KINDER'S COMMENTARY: THE OBE DENIALS ARE CONTINUING

Missouri's commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Robert Bartman, went on KMOX radio Monday afternoon to assure Missourians, yet once again, that what we are doing under Senate Bill 380 (the Outstanding Schools Act) isn't outcome-based education. In this he was echoing Gov. Mel Carnahan's astonishing but little-noted statement of last week in which he supposedly joined the ranks of OBE opponents. Dr. Bartman also reiterated for at least the 100th time his statement that, after all the controversy over OBE, he "can't define it." Make no mistake: The governor and Dr. Bartman are engaged in intentional evasion and are desperately seeking to have it both ways.

As a guest on Charles Jaco's program, Dr. Bartman further stated that the folks raising all the ruckus over OBE -- troublemakers such as yours truly -- are using the term as a sort of trash bin into which they dump "anything and everything they don't like about public education."

The fact that Bartman says we Missourians a) can't define OBE, and b) aren't doing it pursuant to current SB 380 reforms makes all the more interesting the appearance, last week for a speaking engagement in Columbia of one Dr. William Spady.

Bill Spady, a sociologist who never taught in a classroom, has earned national renown as the founder and most ardent proponent of OBE. He appeared in Columbia at a day-long seminar sponsored by a keystone of our state's public education establishment: the Missouri School Boards Association. The MSBA works hand in glove with other pillars of Big Education, such as teachers groups, associations of superintendents and the state department headed by Dr. Bartman, where I have earned so many friends with this series of education columns. The MSBA heavily promoted the Spady appearance for months in advance. Still, a relatively small crowd showed up -- gee, do ya think it might have been the $50 charge? -- and many of them were critics affiliated with the traditional-minded Missourians for Academic Excellence, there to monitor the "experts" who arrogantly lecture parents on what's best for their children.

Citizens of the Show Me State may be forgiven for wondering one teensy, weensy, little thing: Why did Big Education bring in and heavily promote an appearance by the nationally renowned founder of an educational fad to explain something we can't define and aren't doing here in Missouri?

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Fresh from having once again misled listeners to Charles Jaco's afternoon call-in show on KMOX, Dr. Bartman headed down to New Madrid for Tuesday afternoon's "regional education conference," the final one in a round of 10 such meetings statewide. And today, Dr. Bartman will meet with the state board of education so that it can adopt the academic performance standards so long delayed by the long-running guerrilla battles fought over them and chronicled in this space.

State board members might use this occasion to reflect on the battle front in America's culture war they ignited when they charted an OBE path for Missouri schools back in the early 1990s. That would have been before the lies and the subterfuge started, from Mel Carnahan and Dr. Bartman on down. That was when state school officials were forthrightly and honestly telling the truth about their plans to remake Missouri schools on the OBE model. It can't be emphasized often enough that ordinary parents who favor traditional schooling didn't start this battle. They had it thrust on them by Big Education bureaucrats who have told half-truths and stonewalled and dissembled at nearly every turn. Just as Dr. Bartman did on KMOX Monday afternoon.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, there is a stirring at the grass roots. (One sign is Mel Carnahan's conversion statement.) Nationally renowned OBE opponent Peg Luksik and I spoke four times between last Thursday and Monday evening. There is a reason that 350 people showed up last Thursday evening at Marquette School in the Rockwood district of St. Louis County, despite the fact that they had to miss the Rams football game to be there. Or the fact that 85 ordinary folks came indoors on a spectacularly beautiful Sunday afternoon in Columbia, or the 150 or so who attended Monday evening in the much smaller city of Farmington. These Missourians are awakening, believing their schools are being hijacked by a bunch of Big Ed elites. They're right.

In Sunday's edition: Excerpts of 1992 state board of education documents forthrightly stating plans to remake all Missouri schools on an OBE model by the year 2000.

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