Dear Editor:
For many years, I worked professionally in the Curriculum Section of DESE (the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education). In that position, I had many opportunities to meet with my counterparts from other states, which led me to appreciate how blessed we are to have a State Board of Education that is more independent from politics than is the case in other states where chief state school officers are elected or chosen by governors.
In those other states, education policy is often jerked around by politics, where changes in education leadership take place frequently, often following the election of new governors or chief education officers whose political ambitions often exceed their interest in and devotion to public education.
Under Missouri's Constitution, we have an independent state board of education where board members deliberate on education policy using informative reports from the commissioner of education, DESE staff, and other sources. The state board also has the responsibility to select commissioners and replace any commissioner who proves to be incompetent or unresponsive to their direction.
As a result, Missouri has had considerable continuity in its state education leadership, which allows DESE staff and local school districts to plan rationally for how to implement state policy in ways to best meet the needs of students.
Our new governor, however, aims to subvert our Missouri system by appointing new board members with the expectation that those members will rubber stamp his goal of firing the current commissioner of education and replacing her with a man of his choice.
The governor wants a commissioner who shares his panacea for school improvement: Shift money from local school-board-run public schools into charter schools.
In fact, our state not only has some charter schools, but it also has data, which shows that charter schools are no "silver bullet" for reforming public education. To be sure, some charter schools have outperformed their nearby public schools, but not at all consistently. Some were even forced to close.
Shouldn't new state board members first gain experience as independent board members before carrying out directives from our governor? Shouldn't they get into the nitty gritty of doing their jobs before deciding whether the current commissioner of education needs to be fired? In the process, they will probably discover the wisdom of having a State Board of Education that is more deliberative and removed from politics than our governor seems to want.
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