Why Didn't Money Save Kansas City Missouri Schools?

Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment by Paul Ciotti

This article provides a lot of research and makes some interesting conclusions that are worth thinking about regarding the Kansas City Missouri School District.  In addition to what is concluded, I believe a look at what's going on outside the school in these kids lives is also an important component to understanding the failure.  Lack of decent paying jobs and opportunities for the parents of the children, drug abuse, crime, etc;  it's a more global problem and the education is simply one symptom of it.   

 " "It's not unconstitutional to give the students a lousy education; it's only unconstitutional to give them a segregated one."⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

 Conclusion

All the money spent in Kansas City brought about neither integration nor higher levels of achievement. The lessons of the Kansas City experiment should stand as a warning to those who would use massive funding and gold-plated buildings to encourage integration and improve education:

• The political realities of inner-city Kansas City made it impossible to fire incompetent teachers and principals and hire good ones.
• Because the community regarded the school system as much as an employment opportunity as an educational institution, less than half the education budget ever made it to the classroom.
• School superintendents found it hard to function because every decision was second-guessed by the court-appointed monitoring committee; the attorney for the plaintiffs; and the state of Missouri, which was paying most of the bills.
• Because the designers of the Kansas City plan assumed that inner-city blacks couldn't learn unless they sat in classrooms with middle-class whites, the district wasted exorbitant amounts of time and money on expensive facilities and elaborate programs intended to attract suburban whites instead of focusing its attention on the needs of inner-city blacks.
• By turning virtually every school in the district into a magnet school, the Kansas City plan destroyed schools as essential parts of neighborhoods, fractured neighborhoods' sense of community, and alienated parents.
• The mechanism used to fund improvements to the school system (a federal desegregation lawsuit) deflected attention from the real problem--the need to raise black achievement.
• The ideological biases of local educators and politicians, and the federal court, made them reject solutions that might have worked, such as merit pay, charter schools, or offers by private schools to educate students in return for vouchers.
• Because the district had no way to evaluate the performance of teachers and administrators, promotions couldn't be based on merit.
• The desegregation plan created inverse achievement incentives--the district got hundreds of millions of extra dollars in court-ordered funding each year but only if student test scores failed to meet national norms.