Education is mostly dependent on what happens in the home, whether kids go to public or private schools or whether they are home schooled. Outstanding schools always have outstanding parental support of education, at school and at home. And this in turn depends on stable, hard-working families that emphasize the importance of learning and model that emphasis.
The Kansas City debacle proves that money does not and cannot solve the problems of inner city schools. I was living near Kansas City at the time of the court order–an obscene display of judicial power and arrogance–and everyone knew then that it would not and could not work, that the 2 billion might as well be flushed down the toilet for all the good that it would do.
I remember when the 35 million dollar Central High School opened in the 90′s, the most gold-plated school facility in the nation. Everyone I knew was laughing at the folly of thinking that it was the building who would bring poor students to suburban levels of achievement.
What an idiot that judge was, and how foolish the people of Kansas City and Missouri were to follow his court order. Tyrants, even if they wear judicial robes, need to be defied. Has this judge apologized for his mistake? Apologized for stealing 2 billion from the people of Missouri to get nothing in return?

As a public school teacher I can completely concur. The bulk of what needs to change is beyond the scope of educational policy.

All of this was driven by the idea that desegregation was the key to educational achievement.
There is a reason for that. Historically in the Old South and much of the Midwest, African American schools were given a minute fraction of the money given to white schools. You continue to see the pattern often today that African American majority schools are allowed to fall apart, while white exurb/suburb schools attract good teaching talent, have better budgets (from the property values, of course!) and the facilities are in good repair.

Rod: …no amount of money, testing, or reform measures can adequately compensate for a failed culture.
The components of that culture are the various members of the various combinations of family members on one side, the school professionals (administrators, teachers, support staff) on the other side and the legislators and taxpayers in the middle. Any education policy that fails to address the issues, concerns and requirements [constraints] of each and every component will fail sooner or later.
Lancelot: …an obscene display of judicial power and arrogance…
Your post is excellent on every point. Replace “judicial” with “legislative”, and you describe my exact reaction to the No Child Left Behind Act, and as the evidence continues to mount for its egregious failure to reform, improve or do anything of consequence, those who might rightly apologize for it will have moved on to deification, retirement or prison.

OK, so it starts in the home. What can we do to help the kids who don’t get what they need at home? I am not comfortable leaving them out to dry. They are our future citizens, parents, and workforce. I’ve read so many editorials like this lately. We can all agree there is a problem; we can even agree it begins in the home. So what? What can we do to fix it? is anyone pointing the way to “right strategies”? I’m just a parent. I don’t have the answers but I’m willing to help.

You give me kids who:
a) come from intact, two-parent families where the father and mother are married for the first time and to each other; and
b) who have books in their home (and are not afraid to use them !); and
c) who limit (if not eradicate) television-viewing time in the home, and
d) expect their children to put scholastic achievement as a high priority (behind their God and their family);
and I’ll give you kids who will do well in spite of anything that the public schools can do to, with or “for” them.
Your servant,
Lord Karth

P.S. It doesn’t matter what color their skin is, either. Caucasian white, African black, Asian yellow or Andorian blue; it won’t make a difference.
Your servant,
Lord Karth

@Lancelot.
What an idiot that judge was, and how foolish the people of Kansas City and Missouri were to follow his court order. Tyrants, even if they wear judicial robes, need to be defied
I’d be curious to know if you think that Brown V.Board or Loving V. Virginia were exercises in “judicial tyranny”.

btw…Lancelot.
Notably, white people did defy court orders that ended segregation of schools. They moved away so their children would not have to associate with minorities.
I guess that you approve.

There is an achievement gap that is near-universal. IQ seems to be partly heritable, and non-Asian minorities, on average, have lower ones. Then add in cultural problems.
No shame in that–there are other important skills besides academic ones–but it’s taboo to say it. We will keep doing the same useless and expensive stuff until we recognize the fact.

Direct Instruction has been shown to remedy whatever educational gaps poor children (of any race) have when they arrive in Kindergarten.

Actually, we know that Direct Instruction works well for poor kids, but it goes against every progressive education orthodoxy so schools won’t use it. We also know that having the kids spend almost their entire day in a well run school where behavioral norms and middle class values are demanded and enforced works well for poor kids. (See “Sweating the small stuff: Inner City Schools and the new paternalism” by David Whitman). But such schools break the rules of both progressive education orthodoxy and teachers unions.
It’s disgusting because we do know of a couple of things that work, but the powerful adults involved won’t let them happen. So we have this cycle of dysfunction that never gets broken and many people figure that it’s just the way “those people” are. We need to get rid of the unions and about 90% of the administrators and start over.

