Learning From Kansas City

Kansas City, Missouri (where I am a visiting professor for the current academic year) is a medium-demand city: a city with more successful neighborhoods than Cleveland or Detroit, but one still dominated by its suburbs to a greater extent than more successful cities. One reason the city keeps losing people to its suburbs is the low reputation of the city's school district. In the city’s affluent southwest side, only 27 percent of K-12 children attend public schools. Moreover, many people who would otherwise live in those neighborhoods have moved to Kansas so they can send their children to the overwhelmingly white public schools of Overland Park, Leawood, and other suburbs. Why are Kansas City’s schools so unpopular?

I recently read Complex Justice, a book by political scientist Joshua Dunn about Kansas City’s schools. While much of Dunn’s work focuses on litigation strategy and judicial decision making, he also makes a few points relevant to the problems of urban school districts.

In particular, Dunn shows that some of the city’s public schools became all-black almost as soon as desegregation took place. For example,Kansas City's Central High School was almost 90 percent white in 1955, and by 1965 had only 16 white students (out of over 2000). Similarly, Paseo High School was 6 percent African-American in 1959 and 97 percent African-American in 1969. So it appears that Kansas City's whites were ready to move out as soon as blacks moved in—a fact that suggests that whites decided that a school was “bad” as soon as a critical mass of African-Americans moved in.   

Some commentators argue that if government spends as much money on urban schools as on suburban schools, everyone will achieve at suburban levels, and the middle-class lion will lie down with the low-income lamb. But Dunn shows that during the 1990s, the federal courts tried this strategy in Kansas City. To desegregate the schools, a federal judge sought to entice white suburbanites into the school system by ordering the city to create numerous magnet schools, raise teacher salaries by 44 percent, and reduce class sizes. At the zenith of the desegregation program,Kansas City was spending twice as much per student as its suburban rivals. Yet the number of white students did not increase, nor did test scores. And during the 1990s, student enrollment in Kansas City schools decreased among both blacks and whites, as middle-class pupils of all races moved to private schools and to suburban school districts. It seems to me that another lesson of the Kansas City fiasco is that money didn’t matter—or more precisely, that even if money matters, it doesn’t matter enough to reduce suburbanites’ collective cultural distaste for urban schools full of poor people.*

So what can be done? Numerous cities have selective schools that limit entrance to students who do well on an admissions test. For example,Buffalo’s City Honors school is as prestigious as any suburban school; U.S. News ranks it no. 14 in the state, lagging primarily behind similar public schools in New York City. Today, these schools are not so numerous that affluent families can expect their children to get in, and as a result many families prefer suburbia as a lower-risk option.

But suppose that a school district established a multitude of such schools, so that any student who was in the top quarter or so of the district’s students could be in a classroom filled with equally bright students. It seems to me that the existence of such schools would eliminate suburbia’s competitive edge. 

It could be argued that such schools are harmful to lower-achieving students, who will not benefit from having higher-achieving students in the same classroom. But today, the latter students’ parents, unless they are very poor indeed, can always leave the school district. As the working poor have spread through suburbia, even parents who cannot afford the most exclusive suburban school districts can afford to live in a working-class suburb with less ill-reputed schools than those of the central city. For example, Kansas City’s school district is surrounded not only by the rich school districts of the Kansas suburbs, but also by more diverse school districts to the city’s east, north and south. So a parent who cannot afford Overland Park can always move to a not-so-upper-class suburb. So as long as suburban school districts are allowed to exist, and as long as those districts are not as poverty-packed as urban schools, few parents will be willing to send their children to a typical urban school. 

Moreover, even the best “exam schools” are often far more diverse than most suburban schools; for example, City Honors is 34 percent minority, and Lehman College high in the Bronx (which the U.S. News ranks as number 1 in the state) is 46 percent minority. 

Thus, it may be the case (leaving aside possible fiscal constraints) that an expanded system of selective schools may be an urban school district's best hope for retaining middle-class families. 

*I note that Kansas City is not atypical.  In numerous other regions, city schools spend more per pupil than suburban schools.  On the other hand, it may be the case that students from impoverished backgrounds cost more to educate than students from better-off backgrounds, and that if urban schools outspent suburban schools by some as-yet-unknowable amount (three times? four times?) spending might start to matter.