KINDER'S COMMENTARY: CHARTER-SCHOOLS IDEA GETS LOPSIDED SUPPORT IN SENATE VOTING

Wednesday afternoon saw an historic education vote on the floor of the Missouri Senate. For years, some of us who really mean business when it comes to education reform have fought to enact a greater measure of parental choice within the public school system. Our chance finally came Wednesday afternoon, and the outcome frankly exceeded our fondest hopes. In the first-ever floor vote on the question of charter schools, we charter supporters prevailed by the lopsided margin of 22-11. The key vote came on an amendment to the bill aimed at resolving the St. Louis and Kansas City desegregation cases -- the two most expensive such cases in America.

Charter schools are a new animal within the public school system that can fairly be said to be sweeping the country. A group of parents, teachers, public-spirited citizens (or some combination thereof) decide they want to form a charter school. They apply to a chartering institution such as the state or local school board or, in some cases, a college or university. Next, a new school comes into being under a "charter." The essence of the deal is that the charter school is freed up from many of the stifling regulations under which most public schools must labor. Granted freedom, these charter schools are at liberty to innovate and to fill new niches, to try new approaches. They operate under a board to which they are accountable, as they ultimately are to the chartering institution.

Under the Senate amendment approved this past week, Missouri will experiment with charter schools in the two places where they are most desperately needed: St. Louis and Kansas City. In St. Louis, one of the promising developments we proponents cited is that two world-renowned institutions have signalled their willingness to operate charter schools: The Missouri Botanical Garden and the Missouri Historical Society.

Imagine you're a poor, single mother of a minority child in St. Louis, trapped in public housing and frustrated with an unresponsive school bureaucracy doing a miserable job of educating your child. A charter school run by such world renowned institutions such as these two could be an answer to a prayer. Help may just be on the way.

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Another dramatic showdown is shaping up with Gov. Mel Carnahan over this year's version of the bill banning partial-birth abortion. Recall that the governor vetoed the bill I passed last year, setting up the dramatic confrontation in September's veto session, won by the governor after eight senators who had voted for the bill in May flipped their votes.

This year, for important reasons, the effort began in the House. This week, that chamber's representatives overwhelmingly approved a tough version of the bill. The vote: 123-30 on first-round approval. The bill started out with 110 co-sponsors -- one more than the two-thirds needed to sustain a veto. Test votes on various amendments reveal that this time we may have three or four votes more than last year's overwhelming approval margin.

Should the governor decide to put his party through another wrenching veto, we members of the General Assembly will convene for an override vote, this time barely six weeks before a General Election. As Dr. Johnson observed in a different context, "Nothing quite so concentrates the mind as a hanging at sunrise."

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Cape Girardeau school superintendent Dan Tallent visited Jefferson City this week to help make our case for increased funding. Substantial progress was made. With six weeks to go in this year's session, pull for passage of Senate Bill 781, which will help Cape and other similarly penalized districts.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.