CDC,
They did not move away so their children would not have to associate with minorities. They moved away so their children would not be exposed to the rampant pathologies of the poor–crime, violence, drugs, family disintegration. This was true of both middle class whites and middle class blacks. Race had very little to do with it.
I approve of them doing that, yes, as would any parent who loves his or her kids.
As for Brown and Loving, as with Roe and Doe, the supreme court also has practiced a form of judicial tyranny, not trusting govt. of the people, for the people, and by the people to do the right thing on select social issues. Much of the divineness in our society on issues of race or reproduction is based on these issues not being decided democratically, but by judicial rule. Democracy is slow and messy, but it is the only way to really resolve social issues and conflicts, not the courts. The courts cannot resolve them, they can only decree legal solutions that people will resist because tyrants have imposed them. That the tyrants are well-intentioned, “philosopher kings” does not make them any less tyrants.

In at least one study, poverty was found to be the primary indicator of student failure. Of course, all the things that frequently go along with poverty are included (single-parent homes, increased crime and gang activity and influence, lack of transportation, lack of broader experiences and opportunities, etc.).
BTW, this is why merit pay for teachers will probably never work and will very likely increase the problem as the best teachers flee to suburban upper middle class areas where their excellent work will actually be absorbed and appreciated and make a difference because the students have relatively stable home lives where education is a priority. Even the best teachers can’t overcome a devastated home life, parents who aren’t educated and/or don’t care, etc.

“Democracy is slow and messy, but it is the only way to really resolve social issues and conflicts, not the courts. ”
So if the majority of the people support oppressing a minority group, it’s ok? afterall vox populi?

It still amazes me that all educational talk fails to get to the root of the problem, namely, motivation of the student. We constantly don’t want to blame the students, because they are too young to know better. But walk into any 7th grade class and you will find a number of children that don’t want to be there because they don’t know how what they are doing is going to apply to their future.
The solution is to find what motivates these kids. A teacher in Harlem changed his entire curriculum towards creating and managing a business. Term papers were business proposals, math class was accounting, history was market research and so on. Funny how when kids see a reason for their efforts (making money), they are much more motivated.
BTW – the same problem exists with racial profiling at the airports. The bomb is the problem – find that, and it doesn’t matter what race, religion, gender or age you are.

They did not move away so their children would not have to associate with minorities. They moved away so their children would not be exposed to the rampant pathologies of the poor–crime, violence, drugs, family disintegration.
Uh huh. And “welfare queens” is not a dog whistle for “single black mother”.
You seem to have a novel interpretation of US history that puts the best possible spin on the motivations of white people who fled from schools that were forced to integrate after the government finally enforced the Brown V Board decision.
hey moved away so their children would not be exposed to the rampant pathologies of the poor–crime, violence, drugs, family disintegration.
I would really like to see the history paper that backs that up. BTW…the poor people were overwhelmingly BLACK.
I wonder how that happened.
Oh yeah…no access to education and forcibly kept out of good jobs…
So they were still running from the black people.
This was true of both middle class whites and middle class blacks. Race had very little to do with it.
There was no such thing as a black middle class in the 1950′s, 1960′s or most of the 1970′s. If you contend that race had nothing to do with it, you are either a racial huckster or monumentally ignorant of racial history in this country.
As for Brown and Loving, as with Roe and Doe, the supreme court also has practiced a form of judicial tyranny, not trusting govt. of the people, for the people, and by the people to do the right thing on select social issues.
That tells me what I need to know about you.
You have explicitly agreed here in this forum with racists like Senator Bilbo that a white majority should be able to vote that minorities can be banned from marriage as they choose or to go to school. Your agreement with this vile exercise of tyranny is contemptible and despicable. Moreover, your attack on the proper use of the judiciary by calling them “tyrants” shows the Orwellian misuse of language in order to obfuscate what your position actually is:
You openly support the misuse of Democracy to deny equal participation and even basic freedoms to minorities so long as people of your ethnicity are the ones getting to make the vote.
I have nothing but contempt for you.

