INTEREST IS MOUNTING IN EDUCATION REFORM ALL ACROSS MISSOURI

The Missouri Senate this week faced some probing questions about state funding for the state's eyebrow-raising involvement in the New School Project. In the end, senators voted 14-18 to keep the $250,000 in the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education budget. But the lengthy debate that preceded the vote is an example of the growing awareness -- and concern -- about the direction education reform has taken.

The New School Project is a 17-state consortium that advocates Outcome Based Education, which is sometimes called other names like Mastery Learning. While most parents of school-age children and taxpayers in general know little or nothing about OBE, the fact is that it is being implemented as a result of the so-called reforms dictated by Senate Bill 380, the 1993 legislation that has given new meaning to the topsy-turvy changes that certainly will revolutionize how students learn. The question remains: Will they learn more or be better prepared educationally?

Thanks in no small part to the penetrating questions being asked by Peter Kinder, associate publisher of this newspaper and a state senator from Cape Girardeau, the awareness of the impact of SB 380 and the role of OBE in Missouri's public schools is growing by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, parents, taxpayers and even educators around the state are asking more and more questions too. The answers so far are unsettling.

The state's education bureaucracy and district-level administrators prefer to say little or nothing about the implementation of OBE and the mandates of SB 380 for fear of generating unrest or outright revolution among school patrons. Most of officialdom pooh-poohs the notion that students are in peril because they are being used as guinea pigs for half-baked education concepts that have proven to be worthless failures in other states where they already have been tried.

But parents are starting to notice some of the peculiarities of assignments and projects their children are asked to complete. They are noticing that there is little emphasis on spelling or the fundamentals of arithmetic. They can see the shift toward the teaching of a value system that may indeed strengthen the ability of youngsters to form opinions -- but without the guidance of parents whose moral standards may be far different than those of textbook authors and educator-experimenters.

The plain fact is that the public is in the dark about the revolution in public schools. Well, mostly in the dark. One thing taxpayers are noticing, as they file their state income tax returns this year, is the cost of Missouri's education reform. Taxpayers are sending millions of dollars more to Jefferson City this year as the full impact of SB 380 hits. If education reform hasn't excited Missourians up to this point, it is likely the financial burden that was imposed without a vote of the people will be a swift kick in the face.

The state has, with little fanfare, set about establishing new school standards that impose Jefferson City-generated mandates on local districts. The carrot, of course, is extra state funding for cooperative districts that hop aboard, without questioning, the OBE freight train.

But the track isn't firmly in place for this attempt to railroad SB 380 and its OBE reforms throughout Missouri's public schools. Some school districts are starting to fight back. Others are just beginning to face the backlash that can be anticipated from such a bold attempt to take school districts out of the hands of local boards. Still other districts have yet to consider the need to come clean about education reform and tell school patrons, in plain language, what is going on.

If the action on the Senate floor this week is any indication, there are a good many more loose rails on the education-reform track.

One positive move on the part of the Cape Girardeau schools is a meeting scheduled for April 27 to discuss the district's participation in the A-Plus Schools program, one of the reforms initiated by SB 380. The meeting will be at 7 p.m. at Central High School's auditorium. This meeting should be of special interest to anyone concerned about the future of education -- or the increasing state spending on public schools.