KINDER'S COMMENTARY: CHARTER SCHOOL PROJECTS HAVE SHOWN SUCCESS

My last offering described how a growing movement for charter schools may just be about to bring to Missouri this promising effort in education reform. Charter schools involve a new model in which some combination of parents, teachers, entrepreneurs or community activists undertake to create a new school or convert an existing school through authority granted by an authorizing sponsor. As one authority puts the matter: "As imagined by these visionaries, charter schools would be accountable for improved student achievement; in exchange for accountability for results, the state would waive most of the rules and regulations that govern traditional public schools."

The more controversial (and to this writer enormously promising) school choice movement aside, charter schools can fairly be said to be the vanguard of school reform in America today. In state after state, bills to create charter schools have either already been passed or are being actively considered by legislative bodies. States such as Michigan and Arizona are in the lead in opening charter schools. In fact, of the approximately 500 or so charter schools operating nationwide, Arizona already has 167 of them.

In fact, critics of charter schools are pointing to some rocky start-up experiences in Arizona since that state enacted a charter law in 1994. The story was told in a front-page news story in The Wall Street Journal's Dec. 24, 1996, issue.

A closer reading, however, will reveal that the states are working as the very "laboratories of democracy" they were intended to be under our federal system of government. As state after state experiments, we are able to learn, as regards charter schools, what works and what doesn't.

A good source book is "Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity for American Education" by Joe Nathan. Nathan describes schools that aren't merely surviving in the face of opposition from entrenched teachers unions, but excelling. At the Minnesota New Country School, for instance, students must demonstrate several hundred competencies ranging from basic areas such as writing and math to applied areas such as developing a post-high school plan as a condition for graduation. Teacher at the school aren't bound by the union bargaining agreement, so they have decided to do without an administrator at the school, preferring instead to work longer hours so that the money saved could be put back into the classroom.

In Colorado, the Academy Charter School, whose student body includes a significant number of disabled students, uses a conservative curriculum. Included in it are phonics, spelling, penmanship, the Saxon math program and the Core Knowledge program of famed traditionalist educator E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch, a distinguished professor of history at the university of Virginia, is the author of an acclaimed book published last year and entitled "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them."

This Colorado school has also implemented a character development program that incorporates elements of ancient philosophy and literature as well as the moral and ethical standards of the nearby U.S. Air Force Academy. After just the first year of operation, Academy Charter students showed a 9 percent overall improvement in math, a 4 percent improvement in language and a 3 percent gain in reading.

An early reading of the draft bill likely to be introduced in the Missouri Senate within a few days is promising indeed. After checking it with national authorities in the charter school movement, the measure appears to pass muster on nearly all counts. The bill hasn't even been introduced as yet, so I will withhold comment on specific provisions. We do know, however, that bipartisan sponsorship is assured, that a lead sponsor will be Sen. Harold Caskey, D-Butler, the author and principal sponsor of the Outstanding Schools Act of 1993, and that the governor's office has been in on it from the start. As previously stated, it is a long way from proposal to implementation, from conservatives such as yours truly achieving agreement with the teachers unions, but we Missourians may just have a date with charter schools in our future. Should be an interesting legislative session.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau. He is a member of the Senate Education Committee.