Re: come from intact, two-parent families where the father and mother are married for the first time and to each othe
Too restrictive. Numerous people (myself as an example) have survived the loss of a parent, and perhaps the remarriage of the surviving one, without ending up as wastrels or criminals. In fact this situation used to be even more common in the “good old days” that people like to rhapsodize about. What matters, I think, is that there are adults care, really care, about the kids and who put them first rather than their own whims and pleasures.

Too restrictive. Numerous people (myself as an example) have survived the loss of a parent, and perhaps the remarriage of the surviving one, without ending up as wastrels or criminals. In fact this situation used to be even more common in the “good old days” that people like to rhapsodize about. What matters, I think, is that there are adults care, really care, about the kids and who put them first rather than their own whims and pleasures.
Nicely done.

there are taboos against speaking out on issues if one is employed in education….taboos that can cost you your job. One teacher cannot criticize another’s teaching ability without loosing their job according the educational law. The system of education is not broken for the majority, but for the minority, it is an utter failure.
Personally, I know of, first hand, a school where these kids from disadvantages homes end up after they have been abandoned by all the regular schools. It’s a high school whose mission is specifically for kids who come from HORRIFIC family situations…way beyond poverty in many cases. NONE of these Federal programs or laws will work to fix this school or these kids. This school NEVER makes AYP(adequate yearly progress). That is the dreaded assassination tool that “measures” a school to determine if it will loose all Federal funding or not. If a school does not ake AYP after a number of years, draconian measures are taken to punish it, the staff and the district. It is RIDICULOUS to apply a law like NCLB to a school like this one…By the time kids are 16, the goal for them has changed to keeping them off the street and out of prostitution that they may be facing in a year or two. Whether they know the capital of Uzbekistan is no longer relevant! Already the entire staff on this school consists of people who are extremely dedicated to doing whatever they can to make an impact in the life of just one kid.
Just as an example, one student’s mother was planning to “sell” her. Another student’s parents had abondoned him and he was living in an adandoned car. The age of these kids makes it hard to place them “in the system”. Should the government REALLY be concerned with whether or not these children make AYP? Should the entire staff be fired and the school be “restructured” for failure to make AYP? Or worse…how will a school like this ever attract teachers if their salary is tied to their students test results!!!
Getting rid of “90% of administration” is not the answer. That is simply laying blame and then seeking retribution.
And John…you are absolutely right….Race to the Top will fail because punishing teachers whose students do not do well by cutting their pay WILL absolutely cause them to flee to areas where the student population has a great chance of success.
Education USED TO BE a function of the local government or at least the State government. There were problems with this for sure, one of you mentioned patronage, racially motivated distribution of funds and so on. On the other hand, broad sweeping Federal laws, applied without consideration to all schools regardless, will continue to bring chaos and failure.
I wonder if perhaps the Charter school movement might end up being the salvation of the system in the end…

Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone has found a solution by mounting a block by block crusade to turn around Harlem schools.
Canada’s program starts before birth, with a “Baby College” that teaches impoverished parents about brain research. Canada said “families of color” traditionally believe young children should be quiet and behave, while talking and exploring their world is what helps them prepare for school.
And this has been the result:
The program made big news earlier this year, when its charter school, the Promise Academy, eliminated the achievement gap for math between average black students and white students in New York City. Among other strategies, the academy has an extended school day and year and Saturday classes for those who need extra help.

I’m increasingly seeing one part of the problem here as the mistake of clinging to Industrial Age education methods and philosophies when we are well into the Information Age.
What, after all, were public schools designed to do? A tour through the educational philosophies of the past hundred years or so shows a progression from an emphasis on subject matter mastery to an emphasis on child-centered pragmatic learning with a goal of producing good citizens. What’s wrong with the latter? Only this: both the pragmatic knowledge and the ideal of the good citizen have shifted quite a bit, from basic proficiency in math and English to a focus on progressive history and “social studies” on the one hand, and from the good citizen as a productive worker straight out of high school (for the majority of students, anyway) to the good citizen as an education consumer/eventual corporate worker on the other, with the given understanding that the child’s education won’t be complete until he has finished a four-year college degree, and won’t really be “competitive” unless he chooses to obtain a master’s degree or doctorate after that.
I’m not saying that familial dysfunction isn’t hugely responsible for the failures of some schools; it is. It shows the lie of the sexual revolution for what it is–in the African-American community, for instance, a staggering 70% of all children today are born out of wedlock; fatherlessness has become a generational problem for some of these children, who know no father and no grandfather, and have no idea why either would be necessary. Yet sociologists point to problem after problem related to the lack of a father in the family, including greater crime rates, greater promiscuity, and lesser levels of success. Sure, some single mothers manage to counteract these negative forces, give their children good male role models, stay on top of their children’s lives and educations, and help them to do well, but this is astonishingly hard to do, and happens rarely in families where the dysfunctions have been going on for several generations.
But take a child from this type of situation, where the adults around him model dysfunctional and irresponsible behavior, where he is encouraged to participate in that sort of behavior, and then send him to a school which is telling him that his success in the world depends on a minimum of sixteen years of sustained and responsible educational achievement at a minimum–and you aren’t even speaking his language.

