KINDER'S COMMENTARY: EDUCATION REFORM DRAWS INTEREST

Tuesday evening I flew to Springfield, Mo., there to join five other panelists in what was billed as a "Firing Line"-style debate on education reforms in Missouri. The Greene County Christian Coalition sponsored the event, which received plenty of advance publicity and was well-covered by local news media and attended by a U.S. congressman, a Senate colleague of mine and by more than 200 citizens.

The question we debated for just short of two hours was "Resolved: That current reforms will produce academic excellence in Missouri." With three panelists on each side, the affirmative side was represented by the assistant dean of the college of education at Southwest Missouri State University, a top official from the Springfield public school district and a history professor at another local college who also serves as a school board member. Representing the negative side were Missourians for Academic Excellence president Lynnette Holt, a Lee's Summit housewife and piano teacher and parent of two children in the public schools, John McDonough, of Citizens for Educational Freedom, Kansas City chapter, and yours truly.

We had a spirited but entirely civil exchange of views. It was videotaped so that viewers across Missouri will have a chance to see the program on local, public access cable TV shows. I will be receiving a tape in a few days and will be arranging for time to show it here to cable viewers in Cape Girardeau and Jackson. We will let you know when it will be shown here.

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As we start another school year, there are countless thousands of dedicated, hardworking teachers across Missouri who are doing a great job, many times for inadequate compensation and under the most trying conditions. They also labor under conditions involving the threat of parental lawsuits and regulatory nightmares that didn't exist when I went to school. Behavioral disorder children can paralyze both teachers and administrators and render learning enormously more difficult, if not impossible.

In most cases, reform of these regulations will have to come from the federal level. I have spoken with Rep. Bill Emerson and have impressed upon him that teachers and administrators are groaning under this burden. The need for reform is urgent. The congressman informs me that this matter has the attention of congressional leaders and has pledged his best efforts to address this situation.

Then there's the weather. Facing unbearable heat, school officials in Cape Girardeau and many other districts have had to send students and teachers home early. Surely, a community as prosperous as ours can summon the will and the means to address this problem.

Many times, some of the things I have written on trends in education reform are misinterpreted as attacks on the efforts of our good teachers. This is untrue, as I see many of the dangerous trends in education making things worse, not better, for the classroom teacher.

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This week's start of school coincides with a devastating article in the Sunday magazine of the Chicago Tribune of Aug. 27 entitled "The Dumbing Down of Our Children: Why American Kids Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write or Add." It is no attack on classroom teachers here in Southeast Missouri to note the depressing trends in education "reform" nationally and to sound the alarm. The article is an excellent, albeit depressing, excerpt of a book coming out this October with the same title, written by Charles Sykes and released by St. Martin's Press. The excerpt is six pages of devastating, copious documentation of what I have been writing so much about this year: the disturbing trends in what passes for education "reform" in America today.

I deem it an enormously important event in the national debate over what is happening to our schools that a major, national, mainstream newspaper such as the Tribune would choose to give such attention to a not-yet-published book. With substance as provocative as its title, this article (and the book to follow) is one you shouldn't miss.

Kent Library on the university campus subscribes to the Chicago Tribune, although the public library doesn't. By the time you read this, they should have Sunday's edition with the magazine book excerpt. If you subscribe to America On Line, you can access the Tribune article through that service. If all this fails, call me at my office and I will see that any reader gets a copy of this important article.

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