KINDER'S COMMENTARY: MISSOURI SCHOOL REFORM GETS SILLIER AND SILLIER

This school reform process is becoming a joke. An expensive, time-consuming joke.

"JEFFERSON CITY -- It's taking longer than expected to rewrite proposed state standards for measuring student achievement to make them understandable to the average Missourian.

"So the state's education chief asked Thursday for more time to work on the standards, which have been sharply criticized as too vague and lacking emphasis on academic achievement.

"`We need to have more understandable language,' Education Commissioner Bob Bartman told the State Board of Education. ..."

So began an Associated Press dispatch of this past week from our state capital. Thus it is clear that, without dissent, the State Board of Education has come to the same conclusion about the proposed standards that was arrived at in April by the Commission on Performance. The commission is a 28-member group created under Senate Bill 380 to recommend up to 75 "academic performance standards" to the State Board of Education. Under SB 380, the standards are to be mandatory for all Missouri schools. The commission long ago fell months behind in drafting them. Now, more delay will ensue, as expensive consultants pore over them.

Following three months of vigorous criticism in this space and a genuine, grass-roots uprising against the draft standards, the Commission on Performance met April 25 in Jefferson City at what Dr. Bartman had long planned would be its last meeting. The plan was to have the commission adopt the flimsy drafts and send them on to the state board for adoption within a matter of days. Back to the AP story: "... The first version of the standards ... met with shaking heads at an April meeting of the commission ..., the panel which is to consider the final product.

"Crafters were told to report back this month with a massive rewrite.

"But Bartman told the state board that he wants to cancel the commission's July 26 meeting because the rewrite isn't done, and more time is needed. ..."

Undaunted by having missed 17 previous targets, Bartman now says: "The target is to have the standards in a preliminary form and ready to take to the people in the fall." Bartman promises a new round of public meetings on the standards around the state in September or October.

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Aren't you feeling great that we can now begin to see some relief or perhaps even, far down the road, the end of Missouri's massive payments to the St. Louis and Kansas City school districts? With relief from these obligations in sight, a few colleagues and I began looking around recently for taxes to cut. Give the people their money back, we reasoned, especially given Gov. Mel Carnahan's enthusiasm for higher taxes.

Sorry, folks. Gov. Carnahan and his legislative majority have already spent the money -- money that should be coming back to you in much-needed tax relief. A little-noticed provision in Senate Bill 380 sends any such savings to the school foundation formula.

With revenue growth, all the taxes Mel Carnahan has imposed will soon be taking from Missourians, in new and higher levies, about $1 billion more than when he took office just 30 months ago. This from a governor who in his 1992 campaign promised a $200 million proposal for schools that would go to a vote of the people before approval.

A pretty expensive governor, I'd say. If Missourians re-elect this guy next year, we will deserve our fate. That fate will be to watch Missourians fall behind the rest of America, as one state after another lowers taxes, shrinks government and attracts business in an ever-more-competitive world economy.

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