High Cost for Low Grades

The schools here were segregated. The education, lousy. Fix it, a judge decreed. Then he all but handed out blank checks to spur spending on education.

Fifteen years and $2 billion later, Kansas City’s urban schools are packed with extraordinary goodies. At Central High School alone, there are 900 top-of-the-line computers, an Olympic-sized swimming pool with six diving boards, a padded wrestling room, a classical Greek theater, an eight-lane indoor track and a gymnastic center stocked with professional equipment.

But the frills cannot hide a depressing truth: It is doing such a dismal job that last year Kansas City became the first big-city school district ever to lose its accreditation. Its schools flunked every one of Missouri’s 11 academic performance standards. The school board is hiring its 20th superintendent in 30 years. And the state is threatening to take over the district.

In a nation increasingly alarmed by the condition of its schools, the Kansas City district has become the latest icon of failure.

And it reached that nadir despite a court-ordered spending spree the likes of which no urban district had ever seen. The sky’s-the-limit buying blitz, paid for mostly by state taxpayers, loaded its schools with luxuries ranging from a planetarium to a recording studio to a 100-acre farm, from philosophy teachers for seventh-graders to a world-class Russian fencing coach who took his high school athletes to matches in Europe and Africa.

“Kansas City is a very, very sad story,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard University sociologist who has studied the district for years. “They really can’t show much of anything, though they spent $2 billion.”

To Orfield, the lesson from Kansas City is clear: Money can’t buy good schools. Not, at least, in shattered urban districts where poverty leaves many children ill-equipped to learn.

When students come to class hungry, exhausted or afraid, when they bounce from school to school as their families face eviction, when they have no one at home to wake them up for the bus, much less look over their homework, not even the snazziest facilities, the strongest curricula and the best-paid teachers can ensure success, he argues.

“Basically, we have a huge social crisis, and schools really can’t solve it by themselves,” Orfield said.

Other analysts contend that money can make all the difference--provided it is spent wisely. They pin Kansas City’s failure on a decision to focus on new buildings and razzle-dazzle magnet programs rather than on basic educational reform such as developing a core curriculum and training teachers in the latest techniques for engaging students.

High school senior Sheena Williams, 19, complains that there’s precious little being taught, no matter how fancy the classroom. “Let me tell you something: Not all my teachers teach,” she said. “In some classes, we watch movies every day. We watched ‘Dr. Doolittle’ in economics, and economics don’t have nothing to do with a man talking to animals.”

The failure in Kansas City is striking for the huge sums of money spent, and it informs the national debate as lawmakers in state after state wrestle with how to save urban districts in crisis. In Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and elsewhere, failing districts have lost their autonomy to state or mayoral takeovers. In the Detroit area, nearly 350 schools are at risk of losing their accreditation because too many of their students flunked state exams. Los Angeles Unified is in the midst of a wrenching reform after two decades of decline during which its students fell to the bottom quarter on national tests.

Even if they are convinced that better funding is the answer, legislators may look at the saga of Kansas City and conclude that money is too easily wasted, said Mary Fulton, a policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan group that reviews school reform issues for legislators.

“It’s very frustrating for lawmakers who have seen dollars go down the drain,” Fulton said.

But Kansas City’s newest superintendent, Bernard Taylor, rejects the portrait of his district as a black hole--or a failure.

“These schools do work,” he insisted, adding that “their efforts may not be reflected in test scores.”

That’s why this spring’s round of state exams is critical. If the students do poorly, the state has threatened to dissolve or take over the district at the end of next school year--and several lawmakers want to speed up that timetable. Students prepared for the tests for months, cramming in their classrooms and attending weekly Saturday prep sessions. If they do well, the district could regain provisional accreditation.

Bracing for Disappointment

Tension is high as administrators and principals await the exam results, due out in early fall. And Taylor is already trying to prepare state overseers for less-than-stellar results, saying he hopes the district will “get credit” for improvements, even if the scores fall way short of the state average. “We’re making gains,” he said. “They may not be large enough gains to get us more points toward accreditation, but they’re gains all the same.”

The district’s 30,000 students have mighty far to go. Only 16% of elementary school pupils read at their grade level. Among high school students, just 2.5% scored in the top two levels on last year’s state math exam. Barely 1% hit the top levels in science. The best showing was in communication arts, but even then, only 9% of high school students scored in the top two levels.