CDChick,
There is more to the picture than you are focusing on. Racism is by far the single most influential factor, but not the only one, and resolving it and it only will at best make school failures appear later rather than sooner.
Addressing fiscal segregation (separate but equal, yadda) is not enough. Addressing the psychology of poverty is not enough: Compare the oppression of blacks in the US with the oppression that non-black European immigrants fled from, and the academic performance of the children in each group.
The evidence here in Philadelphia is repeated in every urban center in the US: Children who are not prepared for and supported in being students by their families and their subculture will not do well.
There are periods of time where the collected data is clear. Is it racist to observe that the Vietnamese immigrants of the 70s performed much better than blacks during that period? The Vietnamese were equally impoverished, in similar proportions. That’s just the group with whom I have direct experience.
About judicial “tyranny”: This is a valid and necessary recourse when the vox populi is against the legislative voice, or when both are against equal protection under the law. In the example of our homosexual citizens, they have two mandates: Repeal those laws that directly oppress them, and fight in the courts to have existing laws protect them equally. Both are necessary in education as well. NCLB is a prime example of oppressive legislation.

The evidence here in Philadelphia is repeated in every urban center in the US: Children who are not prepared for and supported in being students by their families and their subculture will not do well.
I agree, and I think almost all of Rod’s analysis is on target. At the same time, declarations (as from Lancelot) that the SCOTUS was engaging in “tyranny” by ending disgusting Jim Crow laws or overturning laws against mixed race marriage, are risible and need to be examined and exposed for the lies and tyranny apologia that they are.
It is well established that white people fled from school districts with minority populations when Brown V Board was enforced. In fact one district in Virginia shut all the schools down, and helped the white children attend white only private schools. All black children were left out with no school of any sort, until the “black robed tyrants” put an end to the blatant evil being commissioned by the “will of the people”.
That is why I have no patience with people like Lancelot, since he not only glosses over the destructive racial history of our country, but he actually supports the outright bigoted and evil outcomes that majority rule tyranny was bringing about.
It is historical revisionism of the first order, and we must push back against it wherever it is found.

Rod, You’re only partically right. While an honest conversation about culture is long over due, there are charter schools that do an amazing job of educating low SES (socio-economic students). We know how to improve educational outcomes, but it is politically unacceptable to implement.
School choice now.

1. “it’s incredibly depressing, because it says that the way out of this morass is not easy, or quick” and
2. “that it ultimately has relatively little to do with educational policy at all”
First statement is true – although if that depresses you, stick to the easy and quick stuff, real problems need real effort. Second statement is only even partially true if you define educational policy as K-12. Birth to pre-K traditional education can have a tremendous impact. And going beyond traditional education to pre-natal and pre-conception – the socio-economic circumstance of new parents – is also incredibly important to a kid’s future education. A good job isn’t just the best welfare policy, it’s also the best education policy.

Celtic, if you read that Cato analysis, it says toward the bottom that one of the errors the court made was assuming that the problem was segregation, not low educational achievement. The judge believed that if you just got a certain ratio of white people into the schools, then they would fix themselves. This is so far from socio-cultural, and socio-economic, reality as to be risible. But there’s nothing funny about a $2 billion boondoggle.

