KINDER'S COMMENTARY: EDUCATION ACCUMULATES ITS LUMPS

Confirmation: You read it here.

It was most interesting to read a letter to the editor, written by a teacher and published Wednesday, which took me to task, but which confirmed what I had previously written about a disturbing trend in education, to wit: "invented" or creative spelling.

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Progress with school choice

Last year saw breakthroughs in the battle for parental freedom in education. In both Milwaukee and Cleveland, pilot programs are under way to offer to parents of poor and middle-income children the same choice wealthy parents have always enjoyed: The chance to send their children to the school of their choice without financial penalty.

It is, by the way, no accident that the principal breakthroughs have occurred in states, such as Wisconsin and Ohio, that currently have Republican governors and Republican majorities in both the state House of Representatives and Senate. Although too many Republicans oppose school choice, and although there are Democrats in every state legislature who favor parental freedom in education, in the main, the leadership of the Democratic Party is far too in thrall to teachers unions such as the National Education Association to even discuss the measure seriously. I can tell you, for instance, that I have been amazed at the intensity with which Democratic leaders of the Missouri General Assembly have fought even tentative half-steps toward school choice.

And now, in addition to the battle for parental freedom occurring in statehouse after statehouse, school choice is making headway in the District of Columbia. Per-pupil spending in D.C. public schools (over $9,000) is among the highest in America, even as test scores head ever downward and the dropout rate is a national disgrace rivaling that of the Kansas City School District. Congressional negotiators have approved a plan that allows Washington, D.C., students to use scholarships for private and parochial schools and establishes publicly funded charter schools that would operate outside the authority of the D.C. school board. The scholarships, up to about $3,000 per student, would be federally funded.

Also: the plan includes the formation of a super school board appointed by the president and local officials that could override the D.C. school board. Approval of the plan -- which has passed in the House -- came just one day before two teachers were attacked at a D. C. school where students "then went on a rampage for at least 20 minutes until police arrived," the Washington Times reported.

In the Missouri General Assembly, those of us who back parental freedom in education have been stymied this year, as we have been for the last three years, by the leadership of the majority party that has enjoyed uninterrupted control of both houses for more than four decades.

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A president on the upswing?

A noteworthy item from a publication called "The Item" of Sumter, S.C.:

"Sitting down for a conversation with Sen. Fritz Hollings is one of life's great pleasures," a recent editorial opined, offering examples of the Democrat's humor and candor.

"Clinton's as popular as AIDS in South Carolina," Mr. Hollings said, but elsewhere things are looking up for the president. "His approval ratings are about 50 percent now. If the get up to 60 percent, his people tell me Bill can start dating again."

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Truth according to Koch

Another of the great pleasures of life is the former Democratic mayor of New York, Ed Koch. The former Hizzoner waxed poetic about the fortunes of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and the case of the missing documents that mysteriously appear in the first family's White House living quarters.

"I do not believe that Mrs. Clinton has committed any crime," Mr. Koch recently wrote in his New York Post column. "Her perfidy does not rise to the level of Lady Macbeth or Medea, but what comes to mind is the Sir Walter Scott couplet: 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.'"

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