regional Education Conference conducted across Missouri by Bartman's department that fall. Quoting from Dr. Bartman's "Welcome" to conference attendees, from a page that has his picture on it: "At this year's conferences, we'll be discussing outcome-based education, one of the formal priorities of the State Board of Education. Members of the state board and I believe that 'OBE' is the most promising strategy for schools to use as we strive to achieve world-class educational standards throughout the Show Me State. ... This conference will give you an opportunity to learn more about OBE and its potential impact on students, teachers and schools. In addition, we will be asking you to review and react to a list of proposed 'graduation outcomes' which I hope will provide a practical framework for Missouri's efforts to expand outcome-based education in the years ahead."

I'll be there reading to the resolutions committee from DESE documents entitled "Questions and Answers about Outcome-Based Education" in which a bold headline states "State Board Advocates OBE."

It'll be High Noon at the Lake, and I'd say one side in this confrontation has a gravely serious credibility problem. What contempt they must have for us ordinary Missourians! Did they think we'd never produce their own documents, which they have never repudiated, and quote them back to them? How stupid do they take Missourians for?

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