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Results of the Kansas City Experiment

By the time Judge Clark took himself off the case in March 1997, he was a deeply frustrated man. For more than 20 years he had devoted 20 percent of his time as a judge to the Kansas City case.(79) And despite all the effort he had made to order the plan, fund the plan, and keep the plan on track--often in the face of intense opposition from the very people he was trying to help--the plan wasn't working. The number of white suburban students attracted to the district by all the new magnet schools was less than 10 percent of the number that Clark had expected.(80) Year after year the test scores would come out, the achievement levels would be no higher than before, and the black-white gap (one-half a standard deviation on a standard bell curve) would be no smaller.(81)

Although the initial gap was small, by the 12th grade, blacks' scores on standardized tests were about three years behind those of whites (10.1 vs. 13.1).(82) At Central High School, which tended to attract suburban white computer hackers, white males were five years ahead of black males on standardized tests.(83) "While there is some good teaching and learning going on in KCMSD schools," Clark concluded in his March 1997 final order, "there is a great deal of poor teaching and little learning in many schools."(84)

Despite intense and unrelenting effort, the district also found it impossible to eliminate almost-all-black schools. The reason wasn't racism, either--the district had a black school superintendent, a majority black school board, and a black school board president. In 1996 nonwhite enrollment exceeded 90 percent at 4 high schools, 2 middle schools, and 10 elementary schools.(85) Clark could have ordered intradistrict transfers to distribute whites equally, but he feared that the white parents would do what other whites had done in the past--enroll their children in private schools or pull up stakes and leave the district or even the state. The border between Kansas City, Missouri, and Johnson County, Kansas, runs right down the middle of the metropolitan area. For people wanting to escape the reach of the court by leaving Missouri entirely, doing so was in some cases as simple as moving across the street.(86)
Although the district had once hoped to have enough white suburban students to bring down the black/white ratio to 60 percent black, 40 percent white, the percentage of nonwhites (blacks, Hispanics, and Asians) increased every year, going from 73 percent at the start of the desegregation plan to 80 percent in the spring of 1997.(87)

In his final order, Judge Clark blamed the failure on the district: "Because of the KCMSD's troubled past, the district has lost the confidence of many of its staff, students, parents, and the community at large--already low achievement scores have fallen in the last year or two and the debacles of the School Board have provided near constant fodder for the news media."(88)

The average black student's reading skills increased by only 1.1 grade equivalents in four years of high school.(89) At Central High, complained Clark, black males were actually scoring no higher on standardized tests when they graduated as seniors than they had when they enrolled as freshmen four years before.(90) Most annoying to the judge, the district seemingly had no idea what it really spent on various budget line items. Instead of adhering to a budget, Clark wrote, the district simply "threw" some money into a given account, and the departments could overspend or underspend as they saw fit. Despite repeated requests from the court, the district couldn't put together a security plan, a staff development program, or a core curriculum--something it had needed since the desegregation plan had gone into effect 12 years earlier.(91)

Clark had reason to be annoyed. Back in 1985 his chief educational adviser had sat on the witness stand in his court and had confidently assured him that, if he funded the proposed plan, student achievement on standardized tests would climb above state averages in less than five years.(92) But then Kansas City got all the money any school district could ever want, and essentially nothing changed.

"I don't know who sold the judge that bill of goods [that students would meet state norms in five years,]" Annette Morgan, a Kansas City Democrat and chairwoman of the Missouri House Education Committee said in 1995. "I always thought that was ludicrous. If they had done that they would have achieved the attention of everyone else because that has not been done any place I know of."(93)

No one was more disappointed than former school board president Sue Fulson. "I truly believed," she told the Harvard Project on School Desegregation in 1992, "if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed that they would truly make a huge difference. I knew it would take time, but I did believe by five years into this program we would see not just results, but dramatic results, educationally. And [the fact we didn't] is my bitterest disappointment."(94)

Judge Clark was so disappointed that at one point he suggested that he would keep control of the district until test scores reached national norms. That left Missouri in a bit of a bind. For one thing, no big city school district had ever met national norms (they had their own standard--big city norms), and, as Justice Scalia pointed out in exasperation when the case finally got to the Supreme Court, by definition, "half the country is below national norms!"(95) The other problem was one of incentives. As long as Clark kept control, the state was obligated to send the district upwards of $100 million a year with no say in how the money was spent. Furthermore, given the extensive facilities and new programs the district had created, it was money the district couldn't do without. If the district did unexpectedly and unaccountably happen to raise test scores to national norms, the money would cease and the district would go bankrupt.

After all these years since, the left just ignores this implementation of everything they's ever asked for, and its failure to achieve even one of the results they claimed for it if they got everything they wanted, even beyond their wildest dreams, which was supposed to ensure that their ostensible goals-the closing of the gap, and "equal" facilities-were achieved. The facilities were not only "equal", they exceeded their dreams.

Yet here they are in 2016, still talking about "inequality" in resources as being the reason that black and Hispanic students still haven't closed the gap.

And still in many black districts (such as DC), more money is spent per student than the average, with the same lack of results.