KINDER'S COMMENTARY: OBE TALKS; BARTMAN MUST GO

Tonight and tomorrow evening, I will be speaking on the same platform with a nationally known speaker and writer who opposes outcome based education. Peg Luksik, a Pennsylvania mother of six, is the lady of whom I speak. She has debated the leading proponents of OBE in a variety of formats across America.

Back in January 1994, Mrs. Luksik simply demolished Gov. Mel Carnahan's chief education adviser, Dr. Bob Henley, in a joint appearance in front of about 600 people who showed up to hear them in Kansas City. I will be joining her to speak to large crowds in St. Louis County schools: tonight at Marquette High School in the Rockwood district and Friday night in the Riverview Gardens district. Both events are at 7:30 p.m. Then Sunday afternoon at 2, Mrs. Luksik and I will be speaking in Columbia, whose schools have been straightforwardly and openly implementing OBE for some years now. Next, in the appearance closest to Cape Girardeau, the two of us will speak in Farmington at 7 p.m. Monday at the Tradition Inn, located on Highway 67. Perhaps some readers interested in learning more will attend one of these meetings. At least one of them will be videotaped.

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Dr. Robert Bartman, Missouri commissioner of elementary and secondary education, is traveling the state these days, as he always does this time of year, holding carefully staged meetings, or "regional education conferences." The one for Southeast Missouri is the final appearance, and it will be at New Madrid County Central High School on Tuesday.

Ostensibly held, at least in part, to gather public comments on trends in Missouri education reform, the first thing that arrests your attention is the time of day for all the meetings: 2 p.m. Why not hold them in the evening? Holding them in mid-afternoon certainly makes it difficult for average Missouri taxpayers and parents to attend a conference that will be, for most of them, their only real chance to offer input to the lords and masters of public education in Missouri. Further, the meetings are held at relatively remote locations: for instance, the one in Southwest Missouri is held each year -- not in the centrally located and populous city of Springfield -- but at Republic. Two years on the Senate Education Committee has convinced me that this is no accident. But still, it could be, right?

And then you get to the conference. What you find there is that Dr. Bartman stands up and delivers a prepared set-piece, a lecture of his own devising. Last year, he spent much of the time delivering near-hysterical diatribes against Hancock II of the drearily familiar kind that your tax dollars paid for from so many government employees. How about two-way dialogue with the taxpayers who are paying so dearly for all this, or with the parents whose children are the center of the enterprise? Forget it. Year after year, one thing is constant: No opportunity is offered for mere mortals, during this general session, even to ask questions of Bartman, much less to offer an alternative vision or debate him. The group then breaks up into smaller sessions, painstakingly overseen by a carefully trained and highly solicitous facilitator from DESE, Dr. Bartman's department.

For anyone who doubts what I mean, as I have written so often here, about the carefully sealed echo chambers of the public education establishment, this is it: What you end up with at these meetings is a bunch of professional educators, fine people, mostly -- sprinkled together with some school board members and those few brave citizens who are able to make it at the inconvenient hour -- listening to Dr. Bartman deliver The Word According to the State Department From On High.

For arrogantly and repeatedly ignoring both the people of the state and their elected representatives, for intentionally misleading them, for violating both the spirit and the letter of the law, Dr. Bartman needs to go, and the time has arrived to say it: Bartman and some of his top henchmen must be fired, and if the current school board won't do it, then the question of his continuation in office, together with the agenda he is pursuing, must be made one of the foremost issues in next year's gubernatorial campaign. Then, perhaps, public participation of a rather different sort might be forthcoming.

The folks at DESE constantly give lip service to wanting public input. Well, that's mine.

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Coming in Sunday's column: The handouts being distributed at these regional conferences, and what they reveal about the Bartman/DESE agenda to transform Missouri schools.

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