KINDER'S COMMENTARY: EDUCATION IS TARGET OF `STANDARDS'

In last Sunday's column, I described a grass-roots uprising of Missourians for Academic Excellence, a group concerned about radical, state-imposed changes being forced on our public schools. Everything MAE is reacting against was set in train by the 1993 passage of Senate Bill 380, Gov. Mel Carnahan's tax-and-reform package for education.

Critical to the implementation of SB 380's so-called reforms is the Commission on Performance, which the legislation created to oversee the imposition of the reforms on local school districts across Missouri. Inside the largely cloistered deliberations of this largely unelected commission, full-time professionals are advancing a remarkable agenda that amounts to a radical departure from traditional approaches to education as you and I understand them.

Carrying the stamp of a state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that wrote much of 380, the Brave New World of Missouri education, this fad promotes something called "active learning," which also travels under the banners of "performance" or "performance-based" learning.

There is even considerable evidence of what has been called "terminological evasion" where OBE is concerned. In other states, wherever educational elites have remorselessly advanced their agenda, there have been public uprisings much as we are seeing today in Missouri. OBE-meisters have actually coached their would-be implementers to avoid using the OBE terminology, discarding it in favor of the "active" or "performance" wording, the better to confuse less well-informed opponents.

Central to the OBE agenda, under whatever name it advances, is the casting aside -- the active denigration -- of rote memorization, along with other, supposedly outdated, traditional teaching methods. These are to be cast aside in favor of an "active" learning model that emphasizes what proponents say is a clear and unmistakable improvement.

Other hallmarks of the OBE agenda include, in varying degrees and in varying forms: a move away from individual standards of objectively measurable academic achievement and toward cooperative or group learning; classes that move at the pace of the slowest student, with brighter students held back until everyone has mastered the lesson; the transformation of the teacher from an authority figure transmitting a body of revealed knowledge to a "facilitator" (whatever that is); the discouragement and devaluation -- if not the outright abolition -- of homework; discarding report cards, as they have been traditionally been understood, in favor of something called a student "portfolio"; the aggressive teaching of "self-esteem" and other psycho-babble; and the measurement and teaching of politically and/or socially correct "attitude".

Listen to Alan Klaus of North Kansas City, a lay member of the Commission on Performance: "When I first heard about outcome-based education through my son's high school, I was excited. Finally they were talking about setting some standards. But the more I learned about it, the more concerned I became. ... OBE is just not what it seems to be." Klaus experienced the thoroughgoing disillusionment so common to parents who have taken the trouble to learn what the educational elites have in mind for our children.

Indeed, so disillusioned did Klaus become that he combined with fellow lay commission member John Ritland, a McDonnell Douglas engineer from St. Louis, to write a dissenting report to the work of the commission. Their trenchant, well-written report is a lengthy and persuasive indictment of what is happening to Missouri schools in the wake of SB 380, which -- in the Orwellian manner of Big Governments everywhere -- was cunningly and misleadingly named "The Outstanding Schools Acts"

Under SB 380, the commission is charged with producing dozens of "academic performance standards," or "exit outcomes." Last fall, after more than a year of work, the commission and its sub-groups produced a set of proposed standards that were so vague, and so lacking in hard academics, as to cause an uproar among most who have read them. Under whatever name, they are pure OBE.

Peter Kinder is associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau. In next Sunday's column: The academic performance standards and the revolt they ignited within the Commission on Performance.