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Firing people was politically impossible.Ī school district less rife with racial politics would have had a permanent administrator with the vision and ability to do something about the problem. “Race is the first and foremost consideration in almost anything to do with the district,” said former school board president Sue Fulson. During Kansas City’s long slow decline, the district accumulated a lot of less-than-adequate teachers and a badly bloated bureaucracy.
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Unfortunately, in the one area where hardheaded determination might actually have made a difference in the lives of the students-quality of instruction-Clark had deferred to professional educators, who had created the problem in the first place. Nixon charged that 44% of the entire state budget for elementary and secondary education was going to just the 9% of the state’s students who lived in Kansas City and St. The district spent $40,000 for a display case for a high school that had no trophies.
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Jay Nixon, the district couldn’t account for 23,000 items, including TV sets, CD players, bookcases, office furniture and (temporarily) a baby grand piano. Missouri taxpayers were appalled and angry. Among the amenities in the new magnet schools were an Olympic-size swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, a robotics lab, professional quality recording, television and animation studios, theaters, a planetarium, arboretum, zoo, a mock court with a judge’s chamber and jury deliberation room and a model United Nations with simultaneous language translation. Under Clark’s desegregation plan, the district didn’t just tear down decaying old schools and replace them with new shells.
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“They had as much money as any school district will ever get,” says Harvard sociologist Gary Orfield, who directed a study of the district. This is because in 1985, Clark took over the Kansas City public schools, unilaterally doubling property taxes and seizing part of the state treasury, all in the name of “integrating the system” and “build a quality education program.” To attract white suburban students to the district, Clark invited the district planners to go out and “dream"-build, buy, order, train, whatever they needed to reverse the downward trend of Kansas City’s inner-city schools.īut despite spending $1.6 billion in 10 years, the Kansas City Municipal School District has a greater percentage of minority students (77%) than before the plan started the black-white test score gap hasn’t changed at all and dropout rates are more than 55% and rising. District Court in Missouri, has been called “King George” and the “poster child of the imperial judiciary” by his critics. Judge Russell Clark, senior judge of the U.S. As the nation’s governors gather in New York for yet another education summit today, a tragic tale from Kansas City, Mo., should remind them that spending more money may be the wrong approach to improving our nation’s schools.