WhoToVoteForNevada.com 
Inside Liberty Watch Today - October 30, 2006

By George Harris

And many of us are eager to hit the polls and put another election behind us. And in case you still have a few concerns about who should earn your vote, we at Liberty Watch and the Nevada Republican Liberty Caucus invite you to www.WhoToVoteForNevada.com. 

WhoToVoteForNevada.com explores candidates who have demonstrated credible conservative values. We promise, the candidates highlighted are worthy of your vote. If a specific race possessed no candidate with a conservative vision for Nevada, we weren't shy to note "No Endorsement."

All Executive, Legislative and Judicial offices are covered. So before you vote, please take a moment to browse www.WhoToVoteForNevada.com as well as each candidate's biography. 

George Harris
Publisher, Liberty Watch Online, and The Magazine.

Remembering the KC Failure

By Doug French

Last week's article mentioning the study produced by Denver consulting firm Augenblick, Palaich and Associates that called for Nevada taxpayers to hand over another $1.3 billion per year to adequately fund K-12 education prompted a Liberty Watch reader to point out that throwing a bunch of money at public education has been tried before and failed.

I had forgotten that a federal district judge took control of the Kansas City Missouri School District (KCMSD) in the late 1980's and ordered that the school district and the state spend $2 billion dollars ($3.5 billion in today's dollars) over a dozen years (1985 to 1997) to update facilities, build new schools, integrate classrooms and, of course, bring student test scores up to national norms. 

The alert LW reader directed me to Policy Analysis No. 298 from the Cato Institute, authored by education writer Paul Ciotti, chronicling the KC story. Ciotti concluded: "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 education system are far more important than a lack of material resources…" 

This fact flies in the face of the view held by liberal politicians and businessmen in Nevada who believe spending more money on education will increase test scores. After all, the Associated Press reported in April that Nevada ranked 46th in the nation in per pupil funding at $6,399. 
But, Kansas City spent $11,700 per student at the command of Judge Russell Clark during the KC experiment and in the words of education consultant and sociologist David Armor who testified in Judge Clark's court on the results of the 12 year funding experiment in 1997; "But educationally, it hasn't changed any of the measurable outcomes." 

The KC education story is interesting for another reason. Because there are numerous competing school districts in the Kansas City metro area, as the Kansas City Missouri school district deteriorated, parents fled to school districts that were as close as across the street, or certainly across the river in KC, Kansas. This flight from the KCMSD, caused a decline in students from 70,000 to 36,000 according to Ciotti. If only parents in Clark County had a choice. 

Voters wouldn't approve tax increases and the KCMSD deteriorated, while the others thrived. Enter Judge Clark. He ruled that the surrounding school districts and the state of Missouri "were 'joint and severally liable' for the segregated conditions of the Kansas City schools," and ordered the huge spending increase. 

Clark told KCMSD to spend to their hearts content. Among other things, the district built 60 magnet schools that were designed to lure white students back from suburban schools. Coursework in computers, environmental sciences and foreign languages were emphasized. And talk about amenities: "an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery and film studio; a mock court with a judge's chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability," Ciotti lists. 

The ratio of students to teachers was a union-pleasing 12 or 13 to 1 the lowest of any major school district. And teacher pay was increased 40 percent. 

KCMSD had millions of dollars to deploy, but didn't know how, and the results were tragic. The district had 10 different superintendents nine years into Judge Clark's experiment. Most were either fired or bought out of their contracts, and at one time five superintendents were on the payroll simultaneously. 

Superintendents couldn't fire bad teachers, and increasing all of their salaries by nearly half didn't make these teachers any better. The salary increase "didn't so much attract better teachers as convince poor teachers to stick with the district as long as they could because they were getting salaries they couldn't get anywhere else," Ciotti explains.

Test scores at KCMSD were consistently below the averages both nationally and in the rest of Missouri. This is despite that huge jump in teacher pay. At the same time, Ciotti points out parochial students in Kansas City were testing above the averages while those teachers were making 34 percent less in salary than their peers at KCMSD. 

By the end of his program, the Judge admitted; "While there is some good teaching and learning going on in KCMSD schools, there is a great deal of poor teaching and little learning in many schools." Former school board president Sue Fulson lamented: "I truly believed 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."

Philosopher George Santayana said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Remind legislators of Judge Clark's Kansas City failed experiment. After all, it's your money and your kids.

Doug French, Liberty Watch Columnist 


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