CARNAHAN: OBE IS BAD, SO DON'T FRET ABOUT THE SMELL

So Gov. Mel Carnahan is against Outcome Based Education. An old adage says, "There's no zealot like a convert." One is reminded of that wisdom when reading the governor's statement, printed elsewhere on this page, in which he lavishly praises the latest version of the state's new academic performance standards for all Missouri schools and flatly opposes OBE.

The first thing to note is that Carnahan's statement continues a nationwide trend: Elected politicians -- the kind who actually have to face the voters, as distinguished from the insulated bureaucrats of the education establishment -- disavow this stuff whenever they are forced out into the open. Indeed, in Virginia it was Democratic Gov. Doug Wilder, the first African American chief executive of the old Dominion, who pulled the plug on OBE and de-funded it as a state mandate in 1993.

No elected politician defended the first, pathetic, OBE-written draft of the Missouri standards last spring, and Gov. Carnahan joined a motion to send them back for a re-draft back in April. Incidentally, this motion was made by a rather embarrassed Sen. Harold Caskey, D-Butler, the author of Senate Bill 380, the 1993 education reform law also known as the Outstanding Schools Act that started this whole process.

Over the five months since April, the state hired a wordsmith to redraft the standards and express them in the "clear and understandable language," a task it can be assumed was beyond the teachers union members who had first been assigned to write the standards. The revised standards approved this week by the Commission on Performance are only a very slight improvement on the abysmal first draft. Readers can still search through them, for the most part in vain, looking for what most Missourians would understand to be clearly identifiable standards that are truly academic in nature.

Notwithstanding the fact that the words OBE aren't in SB 380, it is an OBE bill through-and-through. This is no accident. For years leading up to the 1993 enactment of SB 380, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education forthrightly admitted -- trumpeted, even -- its plan to remake all Missouri schools on the OBE model. While SB 380 was being debated during the spring of 1993, this language was studiously avoided, as indeed it has been ever since. In the hearts and minds of the education bureaucracy, however, the OBE agenda endures, whether this governor knows it or not. The same agenda goes by other names, each an emblem of faddishness and an attempt at intentional deception of ordinary citizens: "performance learning." "active learning," "mastery learning" and so, depressingly, on.

It is heartening to observe the governor's pre-election year conversion to the ranks of OBE opponents. Would that this conversion be accompanied not just by lip service, but by concerted action to excise this cancer in our schools.