NO NEED FOR RACIAL GRADING

The Missouri School Board is an unelected body, appointed by the governor and confirmed to eight-year terms by the Senate. As such, its deliberations don't often attract a great deal of notice. This has changed as Missourians have begun to awaken to the fact that this board has hired a commissioner, Dr. Bob Bartman, who brazenly and intentionally misleads the taxpayers for whom he supposedly works as to the true nature of the school "reform" process.

The school board now makes news for having voted to begin measuring student test scores by racial groupings. No valid reasons were advanced for doing this. Protests were raised, principally by Sen. Steve Ehlmann, R-St. Charles. Sen. Ehlmann properly objects that this noxious practice is more reminiscent of the late, unlamented apartheid regime of South Africa. There, detailed records were kept of all things racial, as the racial-balance police snooped into every nook and cranny of South African life.

Although the state board says it has scrapped the practice, Bartman is known to be pushing for it, and at least one board member still presses for reporting test scores by racial group.

If South Africa can move beyond this sinister practice, then surely Missouri can as well. Plans to measure student test scores by racial groupings should be dumped on the same ash-heap on which the Afrikaner regime now rests.