America’s Most Costly Educational Failure, by PAUL CIOTTI
The CATO Institute, April 29, 1998
The education establishment thinks the cure for what ails America’s public schools is more money. But spending a fortune is no guarantee of better schools. It certainly didn’t help a poorly performing school district in the heart of Kansas City, Missouri.
School reformers rejoiced when Federal District Judge Russell Clark took control of the district in ’85. He ruled it was unconstitutionally segregated, with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly.
To bring the district into compliance. the judge ordered it and the state over the next 12 years to spend nearly $2 billion to build more schools, renovate old ones, integrate classrooms and bring student test scores up to national norms.
But when the judge finally took himself off the case last year, there was little to show academically for all that money. Although the district’s 37,000 mostly minority students enjoyed some of the best‐funded school facilities in the country, student performance hadn’t improved...
For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three‐grade‐level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down.
To pay for all the changes. improvements, programs and new schools, he unilaterally increased property taxes 150%, imposed a 1.5% income tax surcharge and, when that wasn’t enough, ordered the state of Missouri to make up for the shortfall...
For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three‐grade‐level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down.
Why? One reason was that Judge Clark was unwilling to challenge the educational status quo in Kansas City. After many decades of slow decline, the distinct was burdened with many incompetent teachers. The quickest way to raise achievement would have been simply to fire the bad teachers and replace them with good ones...
In time, the central administration grew so large — three to five times the size of the bureaucracy of comparable school districts — that it consumed over half the district’s entire education budget.
-----------
For years I have read abut this failed experiment in teaching poor blacks. This article provides details. Nevertheless, Paul Ciotti shows his ideological bias when he suggests that better teachers, fewer administrators, and more competition between teachers and administrators would solve the problem, and bring poor ghetto black children up to middle class white standards.
I do not think anything can, and I know that nothing has up to now. There is no conspiracy to keep the illegitimate children of the black underclass from performing well in school. They do not perform well because they cannot perform well. Good teachers should not be wasted on bad students. Good teachers should teach upper middle class kids with high IQ's who are trying to get into the colleges of their choices.
If anything could help slum black public schools it would be more discipline, enforced by corporal punishment, and plenty of expulsions. Students that violently resist being educated and that violently interfere with the education of those who are trying to learned should be thrown out of school and kept out. By the time a juvenile delinquent is flushed down the toilet of the school to prison pipeline for decades of hard labor, enforced by the whip, his backside should be covered with scars and scabs.
Comments
Post a Comment