ST. LOUIS SUPERINTENDENT BARS THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOORS THESE DAYS

Venture the bold opinion that Missouri is home to maybe the two worst urban school systems in America and, these days, you get fewer and fewer disagreements. Both the St. Louis and Kansas City school districts have been put on notice that they are about to have their state accreditation yanked. In St. Louis, that drastic but necessary step has been deferred two years by last year's desegregation case settlement. This is in itself an outrage of historic proportions, but that's a column for another day.

The colossal scale of failure is symbolized by two school districts with expenditures in the range of $10,000 and more per student to go along with 60 percent dropout rates for entering freshmen by the time they should graduate four years later from these inner-city high schools. After generations of viewing our two urban school systems as a patronage operation to be padded at maximum hiring levels, these city schools have scandalously high levels of bloated bureaucracy. Visiting with a salesman at a St. Louis auto dealer last fall, a colleague of mine heard that the guy had formerly been in the textbook sales business. "When you tried to sell to the city schools," he told my friend, "there were 114 people you had to take to lunch ... ."

Meanwhile, the battle continues as to how to give poor, mostly minority parents more choices in how their children might escape the desperately failing schools in which government has trapped them. In the early 1960s, Americans watched with steadily increasing horror as segregationist southern governors stood in schoolhouse doors to bar little black children from entering. Today those obstructionist southern governors have their imitators. Today, standing in the schoolhouse door, four-square to prevent their escape from his government-school plantation, is the superintendent of St. Louis schools, the estimable Dr. Cleveland Hammonds, and his imitators.

In 1998, we in the General Assembly passed a charter-school law applying only to St. Louis and Kansas City. Parents, teachers, neighborhood groups and other civic-minded citizens could band together to apply to a college or university for a charter to open a school. Their ambition: to operate a public school that would carve out a niche in what might someday become a flourishing urban educational marketplace.

Every step of the way, these heroic pioneers have had to fight tooth and nail against these masters of the urban educational wasteland. So determined is Hammonds to strangle this baby in its cradle that he took the money we appropriated him and used it to file a bogus lawsuit (since dismissed) against the very charter law that got him his operating funds. Chutzpah, anyone?

Then, last Thursday, this newspaper carried a startling headline: "Charter school welcomed in St. Louis" by officials of the St. Louis public schools. Why, then, the turnabout? In an answer that will live in infamy, Hammonds told us: "We wouldn't be losing revenue because they would be reclaiming students that either have dropped out or are close to dropping out."

There you have it. For Hammonds and his ilk, it's all about money. Money, money for the system, the system, always the system. Coming soon is the day when Dr. Hammonds will be confronted and defeated, perhaps even his feelings hurt, and parents opened up to all the marvelous choices an educational marketplace can offer.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.