KINDER'S COMMENTARY: ED TRIES TO MANIPULATE `HEARINGS'

A funny thing happened on the way to Big Education's plan to ram its "standards" down the throats of Missouri parents. Parents aren't buying.

"Hearings" held last Thursday by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education at seven locations around Missouri may prove a milestone in the corruption of your state government, a watershed in the descent of a powerful state bureaucracy into a sinkhole of rigged "hearings" and fraudulent self-congratulation. Were it not so serious, involving as it does the education of your children, truly, truly it would be laughable.

The hearings' stated purpose: To gather public comment on so-called academic performance standards for all Missouri schools. Thus before the hearings, from DESE, and from the unelected state board that governs it, we heard pious rhetoric: Testimony from grass-roots Missourians, we were told, would have an impact on whether the board would adopt them at its meeting on Jan. 18. Unfolding in the days leading up to Jan. 4 was a feverish push by Big Education and by Gov. Mel Carnahan's administration to pack the hearings with cheerleaders for the "standards."

Thus we have the Partnership for Outstanding Schools and its infamous letter of December 29, 1995. "Thank you for agreeing to attend the Jan. 4 hearing," gushes the letter from the not-for-profit foundation set up to organize cheering for DESE initiatives such as the "standards." The letter continues: (ital)"Groups of people who are opposed to having any educational standards are expected at this hearing.(unital) We are counting on you. ..." (Emphasis original.) The letter concludes with a "P.S. We really need you to try and bring others with you who will also speak in favor of having educational standards."

Aside from the blatant intellectual dishonesty -- portraying opponents of these standards as opposed to having any educational standards -- there are serious problems with such a letter and with the suggested "talking points" enclosed in it. Consider implications of the fact that three state board of education members and commissioner Bob Bartman have their names on the letterhead as officials of the private Partnership for Outstanding Schools. This means that the state board supposedly considering adoption of the "standards" is actively involved in soliciting comments favorable to -- and only favorable to -- those standards.

Do you notice the resemblance to one of those little "elections" run by Saddam Hussein -- the ones where he receives 99.88 percent of the vote? Can you say, "Sham, from beginning to end"?

Thus the governor -- whose staff took time off from working to replace Bob Griffin with a successor hand-picked by him -- had cabinet members attend to cheer for the standards. The teachers unions and compliant school board members worked overtime to get their members there. But despite a lack of organization and no funding at all, groups of ordinary parents showed up at every "hearing." At several, testimony was nearly evenly divided between opponents and supporters, despite Big Ed's tax-paid resources working for the "standards."

After the session, Ray Rowland of Dexter reports, he approached state board member Rice "Pete" Burns of Sikeston. "I guess we're at an impasse," Rowland said to Burns and to a Bartman acolyte from DESE. "Everyone inside the system says they like the standards. Every parent with kids in it and no other connection to Big Ed says they're opposed."

According to Rowland, Burns and the man from DESE ruefully agreed.

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