KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WORK BEGINS ON REFORM ASSESSMENTS

As state school board members continue remorselessly down a road mapped out for them by the thousand-dollar-a-day consultants who've ruined education in so many other states, a potentially explosive scenario is unfolding in another corner of Big Education's empire. Senate Bill 380 called for academic performance standards that have been the subject of guerrilla warfare these last three years. More than 18 months behind schedule, the lord and master of public education in Missouri, Dr. Bob Bartman, now has those in place. Now it's time to turn attention to the assessments.

Assessments are the new buzzword used by the educrats to describe what most of us would have called "testing." They are prong three of SB 380's "reforms." At a meeting in Jefferson City a year ago, Bartman brought in a half-dozen consultants who are supposedly "experts," we were told, in "the enormously complex area of assessments." By the way, all this complexity brings to mind the observation of the great neo-conservative writer and critic Irving Kristol: "Simplicity is the deadliest enemy of the educational establishment." These folks who've captured the commanding ground over our schools have to make everything as complex as possible, the better to shut the rest of us out of the discussion and maintain the seal on their own echo chamber.

Inside these echo chambers, serious work on the assessments has begun. As usual, the vast majority of parents and taxpayers are entirely shut out. A couple of weeks ago, more than a hundred teachers met in Jefferson City with fewer than half a dozen brave parents who somehow managed to get in to a meeting orchestrated by Dr. Orlo Shroyer, Bartman's deputy at the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. To ensure that the echo chamber would remain completely sealed, participants were required to sign a confidentiality pledge agreeing not to discuss the test and to neither copy nor take materials out of the room. This, then, is the working group on assessments -- the mathematics assessment, to be exact.

Promise not to tell anyone, and I'll let you in on a little secret: I have a mole inside. Actually, I have more than one -- a mix of parents and teachers. You might be interested in their report.

As we have seen so often during this process, during this meeting a sharp divide opened up between the overwhelming majority of teachers present and those few parents who managed to get inside. Specifically, first, all but a handful of teachers present insisted that children be given calculators to work the test. Every parent and a courageous teacher or two were opposed. Their arguments were dismissed out of hand. Second, two of my correspondents report, eighth graders will be given a "reference sheet" for use throughout the test with formulae and conversions (English to metric) on it.

My teacher correspondent writes: "I stated that I didn't think we needed those on the reference sheet. The parent in our group agreed, ... stating that by the eighth grade students should know these conversions. She was told by the other teachers that we were not requiring students to memorize facts any more and that we primarily wanted them to know how to find them in a reference book or reference sheet in this case. ..."

"As the group was discussing scoring I asked the DESE staff member ... what states had already adopted a similar method of education/assessment. He didn't know. I then asked him what the testing data from those states were showing and he said there was no data. Then, I said, we are going into this system with no data showing that this method of education works. He said I was right. ..."

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