In response to a scathing St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page indictment of her recent shennanigans – holding preschool funding hostage in order to get back at Kathy Thornberg, a functionary of the Dept. of Elementary and Secondary education who dared defy her – state Senator Jane Cunningham shows us her very thin-skin, while ratcheting up her usual level of self-righteous dudgeon. In a letter to the editor (“Saying no to cookie-cutter ratings”, 4/29), she wants us to know the editorial is wrong about her relationship with conservative education reform guru, and former chancellor of the Washington D.C. School district Michelle Rhee; in fact, she claims, “contrary to what the editorial said, I have met Michelle Rhee on several occasions.” Whoopdy-do.

In her letter Cunningham also disavows any but the most noble motives for attacking Thornberg for her efforts to institute the Quality Ratings System (QRS). According to most authorities, the QRS process consists of developing appropriate, local standards which are then used to monitor preschools’ performance. The ratings that the process yields can be used to help preschools improve their performance and to inform parents about how well schools are performing. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Cunningham, however, claims to be honoring the objections to QRS voiced by “public and nonpublic preschool directors and public school superintendents.” Elsewhere, though, she has indicated that the folks who were objecting most strenuously were mostly from the “non-public … religious or secular” segment of preschool providers. So, what’s the real story? You’re guess is as good as mine and I bet it stays that way.

Cunningham’s major criticism of the DESE version of QRS seems to be that it’s a “cookie-cutter” system that  imposes “one-size-fits-all” evaluative measurements on preschools. Ummm….what am I missing? For fairness sake if nothing else, meaningful evaluative standards need to be uniform. And if they aren’t, of course, they don’t really tell us much. Maybe that’s what some of those folks in the less-regulated “non-public” sphere actually want? Else why object so strenuously to standards that have never actually been tried out here in Missouri in a consistent, across-the-board fashion?

Cunningham’s cookie-cutter argument seems flimsy at best, especially when you remember that she’s one of the people in the legislature fighting hardest to impose teacher evaluations that draw strongly on the standardized test performance of a diverse student population. And she wants to talk about “cookie-cutter” and “one-size-fits-all” evaluative systems?

I’m guessing that the real issue depends on whether the cookie-cutter in question comes from Cunningham’s personal drawer. I don’t know about you, but personally, I prefer my education-flavored cookies to come from the stoves of trained educational professionals, not some pol drunk on Tea Party brew.

Cunningham also writes that:

There have been proposals from legislators to allow for competing rating services, much like there are a variety of national and regionally recognized accreditation companies or testing services from which schools choose. All provide valid information and quality control without subjecting pre-schools to the dictates of one individual whom they may not trust and who doesn’t not value the marketplace, which allows quality choices for families.

Gee, what I want when I go shopping for a pre-school is a bunch of diverse ratings that, for all I know measure apples and oranges. Of course, there’s really no danger of such a evaluative tower of babel since, as Cunningham herself has acknowledged in an article in the St. Louis Beacon last October, the legislature can’t get it together to actually do anything:

Cunningham said that for several years, efforts to enact a rating system for preschools in Missouri were debated in both the House and Senate, but the two chambers could never agree on what such a system should include. In the last two years, she said, the issue gained no traction at all.

Do you think maybe the DESE was just trying to impose some best practices in order to fill up the legislative vacuum? It seems, though, that Cunningham prefers to let Missourians founder in the desert while a bunch of ideologues fight about how to micromanage the details of processes that few of them seem to actually understand in the first place.  

Cunningham also, in a nod to to the de rigueur GOP anti-government rhetoric, writes that QRS would impose onerous “resource-draining, duplicative forms and certifications and rules” on pre-school staff. It may be news to Cunningham, but thorough documentation is essential if the evaluative process is to produce results that have any meaning. It’s particularly essential when funding depends on rankings – along with consistent, uniform standards. Everything, in fact, that the DESE was trying to put in place.

One is forced to conclude that Cunningham and her allies really don’t want information about how various pre-schools compare to get out. She actually stated in an interview in the St. Louis Beacon that

If they [i.e., preschools] don’t submit to her [i.e. DESE employee Kathy Thornberg] one-size-fits-all plan,” Cunningham said, “then when money or whatever vouchers become available to give to income-eligible families to choose a preschool, they won’t have a choice. It dramatically reduces the choices for low-income people.

What I want to know is how making sure that parents don’t have reliable, consistently derived information about how schools compare does so much for choice?

* Very slightly edited for clarity.

Today, thanks to a front-page story in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I learned that State Senator Jane Cunningham, in a fit of spite, is willing to gut a program that affects 4000 preschool children. She wants to yank $11.8 million from the Missouri Preschool Project because she thinks that Kathy Thornberg of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (with the backing, incidentally, of the Commissioner of Education and the State Board of Education) has “defied” the legislature and, more to the point I suspect, the rampageous Senator Cunningham herself.

What did Thornberg do to fan Cunningham’s fury? She applied for federal preschool funding that would require the use of a Quality Rating System, or QRS, which the doctrinaire Ms. Cunningham claims is tantamount to “‘social engineering’ on children,” and would force “a ‘Kathy Thornburg one-size-fits-all’ mentality on child-rearing in Missouri.”

According to Cunningham, by applying for a federal Early Learning Challenge grant, “the state Board of Education has slapped us across the face, and we have nowhere else to go but the money.” Don’t you just feel the heat from her white-hot ego? Don’t dare defy crazy Queen Jane or it’ll be to hell with the kids. And all because a federal grant requires evaluative criteria based on what more impartial observers describe as “documented best-practice standards.”

Cunningham, of course, is all for evaluating performance when the criteria reflects her own personal prejudices. Witness the teacher evaluation mandates in her anti-tenure legislative efforts if you want to talk about imposing external, one-size-fits-all criteria. Take, for instance, this year’s effort to punish teachers and hobble teacher unions, SB806:

The bill also includes numerous mandates regarding teacher evaluation systems, such as requiring at least fifty percent of evaluations to be based on student test scores and prohibiting districts and employees from designing evaluation systems within collective bargaining negotiations.  The also repeals the minimum salary law for all teachers.

So standards are okay when they’re used to enforce Cunningham’s prejudices, but professionally developed educational benchmarks are a problem?

Do you maybe think somebody has a few control issues? Maybe little Janey needs to take a time out until she learns to play well with others.

Fortunately for us all, that’s just what’s going to happen. Cunningham has been redistricted out of office and will be gone after November (although I’m sure she’ll do whatever she can to regain some kind of fiefdom, elective or otherwise, from which she can meddle in Missourians’ lives). It does, however, seem like  even some fellow GOPers in the Senate might be getting tired of her high-handed approach:

Springfield Senator Bob Dixon strongly criticized Cunningham for running the bill [SB806] through her own general laws committee instead of it going to the education committee … “To try to bypass a committee that deals specifically with educations when we’re talking about an education bill … I just think that is … not unlike the substance that is referenced in the book of Nehemiah that was placed in a special part of the city after it is expelled from the back end of a camel,” he said.