209.A
Billion, Six For KC: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
A
Billion, Six For KC
What are the prospects of reclaiming systematic schooling so
it serves the general welfare?
Surely the possibility of recharging the system when so many seem to
desire such a course would be the
best refutation of my buried thesis — that no trustworthy change is possible, that the school
machine must be shattered into a hundred thousand parts before the pledges made in the founding documents of
this country have a chance to be
honored again. No one serves
better as an emblem of the hopelessness of a
gradual course of school reform or
one that follows the dictates of conventional wisdom than Judge Russell G. Clark, of Kansas City,
Missouri.
For more than ten years Judge Clark
oversaw the spending of a $1.6 billion windfall in an attempt to desegregate Kansas City schools and raise the
reading and math scores of poor
kids. I arbitrarily select his story from many which might be told to
show how unlikely it is that the
forces which gave us our present schools are likely to vanish, even in the
face of outraged determination. Or
that models of a better way to do things are likely to solve the problem, either.
Judge Russell G.
Clark took over the Kansas City school district in 1984 after adjudicating a case in which the NAACP
acted for plaintiffs in a suit against the school district. Although he began the long court proceedings as a
former farm boy raised in the
Ozarks without an activist judicial record, Clark's decision was
favorable to the desegregationists
beyond any reasonable expectation. Clark invited those bringing the suit to dream up perfect schools and he
would get money to pay for them! Using the exceptional power granted federal judges, he unilaterally
ordered the doubling of city
property taxes. 4 When that provided inadequate revenue, he ordered the
state to make up the difference.
How's that for decisive, no-nonsense support for school reform as a social priority?
Suddenly the district was awash in money
for TV studios, swimming pools, planetariums, zoos, computers, squadrons of teachers and specialists.
"They had as much money as any
school district will ever get," said Gary Orfield, a Harvard
investigator who directed a
postmortem analysis, "It didn't do very much." Orfield was
wrong. The Windfall produced
striking results:
Average daily attendance went down, the
dropout rate went up, the black-white
achievement gap remained stationary, and the district was as segregated
after ten years of
well-funded reform as it had been at the beginning. A former school
board president whose children had
been plaintiffs in the original suit leading to Judge Clark's takeover said she had "truly believed if we
gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed, that would make a huge difference. I knew it
would take time, but I did believe
by five years into this program we would see dramatic results
educationally." Who is the
villain in this tale? Judge Clark is. He just doesn't get it. The system
isn't broken. It works as
intended, turning out incomplete people. No repair can fix it, nor is the education kids need in any
catalogue to buy. As Kansas City proves, giving schools more money only encourages them to
intensify the destructive operations they already perform.
4.
They actually were raised 150 percent, from a base already not low. With what
effect on homeowners just holding on was anyone's guess. Here, as in the case of Benson,
Vermont, up ahead, the institution's aspect as predatory parasite appears in
stark relief. Education's Most
Powerful Voice
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