KINDER'S COMMENTARY; COMMISSION ON EDUCATION STANDARDS AVOIDS ACCOUNTABILITY

The Commission on Performance is a 28-member group appointed pursuant to 1993's passage of Senate Bill 380, Gov. Mel Carnahan's tax-and-reform plan for Missouri schools. Of the 28 members, only seven -- the governor and six lawmakers -- are elected officials who know the accountability that comes from actually having to face the voters.

A review of this commission's first 18 months serves as an interesting example of the pitfalls of appointed groups that are handed responsibility in fashioning the peoples' business. If this commission were charged with choosing the state rock from a large list of fossil life, it would likely be a stranger to controversy, save perhaps among zealous and eccentric geologists. But it is your children, and the future of Missouri public education, that they are talking about. This makes all the more inexcusable the failure of most Missouri news media -- print and electronic alike -- to give extensive publicity to the commission's deliberations.

Foremost among the duties with which the commission is charged is to produce the academic performance standards that SB 380 mandated for all Missouri schools. On this task, the commission and its sub-groups labored for more than a year before producing dozens of draft proposals last summer. And what of those standards?

"They're just mush," says the normally soft-spoken and highly respected Sen. Steve Ehlmann, R-St. Charles, a commission member. "These are so subjective I can't say whether they're higher or lower." I would go further. The standards are pathetic, and many are laughable on their face.

Don't take Ehlmann's word for it, or mine. Judge for yourself. Here is Standard 4 for Goal 1: "Develop and clarify ideas and perspectives by applying information-processing skills learned in the various content areas." Or Standard 5 for Goal 2: "Discuss and respond thoughtfully to the ideas of others." Or Standard 4 for Goal 3: "Identify and consider a variety of viewpoints when solving problems." Or this one, perhaps the worst of a weak field of contenders, Standard 1 for Goal 4: "Make decisions that are informed, reasoned and responsible."

Who can read these examples, much less the dozens of others, without agreeing with critics that these non-standard "standards" are impossibly vague and almost totally subjective? At its September meeting, critics succeeded in getting a unanimous commission to send these draft standards back to the sub-groups who drafted them. The commission's directive: Include in them some hard and objective academic standards and report back to us with the new version.

In a brush-off reply so arrogant that it is simply astonishing, the sub-group charged with drafting the standards flatly refused.

Let us accurately describe the stark and unpleasant reality confronting all Missourians, whether they know it or not. A largely unelected group of 28 citizens, cloistered in meetings the news media has largely ignored and delegating much of their work to completely unaccountable sub-groups, is meeting to adopt academic performance standards that will turn our public schools in a radical new direction. And not one Missourian in a hundred knows this. Still less do they know the true agenda(s) of those who have set our schools on this path.

I believe the vast majority of Missourians would rebel against these non-standard "standards" if they knew exactly what is going on. To date, they don't. And that is just the way many of the educational pros who wrote 380 and inspired its so-called reforms would have things remain. They want neither dissent, nor tough questions, nor an open, high-profile public debate on what they're doing to our schools. They seek no media coverage, unless it is of the fawning and uncritical variety that accepts all their premises and applauds their work product."

As long as I remain in office, I shall continue trying to sound alarms over the hijacking of Missouri's public schools by a small and arrogant elite, busily insulating itself from the ordinary folks of whom only three things are asked: "Send us your children. Pay the rising tab. And keep quiet."

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missouri and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.