LET'S START MISSOURI SCHOOL REFORM NOW

Missouri's new "Outstanding Schools Act" is often given another modifier by the state's political and educational leaders. The word that invariably accompanies the education funding law enacted in this year's earlier session of the General Assembly is "reform."

Reform carries a connotation of something needed, something innovative, something creative. While Missouri has long neglected its responsibility toward adequate funding of our state's 538 school districts, that need has existed for at least two decades and even longer. So, in this sense, the new school law meets the criteria of reform as far as the state's need for public education funding is concerned.

It would be difficult, however, to categorize S.B. 380 as either innovative or creative. While the non-fiscal provisions of the new law do call for some needed changes such as public measurement reports on student achievement (or lack of it), this practice has been in effect in numerous other states for quite some time. The requirement that districts provide better guidance and training for teachers is also not a new concept; numerous other states have long ago implemented this change. Much of the law, while directly under the supervision of elected legislators, was written to acceptable standards suggested by technical experts, some of them from outside Missouri's borders. There is nothing wrong with this process. Indeed, we commend lawmakers for not attempting the job on their own but securing technical assistance from those whose job it is to study education and its multitude of scholastic ramifications. This is, after all, not a subject one picks up from a brief newspaper or magazine article but rather one that evolves from long years of training and experience.

S.B. 380 isn't reform in either the literal or the technical sense of the word. If the state would be so emboldened as to seek real reform, it would begin with a premise beyond the need to correct the growing bankruptcy of an increasing number of its school districts and the mandatory requirement for additional funding from a circuit court order.

Real reform of public education in Missouri would start with a change in the structuring of elementary and secondary schools. The founding fathers, Jefferson in particular, believed that education was a key to progress, that one could appeal to the rational faculties and create a better world through social improvement. Our lower test scores reflect the now greatly diminished hopefulness of America. That dying ember of the American dream holds that tomorrow will be better than today and that the pathway to this progress is through education.

A great many of us no longer remain convinced that our children will be able to progress beyond the point we have reached. Indeed, there are enough serious problems facing our country to refute improved lives for future generations. We are unable to control environments around us and far distant; many of us can no longer feel safe in our homes, and this is particularly true in economically poor neighborhoods in our urban areas and rapidly becoming true in an ever widening circle.

Our governments, faced with ever increasing constituent demands, never have sufficient revenue to solve problems creating a decline in our quality of life. And our elected leaders at the highest level cannot find the will to balance budgets whose deficits are then added on the backs of the next generations.

No wonder teachers are experiencing so much difficulty in commanding the attention of their young charges, and why so many students see no value in improving their minds or preparing for their futures. It is frightening to contemplate the large number of black children in America who go to school with the notion that they have only a few years to live, given the high rates of homicide and mayhem in their neighborhoods. The fact that they study at all is remarkable.

When the founding fathers envisioned a universal educational system, one which incidentally was not realized until after World War II, they did not necessarily see the system we now have, which leading experts will freely admit is more jerry-built than methodically arranged. Thomas Jefferson did not proscribe the present school organization, which in America has changed little since the 19th century. Curriculums are now so broad that it takes a juvenile genius to take them all in. The first act of reform should be simplification of what students have to learn, while adding to the quality of learning. Schools must begin to concentrate on a few very basic subjects: a command of language, reading and writing, mathematical reasoning. Science and mathematics, as opposed to the humanities, should be at the center of our curriculums from the beginning. Because so much politicizing has taken place in so many subjects, science is the last common ground we have. And interest in this subject must occur at an early age, not by the time a student is in college.

Today's high school in America is probably not fixable for a number of reasons. Designed over a century ago, it remains an anachronism in most educational systems in other highly industrialized nations, most certainly in Japan, Great Britain and Germany. Today's American child should have five or six years of elementary education and then progress to a middle school, remaining there until about the junior year, whereupon the student would enter a two-year community college system, which works quite well in modern America even if one of its greatest tasks is to supplement what the student should have learned in four years of high school. We must also upgrade our teaching profession, giving it both the economic and social status it once held.

Few of our state or national political leaders have awakened to the need for real, valid educational reform. If a governor is elected merely to preside over the sanctity of existing tax rates or chosen to bring about "change," whatever generic meaning that has, then that state is as far from needed reform as it was at the turn of the last century. We don't even see our new president, whose entire campaign was about change, taking steps to initiate school reform. But unless education is at the center of our future, all else is merely superfluous and, worse, meaningless to those who will live there.