Crazy kind of loving there...

Segregation Map of Kansas City, Missouri, Census Year 2000, by the photographer Eric Fischer; each dot represents 25 people, color-coded by race: pink is White, blue is Black, orange is Hispanic and Latino, and green is Asian.

Somebody at Kos posted a discussion of a Very Disturbing Report on Education today, produced by the Cato Institute and proving or purporting to prove that increased school funding doesn't help to improve educational outcomes. Oh, dear, I thought, and took a look at the report itself—Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment by one Paul Ciotti—to see if I could find some holes in its methodology.

Well, I didn't need to worry myself about that in particular, since it turns out that the thing was published in 1998, that's 14 years ago, and actual scholars have had time to identify all the holes already. And have done so, too.

Ciotti's report is the story of the lawsuit filed in 1977 by the Kansas City Board [jump]
of Education against school districts in Missouri and Kansas, the state of Missouri, the federal government, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, to remedy the segregation of the schools in the Kansas City Missouri School District (KCMSD), then and now one of the most deeply segregated cities in the United States (see map above), and he tells it in pretty lively language:

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.

The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.

There's something wrong with just about every sentence here down to the third paragraph, which is sadly true. (My primary sources for what follows are Kevin Fox Gotham, "Missed Opportunities, Enduring Legacies: School Segregation and Desegregation in Kansas City, Missouri", American Studies 43:2, 2002, and an online Chronology of the Case from the Western Historical Manuscript Collection–Kansas City.)

Nobody, for starters, has ever proposed that you can solve educational problems by throwing money at them; that's economic problems, in the classic Keynesian position (strictly speaking, one is not actually supposed to throw money but rather drop it from helicopters, but I won't quibble). With educational problems, you want to have a plan, and then some might say that a more expensive plan is better than a stingy one.

Kansas City did not have a plan; they had a lawsuit, in 1977, and a trial in 1983, and a judgment in 1984, by Russell Clark, found that the district was, indeed, suffering from the effects of uncorrected segregation, and would require a remedy. The district then came up with the draft of a plan, so to speak, that they would have magnet schools to attract white students from the suburbs (they couldn't just bus them in by force—indeed, Judge Clark had dismissed the 11 white suburban districts from the suit). They would need

smaller class sizes, more art and music classes for elementary students, more teachers and counselors, improved libraries, full-day kindergarten, before and after school programs, and a series of efforts directed at low-achieving students.

They would also need to do something about the physical condition of the schools, which were in scandalous conditions—from the time African American students became the majority in the district in 1970, the district's majority white voters

rejected school funding initiatives 19 times while schools crumbled and the district faced fiscal insolvency. During the two decades after 1970, schools fell into chronic disrepair and deteriorated to the point that broken toilets, leaky ceilings, and rodents became com- monplace in inner city schools. Barbara Schell, a vice principle at Central Middle School in 1994, remembered conditions at the Manual Annex school during the 1970s.

We would see huge rats. We couldn't keep candy, food, anything in the closets because the rats would eat the candy. It was so terrible... . We had leaky roofs. We would freeze to death in the winter.

The plan may have been OK in principle, but it wasn't one of the stingy ones. While Ciotti gives us a picture of inexperienced black board members greedily demanding everything they could think of, the reason for the luxury was ironically enough that the board thought that would make the white parents think it was safe—they weren't spending it on themselves!

But getting the money was not going to be so easy; the state refused every proposal, the judge finally ruled that the district would have to pay the bulk of it themselves, at a very high property tax of $4.96 per $100 assessed, and then the federal government (under Old George Bush) began to step in in opposition. It wasn't until 1990 that the Supreme Court ruled that the tax could be collected and the plans could begin to be operationalized, even as the board was getting rid of one superintendent in favor of another, Walter Marks, who had been fired from his two previous jobs (from the districts of Richmond, California, and Wake County, North Carolina, both times for misuse or imprudent mishandling of funds) (Lawrence Journal-World, February 20 1991).

Did they really spend $11,700 per pupil? You bet they did, one year, when the school construction program was at its height. If you control for special expenses, though, and for the money devoted to poverty expenses as dictated by the number of students qualified for free lunches, the spending was never particularly extravagant, in fact, and by the end of the decade it was well below average for the region:

Contrary to the assertions of conservative critics, it turns out that the KCMSD outspent all other major metropolitan districts in only one year–1992–based on either unadjusted or regionally cost adjusted analysis of either current operating expenditures or current instructional expenditures per pupil. While spending peaked at 76% above average (1995) for those districts, by 2000, the KCMSD spent only 12% above average in current operating expenditures and only 2% above average in instructional expenditures. That is, peak funding lasted for a relatively short period of time. Relative to schools in the Kansas City metropolitan area, the spending edge was larger, at 2 to 1 over the average during the early 1990s. Again, by 2000 that margin had declined substantially to only 23% above average in current expenditures and only 9% above average in instructional expenditures. When adjusted for poverty related need, the KCMSD had only 83% of average current expenditures and only 76% of average instructional expenditures among large districts in its metropolitan area. (Preston C. Green, "Urban Legends, Desegregation and School Finance: Did Kansas City Really Prove That Money Doesn’t Matter?" Bepress Legal Series paper 1213, 2006)

But in 1995, the Supreme Court finally ruled in Missouri v. Jenkins, the state's countersuit against the board, that the whole magnet school program was illegitimate, since it required cooperation from suburban districts that themselves bore no responsibility for the segregation, in a huge opinion that seemed to reaffirm that Plessy v. Ferguson and "separate but equal" were acceptable after all;

Rehnquist notified the district court that its ultimate objective was not to achieve racial integration but "to restore state and local authorities to control" of the school district. The majority opinion held that once the vestiges of legally enforced segregation were removed, it would not be illegal for the school district to maintain and run racially segregated all-black or all-white schools. As Justice Clarence Thomas explained, "The Constitution does not prevent individuals from choosing to live together, or send their children to school together. . . . 'Racial isolation' itself is not a harm; only state-enforced segregation is."

That January Superintendent Marks had been fired for conduct seriously prejudicial, under accusations that he had been paying personal expenses on a district credit card.

Meanwhile, of course, the white students hadn't shown up for the magnet schools anyhow, the tax base continued to diminish, and the state refused to change the funding formula so that the district got poorer, and poorer, and poorer, to the point where, by the time Ciotti was writing his study, it was spending quite a bit less than it needed.

So what it comes down to is that too much money wasn't the problem in Kansas City. It was something older than that, as Gotham writes:

Despite the efforts of city leaders and civil rights activists, virtually every attempt in the last three decades to seek a metropolitan-wide solution to the problem of school segregation has met with fierce opposition from suburban residents, property owners, and political elites. More broadly, since the 1960s, the predominantly white suburbanites have shown little or no interest in addressing urban problems such as racially segregated public schools, concentrated poverty, blighted housing, and financial disinvestment—problems connected to neighborhoods now inhabited by racial minorities.

And abandoning the plan didn't make things any better. Indeed, they haven't stopped getting worse. Last August another superintendent resigned amid accusations of corruption against the board president, and on January 1 2012 the KCMSD lost its accreditation once again. As I write, the voters of the Republican Kansas City suburbs have just appointed their delegates for Rick Santorum (Google often! And don't forget to click the magic link).

So that Very Disturbing Report is maybe not so disturbing after all. Just more old tired conservative canard à l'orange.