KINDER'S COMMENTARY: NATIONAL AGENDA FOR SCHOOL REFORM

As stated in my most recent column, pursuant to Senate Bill 380 Missouri is paying $250,000 each year to belong to something called the New Standards Project. Missourians are entitled to ask: What, exactly, are we getting for this money? What is the NSP?

Based at the University of Pittsburgh, the NSP "has the explicit purpose of destroying the current testing system and replacing it with an upgraded Outcome Based Education approach allowing pupils to take a group mastery test as many times as they need to pass it." That statement is quoted from a June, 1993 column by Robert Holland, a leading critic of OBE at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Holland's tenacity, demonstrated in a year-long series of articles, is credited with sparking an outcry that resulted in former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder's September 1993 decision to scrap OBE.

Judged on its own terms, however, the NSP is "charged with building a national consensus for educational standards." It is a national consortium co-directed by Lauren Resnick of the University of Pittsburgh and Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Seventeen states are participating in the NSP. Make that were participating. Three states -- Virginia, South Carolina and Florida -- have quit the NSP.

Who are the key players? Would you believe Hillary Rodham Clinton, and one Ira Magaziner, the first lady's arrogant adviser in designing the failed Clinton health care reform? Mrs. Clinton is a member of the board of directors of the NSP. In a March 1992 article in the journal "Educational Leadership," Mrs. Clinton collaborated with Magaziner. Their vision? Pure OBE. Summarizing, columnist Holland describes the Clinton/Magaziner plan for education:

"To meet international competition, she said, U.S. workers must be trained in a wholly new way -- as members of teams that produce more. Toward the end she laid out an OBE blueprint:

"There would be one standard for all American students to meet at or around age 16. `This standard should be established internationally and benchmarked to the highest standards in the world,' she declared. Yet states would be responsible for ensuring that "virtually all students" passed this common "world class" test."

Columnist Holland observes, savagely, "Can you say `norming,' boys and girls?"

This centralized scheme has been enacted into federal law in the form of the Clintons' "Goals 2000" legislation passed by last year's Democratic Congress. Thus, the NSP is the joining place where meet the two prongs of the Brave New World of Education: Missouri's SB 380 and our state reforms. And Goals 2000, the federal OBE straitjacket.

One thing the NSP will provide is "expert psychometric oversight." I don't know about you, but I had to go to the dictionary on that one. From Webster's New World Dictionary: "Psychometrics: the theory or practice of measuring mental functions, such as intelligence, as by psychological tests."

As the author and critic Irving Kristol has stated, "simplicity is the deadliest enemy" of the educational establishment. I have come to believe that it is part of the conscious design of these people that every "reform" they are undertaking be couched in language so impenetrable that their revolution will be accomplished before ordinary voters and taxpayers wake up to what is going on.

What is going on, some time after the November 1996 election, is this: the stage is being set for yet another tax increase for still more of your tax money to be spent on these bogus and hideously expensive "reforms". And for that you can thank the tag team of Clinton and Magaziner, Gov. Mel Carnahan, the experts at DESE with their thousand-dollar-a-day consultants, and the authors of SB 380.

FOOTNOTE to an earlier column: I have alleged in this column that the experts rewriting Missouri's curricula are engaged in what one writer called "terminological evasion" -- essentially a shell game with words. In other words, as people wake up to the real OBE agenda, the experts simply change the terminology. Now comes this, from an April 1993 sub-committee report of the Missouri House Education Committee on Systemic Change (Outcome Based Education and Re: Learning): Joel Denney, then the deputy commissioner in the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, "spoke mainly about how their problem was a communication breakdown. His opinion is that the term OBE itself carries a good deal of negative baggage that it doesn't deserve -- and that much of the bad feeling could be taken care of by simply renaming the reform effort."

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