KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SCHOOL STANDARDS: TRY, TRY AGAIN

I move that the Commission on Performance and the State Board of Education delay final action on the academic performance standards, with the understanding that this commission will make a recommendation to the State Board of Education on the standards after viewing the completed curriculum frameworks and at least one sample performance-based assessment item in all six curriculum areas: (communication arts, fine arts, health/physical education, mathematics, science and social studies). In addition, the academic performance standards shall be written for each of these six curriculum areas and worded in language easily understood as academic standards by the local school districts, parents, students and the public at large. -- Sen. Harold Caskey, D-Butler, former chairman of the Senate Education Committee and principal sponsor of Senate Bill 380. Sen. Caskey's motion, which on a voice vote carried unanimously, came near the conclusion of the meeting Tuesday of the Commission on Performance. (Emphasis original.)

So, Bob Bartman has been told to go back to school and get it right this time.

In the grand design of Missouri's education commissioner, Dr. Bartman, this Tuesday's meeting was to have been the last for the Commission on Performance, set up by Senate Bill 380 to recommend academic performance standards to the State Board of Education. The 28-member commission has been around for more than 18 months and is already something like nine or 10 months behind schedule. Members will thus re-work the draft standards, which are neither academic nor standards worthy of the terms, and which were sufficiently embarrassing to the formidable Sen. Caskey that, as author of SB 380 and a commission member, he felt constrained to send them back for more work.

On many occasions I have disagreed with "the senator from Bates" (county), as he is addressed on the Senate floor. Anyone who has ever tussled with him, though, comes away with a healthy respect for his keen intelligence and agile command of the legislative process, both procedural and substantive. In his 20-year Senate career, Tuesday's action will stand out. Sen. Caskey is to be commended for a singular act of courage that, at the very least, slowed a runaway train and produced what a Vietnam-era Robert McNamara, currently reemerging in the news, used to call an "agonizing reappraisal."

It was a stunning defeat and a thoroughgoing rebuke for Bartman and for his crowd at DESE, which once seemed so securely in charge. That Bartman himself bought into Caskey's motion by endorsing it does not diminish the sting of his reversal at the hands of Sen. Caskey, his legislative mentor. Top staff members in the governor's office were approached, who basically agreed that they have a real bummer on their hands and had to do something to avert the unfolding disaster, to which many Missourians are slowly awakening. Learning of Caskey's motion the week before, Bartman spent several days with a wet finger in the air and endorsed the motion, I am told by a commission member, only after quietly having members polled to see the likely result. That is, after all one model of leadership: find out which way things are going, then get out in front.

That said, the question must be asked: Where do we go from here? There would appear to be at least two problems with Sen. Caskey's motion. First, it is subjective in nature. That is to say, it admits of no objective standard of compliance. Read it again: How will we know when the drafters have complied with it? It would appear similar to the famous line of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Asked to define obscenity, Mr. Justice Stewart responded, "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." Sen. Caskey, one presumes, will "know it" when he "sees it."

The other problem with Caskey's motion is that it begins with the assumption that drafters are on the right road and need only to be clearer in their language describing the route. For nearly three months, I have been describing why Missouri is on a fatally flawed course in education reform. It is an approach that has failed miserably in other states, most notably in Kentucky, widely acknowledged, at the time of SB 380's drafting and since, to be Missouri's model in this process.

Kentucky is three years ahead of us in this reform. A gubernatorial election is to be held this November, and all candidates in both parties are competing to see who can most effectively denounce the 1990-passed Kentucky Education Reform Act. Fleeing from a public education system in shambles, parents are voting with their feet: An explosion in home schooling is under way, with a 30 percent increase in parents' choosing that option in the last year alone.

Et tu, Gov. Carnahan?

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