STATE'S SCHOOL CHIEF HAD THE VISION: HIS OWN

Anyone who has met Robert Bartman, heard him speak at a meeting or worked with him on any number of public-education issues comes away with a clear impression that Missouri's commissioner of education has a burning passion to improve the public schools in our state.

When Bartman announced this week that he is leaving the state post he has held since 1987, he was widely praised for the changes in public education across Missouri under his leadership.

It's pretty obvious that Bartman is both smart and forceful when it comes to furthering his vision of public education. While supporters of today's state and federally mandated education hail his efforts, the fact remains that it is his vision -- one man's vision, Bob Bartman's vision -- that has been adopted in this state for tax-funded schools.

As a result of his single-mindedness about the direction of Missouri's schools, ideas contrary to his thinking have been brusquely shoved aside, most often without so much as any hearing at all, much less a fair one.

Too many Missourians are still flinching from the Outstanding Schools Act of 1993, which in one stroke imposed one of the biggest tax increases ever handed to Missouri taxpayers. Bartman was the chief architect of the plan.

Along the way, Bartman has turned a deaf ear to discussions about school vouchers. He has rebuffed criticism of new testing standards that force schools to emphasize the latest vogue in teaching methods while ignoring such time-tested fundamentals as phonics.

It isn't just students and taxpayers who have been affected by Bartman's steam roller. Teachers and school administrators have suffered too. Virtually every advancement in our state's mandated programs has been escorted by layers of bureaucratic compliance. But Bartman has rarely heard complaints from superintendents or teachers or even school board members. Why? Because most of these folks learned early on that it was better to keep your criticism to yourself rather than incur the wrath of Bartman.

To his credit, Bartman remained equally unflinching in the face of the state's two largest urban district in Kansas City and St. Louis. Both districts operated under federal desegregation orders throughout Bartman's tenure at the helm of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. This means those two districts were run, in effect, by federal judges rather than local school boards. In both cases, the state's taxpayers have learned hard lessons about why judges should stick to judging.

Under enormous pressure to the contrary, Bartman urged that both districts' state accreditation be taken away. There was little doubt that the districts had failed miserably in their mission to educate, but there was concern the state might not have the guts to do the right thing. Bartman stuck to his convictions and won.

Bartman is too young to take up fishing permanently. He is likely to wind up in an important post in the federal education bureaucracy. If Al Gore is the next president, Bartman is likely to wind up on a short list to be secretary of education. That's certainly something worth watching.