KINDER'S COMMENTARY: LOOKING FOR OBE ANSWERS IN CAPE

About 10 years ago, the former U.S. education secretary, William Bennett, singled out the public shools in Chicago for special recognition. "The Chicago public school system," the blunt-spoken Dr. Bennett said, "is the worst school system in America." At that time, it had been years since chicago had hopped aboard the trendy choo-choo train of educational reform according to the experts who now want us to know how great Senate Bill 380 is.

The grim facts are these: In 1971, Mastery Learning practices were mandated in 500 Chicago public schools. Eight years later, results were so abysmal that parents filed a lawsuit against the school district alleging educational malpractice. Test scores were dropping sharply. In the lowest five achieving schools (where these teaching techniques are supposed to help the most), 7,500 student scores sank to the 10 percent level. This level of performance is no better than answering at random.

Spooked by this pathetic track record and by the parents' lawsuit, Chicago school officials cut and ran. They abandoned the field. Mastery Learning was scrapped. Somehow, though, proponents of Mastery Learning escaped the humiliation and ignominy that should have been their fate. Sadly, like Freddy Krueger, "They're baaaack!"

Is this what we want to see adopted in the Cape Girardeau public schools or anywhere else in Missouri? Let those who urge that our local schools should adopt Mastery Learning now come forward. Let them explain, in detail, to an increasingly informed and vitally interested public, just exactly what they mean by the use of these terms. Hold the cliches. Shelve the pieties. Jettison the jargon. It is time for some answers.

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Tuesday afternoon, on the floor of the Missouri Senate, many of the issues I have been writing about for the last two months were finally joined. After 18 months or so of deliberations, action within the Commission on Performance is building to a head. Careful readers will recall that this commission is a mostly unelected group of Missourians set up under SB 380 to draft so-called Academic Performance Standards. On Tuesday, April 25, the tiny cabal driving the agenda within that mostly unelected commission will meet, at what is said to be their last meeting, to adopt the proposed standards. A few days later, the state school board is supposed to take up the commission's recommendation and adopt the standards, giving them the force of law for Missouri schools.

For more than two and a half hours Tuesday afternoon, a couple of colleagues and I held the floor, forcing the full Senate to consider just exactly where SB 380-style reform is taking Missouri schools. At issue was an amendment to delete $250,000 in funding for Missouri's dues to belong to something called the New Standards Project. This project is a consortium of states run out of the University of Pittsburgh, a national group at the cutting edge of Outcome Based Education-style reforms. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spearheaded OBE in Arkansas, sits on the board of the NSP.

At length, we took pains to describe to our colleagues the work of the commission on performance and the stacked deck that has prevailed within it. Indicting its work product, we described in detail how the proposed Academic Performance Standards are neither academic nor standards worthy of the terms. We used every means at our disposal to sound the alarm for our colleagues over what is happening to Missouri schools.

We described how three states have quit the New Standards Project and saved their money. In September 1993, after a long struggle, Virginia's governor pulled the plug on the kind of reform track we are now on in Missouri. Gov. Doug Wilder, the first-ever African-American chief executive of the Old Dominion, pulled his state out of the New Standards Project. Reasons cited by Gov. Wilder included the fact that this so-called world-class education: 1. Removes local control. 2. Stresses values over academics. 3. Costs too much. 4. Experiments on our children.

In a roll call vote to delete the funding, we lost 18-14. But our message was sent to all who will look beyond cliches and listen to a principled critique of SB 380's reforms. The battle for the future of Missouri's schools is joined anew and has entered a new and more interesting phase.

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