KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WELCOME TO BRAVE NEW EDUCATION

"Group" or "cooperative learning" replaces individual standards of achievement. Students allowed to take tests again and again and again, until the slowest student masters the lesson. Bright students teaching slower students, as the teacher is transformed from an authority figure into a "facilitator." Parents head for their children's schools wanting to see textbooks for each class only to be told that none exist. It seems the teachers write their materials as they are teaching each semester. Other parents start to receive from their children's schools a "report card" they can't read, from which measurable achievement standards have been eradicated. Heading back to school to see evaluations, they are told traditional report cards are being replaced by something called a "portfolio." In the portfolio is a collection of essays the student has written, mostly about his or her "feelings" about this, that and the other. When the parent notices, with alarm, that the child's work is full of uncorrected misspellings, the teacher states that correct spelling is no longer insisted upon in the Brave New World of educational "reform."

Welcome to Gov. Mel Carnahan's "reform" of education as it is being ushered in pursuant to his proudest achievement, Senate Bill 380.

Fanciful? Hardly. Each of the above is a documented instance of educational "reform" occurring today in our state or in another state that has implemented a variety of Outcome Based Education. Still, bad as these are, the above stories pale when compared to the stories of invasion of family privacy occurring as part of the new educational "reforms."

Wherever OBE has been imposed, parents across America have protested what they see as serious invasions of privacy into what were previously thought to be exclusively family concerns. One such parent who has experienced this intrusion first-hand is Jane Bevans. Mrs. Bevans, a Sikeston native, is a working mother of three whose children attend Hallsville public schools in Boone County. Make that used to attend Hallsville public schools. After a couple of years under the new OBE regime, she pulled her children out and enrolled them, at great expense, in private, Christian schools.

"I don't think a lot of parents are aware of the extent of the invasion of privacy OBE involves," Bevans told me. "The first year my son Jeremy was under OBE, he was assigned a writing project. It involved a packet of worksheets on cooperation that at first looked rather innocent. As you leafed through it, you find that children are asked to rank family members according to their preference for each. I'm not kidding."

Bevans said the assignment also required the children to discuss the family budget. "They were told to list the family budget on entertainment and how it breaks down between children and adults. I was shocked and would never have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself."

Another worksheet "directed the children to discuss interpersonal problems within the family." She says she told her children not to comply with the assignment. "My children would flat refuse on privacy grounds," Bevans said. "The teacher would call me and I would say, 'That's right, we're not going to have our privacy invaded.' I think I got a bad reputation with the teachers at that school."

Bevans said she is concerned with what she calls "subtle messages" OBE sends to school children. "There are a lot of subtle messages in OBE that give children an inflated idea of their own decision-making abilities and that, at the same time, run down parental authority," Bevans said. "Most children are just in awe of the teacher, and when they get the teacher's assignment, they're not going to question. They're not even aware they can refuse."

After finally deciding to remove her children from the public schools, she and her husband enrolled them in a private school whose tuition amounts to a "serious drain on the family budget," according to Bevans. "My children won't get a second chance at education," she says. "We felt we had no choice." This is how we help the public schools?

To ask the sort of questions I have been asking, to demand answers, to look beyond cliches, to call for public debates, is now to risk being called an enemy of public education. As I have stated before, it is the people in the education establishment, personified by Dr. Bob Bartman at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, who avoid debate and dodge straight answers. For taxpaying Missourians, these folks have one message: "Send us your kids. Send us more money. And keep quiet."

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