KINDER'S COMMENTARY: FINALLY: THE SOFT-SHOE SOLUTION TO MATH

Complicated math can be taught through dance. -- Margaret Brommelsiek, executive director of the Missouri Alliance for Arts Education, lauding Missouri's new education standards, which elevate arts education from an elective to a core subject on a par with math and science.

Those of us whose who lacked serious aptitude in advanced mathematics would have loved this: We could have danced our way through trigonometry. Had we not been so backward when I was in school, acing calculus would have been a little soft-shoe routine away. (Not that I showed any aptitude for dance, but it would have been easier to fake than those pesky equations.)

As one who has spent two years attempting to awaken Missourians to what is happening to our schools, I have had many occasions to wonder: When will the breaking point arrive? Exactly how much will parents sit still for? How long before the dam breaks and a full-scale parental revolt opens up? (None of this is to denigrate the arts; participation in the Chamber Choir was one of the most enriching experiences of my high school career. Certainly the arts have their proper place.)

Already, parents have endured so much. They have sat through the catastrophe of whole-language reading instruction and its offshoot, invented spelling. California's wholesale, lemming-like plunge into whole-language proved disastrous: Reading scores plunged for 10 years, to the bottom of the nation, before Big Education in the Golden State awakened and decided to scrap it and embrace phonics. Nor is the damage confined to California: A Bootheel father of four tells me that his first-grader, trapped in a whole-language public school curriculum, literally won't learn to read at all unless he learns at home.

As near as I can tell, the state of Arizona must be about four or five years ahead down the road mapped out for us by our state's educrats and their thousand-dollar-a-day consultants. A friend who travels there gives me columns from the Arizona Republic written by Marrianne Moody Jennings, a law professor at Arizona State University. Jennings is thoroughly disgusted at her daughter's experiences in the public schools.

A recent Jennings effort is entitled "X + Y = F: Mesa's algebra textbooks flunk examinations." The textbook, published by Addison-Wesley, is entitled "Secondary Math: An Integrated Approach: Focus on Algebra." Noting that the very title suggested trouble -- "How about just Algebra 1?" Jennings wrote -- she supplies some questions from the text:

"Each year the Oilfield Chili Appreciation Society holds a chili cook-off. The chili raises money for charity. Describe some ways the organizers could raise money in the cook-off."

Or how about this:

"What role should zoos play in society?"

Finally, Ms. Jennings says, "no algebra textbook would be complete without this brainteaser:

"Suppose you were a judge for a creative writing contest in which the topic is: `Why should we have an endangered species?' What would you use as criteria for judging the essay?"

Jennings writes: "I found three discussions alerting students to the devil's handiwork in fossil fuels. I found a picture of President Clinton and some Maya Angelou poetry. What I couldn't find were algebra problems, numbers, equations, or even a photo of a person holding up a finger or two just to avoid bait-and-switch charges against the publisher."

As Jennings describes the brick walls she ran into trying to get satisfactory answers from school district officials, she sincerely "offered alternatives: Set up a traditional section of algebra, and I'll go away. Give them a standardized test. If they do well, I'll apologize and go away." All were rejected.

Sunday: How Jennings discovered that much of math education has been taken over by theorists, and the terrible damage they have wrought.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.