The district’s graduation rate is just 59%, compared with a state average of 79%.

Kansas City’s woes date to the years immediately following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting school segregation.

Though meaningful integration was successfully resisted for years to come in Kansas City, the fear of it contributed to white flight from city schools. Voters stopped supporting the district’s frequent requests for tax increases, and the schools literally crumbled for lack of care. Micky Seever, a former high school teacher, recalls picking up erasers and seeing cockroaches skitter away. The stench of urine was so strong that no disinfectant could remove it. And security was so lax that pimps would occasionally strut into a classroom to drag a girl from class.

In 1977, attorney Arthur A. Benson II filed a lawsuit on behalf of Kansas City students, alleging that the state had sanctioned a segregated--and inferior--education for urban minorities. After a decade of delays and intermediate rulings, Benson won. Federal Judge Russell Clark held the state and the Kansas City school district jointly liable for the poor education of African American kids.

Attempt to Lure White Students

Under a 1987 court order to desegregate, the district chose a novel approach. Although most urban districts seek to desegregate by busing black students into suburban schools, Kansas City set about trying to woo white students to their district by building dazzling facilities. With the state forced, by court order, to pick up 75% of the tab, the district in the late 1980s and early ‘90s embarked on its madcap spending.

It built 15 new schools, including the $32-million Central High. Then it equipped dozens of magnet schools with academic, athletic and arts programs that would be the envy of any suburban district, and of a good many colleges. The magnet programs got not only equipment but also human resources.

One elementary school offered (and still does) private Suzuki violin lessons for every student. One middle school hired 10 “resource teachers” to develop projects in specialty subjects such as archeology, geography and philosophy. There was a Montessori kindergarten and a first-grade Spanish immersion program. There were raises for some teachers, reduced workloads for others.

And none of it worked.

The $2-billion experiment didn’t achieve the stated goal of integrating city schools. Several hundred white suburban students did transfer in the early 1990s, but many later left. The district today is as segregated as it has ever been, with 72% of its students African American and 8% Latino.

Test scores, meanwhile, remained largely stagnant. And there was no narrowing of the gap that found African American students scoring far below whites.

Expressing frustration at the lack of academic progress but ruling that the district’s resources were up to par, Judge Clark dismantled the desegregation order in 1997, releasing the state from its financial responsibility. To that point, the state had poured at least $1.5 billion into the Kansas City district--at the expense of other schools across Missouri. (The rest of the funds came from a local tax hike that Clark ordered the school board to approve.)

When the state money dried up, the district stopped busing in suburban students and dropped many of its magnet programs, which had not helped much in raising test scores and were costly to run.

The new approach: Back to the basics.

Scrapping Antiquated Style of Teaching

Setting aside many of the exotic extras (the planetarium is shuttered, the farm is for sale, a model United Nations has been converted into a computer lab), the district has been focusing on developing a core curriculum and training teachers to abandon the stiff, old-fashioned style of lecturing at the blackboard in favor of a looser approach to education that lets students take the lead with hands-on projects.

District leaders acknowledge that reform has not swept into every classroom. “It’s a little scary, when you’re used to using a teacher’s manual, to just throw it out the window,” district administrator Deborah Kelly said. Still, she and others insist that change is coming.

They point, as an example, to McCoy Elementary, which has revamped its curriculum with an all-out focus on literacy. Every hallway is decorated with student reports and must-read book lists. In every classroom, teachers fill flip charts by the dozen with students’ thoughts on vocabulary and favorite authors. There are beanbag chairs and bookcases at every turn; students have at least half an hour a day to find a comfy spot and just read. The approach seems to be working: The school’s scores, though not yet up to the state average, are significantly better than those of the district as a whole.

Taylor, the incoming superintendent, sees McCoy Elementary as a model for the district.

Kansas City schools may never be truly integrated. But Taylor insists that they will achieve the second goal they set out to capture two decades ago: academic success.

“Just because most students are going to school with people who look like them, does that mean they’re going to receive an inferior education?” he asked, then answered his own question: “No.”

“Reading is still reading, math is still math and good instruction is still good instruction,” Taylor said. “If you’re delivering that, you’re going to give children a good education no matter what the school looks like.”