Affirmative reaction - problems with school desegregation in Kansas City

National Review, Sept 15, 1989 by Richard Nadler, Tom Donelson

KANSAS CITY-The court-ordered plan for desegregating the Kansas City, Missouri, Metropolitan School District (KCMSD) has the distinction of having created near unanimity of public opinion-against it.

Taxpayers were the first to speak up, since the decision mandated a doubling of real-estate taxes for schooldistrict residents. But now that the plan has been in operation for three years, the taxpayers have been joined by the parents of black and Hispanic schoolchildren and by Kansas City civil-rights leaders. As one of these leaders, Wallace Hartsfield of Operation PUSH, put it: "That which was designed to help minorities who have traditionally been discriminated against is now working against quality education for minorities."

The story began with a desegregation case, Jenkins v. Missouri, decided in 1985 by Russell Clark, a federal trial judge in Missouri's Western District. Judge Clark held that contemporary black children in the KCMSD were suffering from the residual ill effects of mandatory segregation statutes, and that these effects were manifested both by the scarcity of desegregated classrooms and by the poor .quality of education within the district. At least Judge Clark dismissed classaction suits against surrounding suburban schools, in effect removing the controversial possibility of a forcedbusing program. But the remedy he did order has proved arguably more expensive and disruptive.

THE PROBLEM is that the KCMSD was not adequately integrated according to the standard set by the court. The student population of the KCMSD was, and is, over 70 per cent minority. In order to induce voluntary integration of the district, and to improve its quality of education, the court approved an ambitious plan to create 46 "magnet schools," at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. In theory, the KCMSD would become an oasis of educational excellence so alluring that residents of surrounding districts would flock to enroll their children there.

Thus, the central paradoxof the court's approach was that judicial taxation and coercive social engineering were applied to fashion a remedy whose success depended upon its voluntary acceptance by the public.

Sub-paradoxes abounded.

To give the KCMSD the required face-lift, public relations became paramount-and impossible. The plan was to attract white suburban students; but the method of attracting them was to trumpet the excellence of KC schools, which had yet to be achieved. Several hundreds of millions of dollars in capital improvements could not counteract thc well-reported problems of crime and indiscipline; new curricula and syllabi could not banish the difficulties engendered by decades of social promotion and grade inflation. The magnet-plan emphasis on expensive specialization-model farms, Olympic-sized swimming pools, elaborate language-lab electronics-strained credibility with taxpayers.

The educational oasis failed to attract the suburban caravan. In one year, the KCMSD spent $1.3 million to attract out-of-district whites. Recruiters targeted a modest goal of one thousand student transfers. Less than a quarter of that number have enrolled for the upcoming school year.

But it was the quotas that eroded black support for the remedy. For the new magnet schools the court had ordained that for each six minority students admitted, four non-minority students must attend-although in existing schools this distribution was to be approached gradually, through annual increases in white student population of 2 per cent. But with the failure of the recruitment drive, the quotas have had an unintended result: thousands of magnet-school seats remain vacant, awaiting non-existent white transfers, while black applicants are "wait-listed"-i.e., excluded ftom the program.

To many black parents and leaders, this emphasis on white body-counts is a slap in the face. Some irate black and Hispanic parents began to falsify ethnic information on magnet-school application forms. Then they went a step further, going back to court to repair the flaws in the court-ordered plan. The Landmark Legal Foundation is representing black families challenging the quota restrictions. Its president, Jerald Hill, put it this way: "In a strange twist of fate these black students now find themselves again the victims of discriminatory treatment solely on the basis of the color of their skin. We are asking the court to dust off the empty desks and open the classroom door to these students who prefer to learn about statistics rather than simply be treated as a statistic."

Meanwhile, another group of minority parents has taken a more unusual course: forming an alliance with the private sector. This July, the day after a press conference convened by the Kansas City civil-rights establishment at the Allis Plaza Hotel, Judy Rivarde and other minority parents, represented by the law firm of Miller, Bash, and Starrett, presented their petition. It contained the amazing assertions that a) the KCMSD could move 10 per cent closer to the court's integration targets immediately through the voluntary actions of parents and privatesector schools; and b) this could be achieved at vastly less expense than under the current magnet plan.