KINDER'S COMMENTARY: EDUCATION REFORM IS PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

At 5:30 p.m. this Wednesday, an informational meeting on a major component of Senate Bill 380 will occur in your state capitol. Officials of the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, joined by several of their highly paid consultants, will brief members of the General Assembly on something called statewide assessments. DESE director Dr. Bob Bartman's invitation letter states its purpose: "To provide ... a better understanding of the complex issues related to performance assessment."

These assessments are the choke point for the new regime of state control of our schools. I have devoted several columns to the flaws in the proposed academic performance standards called for in Senate Bill 380, the so-called school reform act. That 1993 law also required the state to develop "curriculum frameworks" and a "new statewide assessment system based on the performance standards." (Emphasis added.)

Note, however, as previously observed here, the proposed performance standards are still in draft form within the Commission on Performance that SB 380 created. Not only have the so-called standards not been officially adopted by the state school board, but they have not even been officially forwarded to the board by the commission charged with drafting them.

The question therefore occurs: How can the state begin developing the assessment when the academic performance standards on which they are supposed to be based -- and from which they flow -- remain mere drafts that have not yet been adopted?

Hmmm. An assessment process that begins before the standards on which they are based are ready? Could it be that the entire process to this point, within the Commission on Performance and its sub-groups, which has involved literally hundreds of people, has been so much window dressing, stage managed by DESE bureaucrats and their highly paid consultants?

Other questions occur. Pursuant to SB 380, Missouri is paying $250,000 annually to belong to something called the New Standards Project. We being fitted into a national program for radically refitting America's schools in the mold of outcome based education. But no one from the New Standards Project is listed among those who will attend the meeting to speak.

Instead, Dr. Bartman's letter states that among those on the panel discussion will be "representatives from the California Test Bureau, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Advanced Systems and the College Board."

In a reply to Bartman's letter hand-delivered this past Thursday, I asked: "Why is the New Standards Project not invited to speak? What is the California Test Bureau and Advanced Systems and why will they be speakers?" I also asked Dr. Bartman to send me "any documents from the presenting groups which we may review in advance to prepare for the discussion."

California's governor recently vetoed the infamous CLAS (California Assessment) Test. Now we are bringing these "experts" to Missouri to instruct us in "the complex issues" in this reform process?

These and other questions I have been raising are considered a nuisance, a bother and an affront. This past week, a friendly Democratic colleague sidled up to me on the Senate floor to pass along a comment from a member of the state school board. The school board member told the senator: "Tell that guy Kinder to quiet down on SB 380 and let us proceed with the process."

Yet another indication, if one were needed, that many within our educational establishment don't want open debate or discussion or even questions about what they're doing to your public schools.

Be assured that is one piece of advice I intend most emphatically to reject.

Thursday: What exactly is in the New Standards Project?

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