compiled a profile of offenders that revealed a high correlation
between criminal acts and learning disability. Other agencies
weighed in with what they hoped would be persuasive data. Yet some
administrators of traditional education programs needed a nudge;
they saw parent education as a potential rival for resources under
the state's formula for distributing education funds.
THE BILL
PASSES HANDILY
While the
campaign for the legislation gathered strength, the campaign
against it was weakening, in part because of the opposition's
stridency. Moreover, the country's apathy toward nationwide
educational needs had been jolted by disclosures of A Nation at
Risk, the report commissioned by Secretary of Education Terrell
Bell as he left office.
Bonnie Hausman,
a senior policy analyst with the Harvard Family Research Project,
has observed that S.B. 658 was one of those rare measures in which
substantive policies and political expediency meshed. "For
example," Hausman wrote in Educational Horizons
(Fall/Winter, 1989), "the decisions to make the program universal
rather than targeted, voluntary rather than mandatory, and to limit
its scope (no district obligation beyond the level of state
reimbursement) were all justified on substantive grounds, but
imperative on political grounds."
The PAT
leadership coalition unanimously supported a program that would be
open to all parents. Winter told Bonnie Hausman that targeted
programs create stigma and cut participation rates.
We can't say
that only the poor need it; parents with two Ph.D.s can be basket
cases when it comes to parenting. And when middle-class families
participate it attracts the at-risk families because it is not seen
as a program for losers.
Ironically,
rural resentment of Missouri's largest cities led to a requirement
that all school districts offer parent-child education. Rural
Missouri legislators chafe when funds are channeled to remedy
social