KINDER'S COMMENTARY: KENTUCKY'S ELITE RALLY TO THE DEFENSE OF KERA

In the Commonwealth of Kentucky, our neighbors to the east, they have an interesting little dustup of a gubernatorial election under way, outcome to be determined on Tuesday night. I wrote here earlier that GOP nominee Larry Forgy, bidding to become the first Republican to win the governor's mansion since 1967, raised the stakes enormously when he placed all his chips on a bet that voters are ready to repudiate outcome-based education reforms of the kind that were a model for Missouri's Senate Bill 380. A Democratic governor and legislature passed the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, preceding the Democrat-passed SB 380 in Missouri in 1993, so they can be said to be three years ahead of us on this reform track which, we are incessantly told by the elites of Big Education, will lead to higher standards and World Class Schools.

Republican nominee Forgy, who has been building up to a crescendo of attacks on KERA for weeks, boldly told a group of newspaper editors last month that Tuesday's election will be "a referendum on KERA." He said that KERA is an "arrogant concept" rammed down the throats of Kentuckians who never asked for it by "contemptuous legislators." He said KERA's ungraded primaries are a failure, attacked its move away from fundamentals and blasted the high-priced, out-of-state consultants who made money in Kentucky, as we have seen them do in Missouri, peddling fads so discredited they are a national joke.

Responding to Forgy's bold and courageous gambit, watching him rise in the polls at just the right time, the elites of Big Education and their acolytes in Big Media are panicking. Every elite institution in Kentucky and newspaper after newspaper, KERA supporters all, is pulling out all the stops.

Saying Forgy "picks away at every scab he can find," the liberal, Gannett-owned, pro-KERA Louisville Courier-Journal last Tuesday bitterly denounced Forgy's "Pearl Harbor of an attack on KERA." What positively thrills the Courier-Journal is that their Big Business buddies in the Partnership for Kentucky Education Reform have come rushing in to run 10 days and $100,000 worth of pro-KERA TV ads that try to counter Forgy's ads, which boldly tell Kentuckians: "KERA is failing us. ..."

It was left to majority Democrats in Kentucky, so long unchallenged in their party's rule of that state, to trot out the most threadbare and shopworn of cliches: Anyone who criticizes KERA -- their handiwork -- is "against public education" and wants to "take education in Kentucky back to the 1950s." This was their theme in a series of fly-around news conferences last week. The same theme is being sounded against such as yours truly by the denizens of Big Education in the Show Me State.

Such attacks, together with their frenzy and shrillness, were altogether predictable. Or, as they say in some parts of Missouri, "The stuck pig squeals loudest." Forgy knew the stakes when he featured KERA as a front-burner issue. As High Noon approaches this Tuesday, the media attacks on Forgy have further raised those stakes. The outcome of Tuesday's election in Kentucky will have major implications for the course of education reform nationwide. If Forgy wins, as I expect he will, the elites of Big Media, Big Education and Big Business are going to have to figure out how to get back in the good graces of ordinary, grassroots voters who still, after all, have the last say in America.

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