KINDER'S COMMENTARY: DOCUMENTS SHOW DESE's LEANINGS TOWARD OBE

While responding to interviewer Charles Jaco on KMOX radio last Monday, Missouri's commissioner of elementary and secondary education, Robert Bartman, said yet again that what his department is imposing on Missouri schools isn't outcome-based education. In this denial Dr. Bartman follows on the heels of Gov. Mel Carnahan's extraordinary public statement announcing his opposition to OBE and denying that's what his Senate Bill 380 reforms mean for Missouri schools. And Thursday afternoon, following the state school board's adoption of the so-called academic performance standards, radio listeners across the state heard board member Tom Davis' interview on Missouri Net. Mr. Davis, a respected Sedalia business leader, denied any OBE agenda, said he doesn't know where anyone could have gotten such an idea and accused any who dispute this of possessing a "political agenda."

The issue is thus joined anew, and all Missourians are going to have to judge for themselves. The issue for all Missourians, with profound implications for the credibility of Big Education and the future of Missouri: whether our governor, our state school board and our commissioner of education are telling us the truth.

Consider a few titles: "Questions and Answers about Outcome-Based Education" (September 1992). Or again: "A PROPOSAL TO IMPLEMENT OUTCOME-BASED EDUCATION IN MISSOURI SCHOOLS" (December 1992). What would you suppose to be the origin of these titles? The fevered imagination of some right-wing cranks and conspiracy theorists? A few folks who've overdosed on Kinder's OBE columns?

The titles are documents from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Dr. Bartman's department. Anyone wanting to see them may get copies by contacting me. Dr. Bartman works for and answers to the unelected state school board of which Tom Davis, who has served as an appointed board member since the late 1980s, is the president.

Nor is this all. A reliable source has read to me over the telephone excerpts from a November 1993 document dealing with more questions and answers about why -- not whether -- the state department is moving all Missouri schools toward OBE. It is an official DESE document prominently featuring the name of one Dr. Robert Bartman. The timing is most interesting, since it followed passage of the supposedly non-OBE bill some five months earlier. None of these documents has been disavowed by DESE. Each contains all the key OBE buzzwords that are in SB 380: "high performance standards," "competencies" and "performance assessment," which, the Q&A document tells us, is one of many of these terms that are "often ... used interchangeably with 'outcomes.'"

It is true, as the Bartman/Carnahan line has it, that the words OBE aren't in SB 380. True -- but blatantly misleading. All they did with the bill is to follow the counsel of then-Bartman deputy Joel Denney in testimony to a House committee looking into these issues. From the April 1993 subcommittee report: Dr. Denney "spoke mainly about how their problem was a communication breakdown. His opinion is that the term OBE itself carries a good deal of baggage that it doesn't deserve -- and that much of the bad feeling could be taken care of simply by renaming the effort."

Here's the truth: In 1993, through SB 380, Mel Carnahan passed an OBE bill, literally selling your state department of public education to the teachers' unions and giving them carte blanche. One supposes that if the passage of such a bill were your proudest boast, you just might be forced to lie about it too.

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