KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SCHOOL STANDARDS: WELCOME TO EDUCRATS' WORLD

My last offering described the handouts of sample assessments being distributed by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education at a series of meetings now under way. The mandatory assessments mandated by Senate Bill 380 are the real choke points for Gov. Mel Carnahan's new regime for state control of all our public schools. The sample assessments being handed out are for mathematics.

From the General Guidelines, Preparing Students:

"The pre-test activities of the exercise enable teachers to work with students with diverse languages and backgrounds to overcome some of the linguistic and cultural differences that might arise between the student and the testing exercise. The interaction between teacher and student should encourage all students to express their own thinking, questions and background related to the exercise context."

Next -- remember, the subject at hand is mathematics -- is Student Writing:

"... Written communication using mathematical ideas typically makes use of diagrams, pictures, graphs, models, numbers and symbols. Encourage students to mix these varied representations to more effectively communicate. In scoring the written work in the mathematics testing exercises, the emphasis will be on the students' mathematical thinking."

Following this there is -- remember, we're still talking mathematics here -- Student Diversity:

"Although the exercises have been designed to make them accessible to the widest possible range of students, students will react differently to the context of each exercise. For example, students from different economic circumstances will react differently to exercises involving spending money. One advantage of testing student-produced responses is that scoring can allow for contextual differences created by students from diverse backgrounds. Procedures for scoring these exercises will be sensitive to these differences by focusing on how well the student achieved the purpose of the exercise, rather than on a predetermined representation and approach." [UNITAL] (Emphasis added.)

Are you getting the drift? Here we reach the heart of the matter. This pathetic pish-posh, this psychobabble posing as profundity, is about as baldfaced a statement of moral and epistemological relativism as you're likely to find in any document to which an educrat has signed his or her name. (Epistemology is the fancy word for that discipline of philosophy concerning itself with what it is possible for the human mind to know.)

The Brave New World of the educrats is on display here, right there along with the sad disintegration of the colleges of education at most of our universities. This, then, is what they mean to do to your schools: Mathematics -- the indispensable foundation of and gateway to all scientific knowledge, and therefore an essential building block of civilization -- isn't about objective standards of right and wrong answers at all. It isn't even about difficult equations, with their right and wrong answers. This old-fashioned approach, the educrats now smugly lecture us, has been a terrible, decades-long mistake. Rather, from now on, like everything else the educrats touch, math is to be bathed in good feelings and thoroughly and completely relativized. In the Brave New World, it's all about the teacher's taking pains to discover a student's "diverse linguistic, cultural and economic background", as the math teacher assigns her students writing projects, the better to "understand ... where the student is coming from," in the currently fashionable idiom.

Devastating. Absolutely devastating. Lord, have mercy. Wouldn't you think they'd be embarrassed to put their names on this?

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