Kansas City Harbinger For FWCS
Posted by Jeff Pruitt - 3/13/10 @ 6:21 pm - Filed Under Featured, Local Politics
The Kansas City School Board voted to close 29 of it’s 61 schools because after years of dropping enrollment several of them are only half full. Many people are outraged of course but the truth is there is no money to keep them operating - these closings should’ve been done years ago as enrollment began to shrink.
Facing potential bankruptcy, the board that governs the once flush-with-cash Kansas City school district is taking the unusual and contentious step of shuttering almost half its schools.
Administrators say the closures are necessary to keep the district from plowing through what little is left of the $2 billion it received as part of a groundbreaking desegregation case.
The Kansas City school board narrowly approved the plan to close 29 out of 61 schools Wednesday night at a meeting packed with angry parents. The schools will close before the fall.
The article briefly mentions the $2 billion worth of funding for desegregation but what it fails to mention is what a dismal failure that was. Taxpayers were forced to pony up unprecedented amounts of money and years later they had absolutely nothing to show for it - dismal test scores remained and the acheivement gap between white and black students remained.
This is the same sort thinking that the FWCS administration uses to justify its racial balance fund and the failed building plan. None of it works but it won’t stop them from pretending that schools (and more specifically teachers) should be able to solve all of society’s problems and inequities. Here’s the executive summary from a report on the failed Kansas City desegregation experiment:
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can’t be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
H/T: Mish
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I will continue to bang the drum: parents, parents, parents.
Another fiasco. Looks like the acticle on the Kansas City schools published by the Cato Institute.
God invented public urban school systems to prove the existence of parallel unviverses separated only by time delays. Gary, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and now Fort Wayne. The scenario is always the same- flight to the suburbs followed by declining academic achievement, accelerated flight to the suburbs, then a lawsuit (think Ian Roland) followed by an integration program (think busing for “racial balance” and magnet schools) followed by building upgrades to (think buildings like Aboite) they think will keep the middle class from leaving. And let’s not forget unionized teachers and incompetence, denial and hypocrisy from the administrations and boards.
As the Cato article concludes, middle class parents only want to know that their children are getting the education they need to succeed in the future economy. If urban public systems can’t deliver that, and right now they can’t, they will continue to become irrelevant.