EDUCATION REFORM DESCENDS

Short, quiet and unassuming, Mary Alice does not strike you as an inspirational teacher. But when the 38 kids at Westboro Elementary School put on their first Christmas program under Mary Alice's tutelage, I knew we had something special.

Our Christmas program is a wonderful piece of Americana, with a message that would make an ACLU lawyer salivate. The attendance is always greater than the total population of the town, and the music teacher is under as much pressure as a Texas high school football coach. But in front of the world's toughest crowd (grandmas), Mary Alice was the consummate impresario. Directing the singing, choreographing the dancing, playing the piano and keeping the kindergartners from wandering off in mid-performance, Mary Alice managed to bring out the music in even the most tone-deaf farmer's kid.

Last summer, I fired Mary Alice.

You see, educational reform has come to Missouri. And as school board president of the Westboro elementary district (I was absent at the wrong meeting and won in a landslide), I have had to deal with the results. Missouri's Senate Bill 380, the education reform act, raised taxes, increased funding to some schools (not Westboro) and instituted various reforms to "improve" education. The reforms all measure inputs to education; none attempts to measure results. In fact, the statewide tests that previously rated performance will be canceled, and a vague evaluation of "outcomes" will be substituted sometime in the future -- far in the future, if the professional educators have anything to say about it. Meanwhile, schools will be evaluated on teaching certificates and multicultural programs and handicapped accessibility, but not on what the students are learning.

Senate Bill 380 enforces its standards through an accreditation process. If a school fails to meet the standards, students may leave for another school district, with the district they leave paying tuition to the receiving district. Westboro failed to be accredited and lost students, forcing us to pay tuition and run a deficit.

The students who left did not cite the quality of education at Westboro as a reason for leaving. Westboro students have always done well on standardized tests. The main reason students left was the greater availability of after-school day care in the neighboring school. Since true school choice was not part of Missouri's reforms, we were not able to attract students from other districts with our small class size and individualized education.

In order to gain accreditation, we have adopted policies and procedures and curricula ad nauseam. In fact, our copy machine has just expired after making 57,000 copies in the past year.

Each new policy we establish has to be approved by the state. In order to assure approval, we copy our policies from a school district that has been through the approval process and simply substitute "Westboro" for the name of that school district. None of us has read the policies, since all of us are employed and can't devote full time to reading school board materials, but by golly, we've now got policies and curricula with the best of them.

Along with the paperwork, Senate Bill 380 demanded that all of our teachers have the proper teaching certificates. Because Mary Alice was not certified to teach music, she had to leave, although she did have a teacher's certificate. She has been replaced by a teacher directly out of college and possessed of the correct credential, but with none of Mary Alice's experience, charisma or creativity. We've regained our accreditation, but the quality of education we offer is worse, and the financial drain caused by the experience will force us to ask the taxpayers for more money.

We folks in Westboro love our school. We realize it isn't efficient to run a school district with only 38 students enrolled. We can't offer many of the amenities that would be available in a larger school. Our principal also teaches kindergarten and is head librarian and special education instructor. The social studies teacher doubles as the janitor. The school board has patched the roof when it leaked. Last winter I spent a day hanging from the second story repairing a window. Volunteers from the town repainted the library two summers ago, and we have volunteers staffing the library now in order to meet a state requirement.

We also realize that we have something special here. When my youngest son taught himself to read before entering first grade, the teacher essentially designed a course to keep him challenged. She was able to do that because there were only eight children in his class. The school is safe, and when someone misbehaves the whole town is more than willing to offer advice.

True educational reform would involve more local control, not less. As a school board, we now have absolutely no control over the education our students receive. All hiring and firing is a function of teaching certificates and tenure. Staffing levels are decided by the state. Curricula must be approved by bureaucrats in the capital. Our only function as a school board is to sign checks and lobby for more money. One major thing stands between us and a better education for our students, and that is the state of Missouri and its program of educational reform.

My son Ben was a candy cane in this year's edition of the Westboro school Christmas program, and there never was a finer candy cane. But the program was bittersweet for me. At our school board meeting the week before, we discovered that we will have to raise local taxes by a third next year or close Westboro down and send our kids to the neighboring school district. We could have continued without a tax increase under the old regimen, but Senate Bill 380 has increased our costs so much that we must have a lot more money.

I don't know whether the voters will be willing to support such a large tax increase. I do know that something special will have been lost if there are no more Christmas programs in Westboro.

Blake Hurst of Tarkio, Mo., is a corn farmer. This article is reprinted from the American Enterprise.