BIG-CITY HEADLINES TELL THE STORY OF FAILED EFFORTS AT PUBLIC EDUCATION

Thursday morning, Missourians awakened to alarming news expressed in big black headlines at the top of Page 1 in our two major metropolitan daily newspapers. Of the two, The Kansas City Star's was the more dramatic: "Education chief: Revoke KC schools' accreditation/Action also urged against St. Louis." The next day's Star followed with a more subdued headline: "School official cites failed leadership."The state is about to pull the plug on two of the worst urban school districts in America. Beginning steps to revoke state accreditation means a state takeover. After a generation of abject failure, it's about time. Citing this inescapable reality is painful in the extreme, no less for this outstate lawmaker than for the city dwellers now being forced, finally, to wake up and smell the coffee.

A state takeover of an urban school system usually conjures up images of city sinkholes such as East St. Louis (tagged by the Post-Dispatch as "America's Soweto") or Newark. Now we rank with them. No one can say they weren't warned. In late 1996, state officials issued public warnings that the districts stood real risks of losing state accreditation if they didn't shape up. Some of us have been warning for years that what was happening to the children of these urban school districts was nothing less than a crime.

Consider: Something like 75 percent of high schoolers in the city fail to graduate. Of 11 categories the state tracks to determine accreditation, St. Louis passed three, Kansas City none. That last has to rankle Missouri taxpayers especially, inasmuch as a liberal federal judge has ordered us to pay billions over a generation to improve K.C. schools.

What say the parents trapped inside these urban failures? One answer is to look to Missouri's fledgling experiment with charter schools. These are public schools, frequently smaller than usual, that operate in niches outside the one-size-fits-all model of the traditional system. They are freed of many state regulations that hamstring regular public schools. Charter schools are formed by interested educators, neighborhood groups, parents and ordinary citizens. They apply to a charter-granting institution such as a university or community college.

Missouri now has under way an incredible experiment in urban educational innovation. In K. C., owing largely to a pro-active approach by leaders at Central Missouri State University, 15 charter schools opened this fall. The stunning result in their first 60 days of operation: An astonishing 10 percent of the enrollment of K.C. schools has been lost to the new charter schools, so eager are parents to escape the lousy schools government has trapped them in. In St. Louis, by way of contrast, a cabal that can fairly be described as a conspiracy has prevented the granting of any charters beyond the one fiasco that unfolded this past summer when the University of Missouri-St. Louis granted a charter to a school founder who later turned up with a felony on his record. (The effort collapsed amid adverse publicity.)Led by its superintendent, Dr. Cleveland Hammonds, the St. Louis School Board took the increased state money we voted them and filed a lawsuit to strike down the very innovative charter law we passed last year. Hammonds and his board are daily writing new chapters in chutzpah.

Back to that guy at the would-be charter start-up with a felony in his background. Even after all the terrible publicity, not one of the 600 families that had wanted to enroll children in his charter school wanted to put their children back in St. Louis public schools. Seems as though parents are willing to take a chance on a reformed felon who says he's turned his life around, so desperate are they to escape the ongoing, fabulously expensive felony of the St. Louis schools. Yes, parents need more choices. The more -- and the sooner -- the better.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.