KINDER'S COMMENTARY: CHARTER SCHOOLS WOULD REMEDY THE EXCESSES OF BIG EDUCATION

Charter schools, about which more follows, represent an attempt to increase parental choices within the public school system.

We charter supporters succeeded this past legislative session in including in the desegregation bill a provision permitting establishment of charter schools in the St. Louis and Kansas City school districts.

If we have our way, you will soon be reading stories such as this, from neighboring Illinois, right here in the Show Me State:

"LINCOLNWOOD, Ill. (AP) -- Overruling objections of the local school board, the state board of education has approved a `back-to-basics' charter school for Elk Grove Township."

Charter schools, which are public schools, the article says, "typically differ from other public schools in their curriculum, because they aren't subject to many state mandates ..." and regulations.

"Although the school district has rejected the proposed school numerous times," the article continued, "the state board voted 7-1 to allow it."

The new charter school in Lincolnwood will, fittingly, be called the Thomas Jefferson School. The article relates that planners intend "to establish a foundation in phonics and spelling and emphasize geography and American and world history."

To many in Big Education, any such move back toward what, until recently, most Americans understood as the purpose of primary schools is nothing less than heresy. This heresy is nonetheless what parents overwhelmingly desire for their children. That is to say, parents desperately want schooling in the basics, not "education" as that term is currently defined by the Education Establishment.

The latter term as used by Big Education today means something radically different. To these "experts," education increasingly means group or "cooperative" learning replacing individual achievement. "Creative" or "invented" spelling. Something called "portfolios" replacing anything recognizable as traditional grading. And plenty of chatter about the students' self-esteem, coupled with lots of multiculturism and aggressively one-sided environmentalist indoctrination. (A recent cartoon is dead on. It showed two crestfallen children sitting in a classroom. One says to the other, "We did nothing today to save the rain forests or halt global warming. We wasted the whole day on reading and math.") Also, the use of calculators in math classes and the elimination of all drill and memorization, plus unlimited time to take tests (which, by the way, are no longer called tests but "assessments"). When American history is treated at all, the Founding Fathers frequently barely rate a mention, unless it is to stress their slave-owning and their mistreatment of native Americans.

Anyone who believes I'm exaggerating needs a reality check about what is happening in the public schools that used to belong to us all. A mother of a gifted child told me about her son's experience, between finishing kindergarten and entering the first grade, in a summer enrichment program right here in Cape Girardeau. Whatever teaching going on isn't centered on America but is, rather, explicitly multicultural. What struck me as astonishing was this: In the midst of all the greener-than-thou environmentalism and the near-exclusive focus on Africa, the children were taught to recite something called the "Pledge of Allegiance to the World."

By all means, bring on charter schools, and not just in our urban centers. For thousands of desperate parents, the hour grows late.

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