this is a timely topic for me in that I recently met a kid who came from your basic wretched urban environment and tragically messed up family yet who managed to avoid the usual drugs-dropout-crime track, get himself a great education and is now a student in an Ivy – and not because he is black but because he met the school’s admission requirements – high SAT’s, GPA etc. In speaking with this young man I was reminded of schools that do work. This young man graduated from a very small RC High School – St. Anthony in Jersey City. This school has become famous with even a documentary being made about it. It is s small school, the building is nothing special – the typical 1920′s looking type Catholic parish high school. The relatively new and modern public high school a few blocks away is a mess – graffiti covered, plastic windows, a 10 foot high fence around the school, and barbed wire on the rooftop to prevent break ins and vandalism. St A’s though has no such security, no graffiti and a spotless little lawn with trees in front. This says to me something important about how the two schools are perceived by the community. Many years ago I attended a basketball game there and witnessed something that also says a lot about why the school is so successful. Someone standing in the hall during halftime dropped a gum wrapper on the floor – a cheerleader from the school went up to the guy and asked him to pick the wrapper up – telling him this was their school and they wanted it to stay nice. St. A has a zero drop out rate and sends 99% of their graduates into college. It also has an amazing basketball program but that is another story. My point is that – we say kids from these very bad environments can’t be helped yet we have – all over this country – places like St. A’s that are succeeding with these so called ineducable kids. And these schools are doing this at a much lower cost than the schools that are failing. Another example of amazing success is St. Benedict’s in Newark. So why do we ignore the lessons of these successful schools and continue to play the “more money” game? I’d bet the power of the public school lobby has something to do with it. For years the public school administrators organization lobbied successfully against any federally funded study of such schools. Obviously – small less expensive schools controlled by families and a local community don’t create as many opportunities for patronage and to enrich school board officials and construction types either.
I would make an educated guess about why these schools do succeed – they are small, they work hard to promote a sense of pride and accomplishment (often with extremely successful sports), they require not just parent involvement but alumni and community involvement simply to survive, they emphasize character formation and they create a lot of structure and routine for the kids attending.
In these schools we have proof that kids from terrible environments can still succeed – so we need to pass on that argument. We also have proof that it isn’t money that makes the difference. I’d suggest we can look at these schools and see exactly what works – but we don’t. To me the big issue then is why we fail to acknowledge this success and why we fail to promote more schools like this. Kansas City didn’t fail because some kids are ineducable – it failed because enriching the usual public school hierarchy types was more important than those kids.

This should be a wakeup call to our entire country about the education crisis that is unfolding on a mass scale.
I do, however, disagree with some of the author’s comments, particularly when he says, “you simply cannot expect broad improvement in learning from kids who, through no fault of their own, come out of a dysfunctional culture of family breakdown.” These kids can be saved, and they are the ones who will benefit most from differntiated instruction and new approaches to learning.
I believe that systemic change is possible; however, our education system is going about it all wrong. Kansas City Public Schools is a glaring example of why disruptive innovation does not take place by going head on with the establishment.
I suggest our country start listening to those on the periphery, because that’s where the successful approaches to education innovation are taking place.

I think a distinction should be made between Brown vs. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation, and recent measures to enforce integration, which to me is a very different animal. Like it or not, people do segregate themselves: by race, culture, religious beliefs, whatever it may be. And whenever a government tries to get around this by forcibly integrating the school systems, it never seems to go well. Those who don’t want their children in an (economically, racially, culturally) integrated school simply move or switch to private schools. This does nothing to solve the problems of either segregation or of underachieving inner-city schools.

Sorry, the last post is mine–I had to refresh the page before commenting and didn’t realize my name would disappear.

I’ve lived in Kansas City for the past 15 years or so and so have had a front row seat to all that’s gone on here. Many of the above poster have mentioned the affect of poverty on academic performance, and certainly KC has its share of poverty, but something that has not been touched on is the complete and total dysfunction of the KC school board. They have been, and are, just unbelievable, they chew through superintendents, some of which have been very successful elsewhere and gave every appearance of having their acts together, like a school kid going after a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. They are more concerned about patronage than they are about education. In the thirties Kansas City was very much run by a political machine (see Mayor Pendergast), the school board hasn’t got the message that it’s not the 30′s anymore. It will be interesting, in a tragi-comic sort or way to see how long before they throw the current superintendent out on the street.
Of course, Kansas City made the news because they are starting to do something, or so it appears, about the terrible state of their schools. The schools in St. Louis, which were also covered by Whipple’s decree, are in even worse shape, if possible, and I don’t think they have even begun to address the problems.

CDChick, I first want to reassure you that I am not second-guessing your reaction to Lancelot. That’s between the two of you and whatever clarifications or qualifications (including none) he offers.
I grew up in a school district to which the white tra… um, former residents of West Philly fled. Due to my upbringing, I was a rare, quiet dissenter (and later, starting around 8th grade, not so quiet) to the default racism of my neighbors and peers. The defining phrase I heard often was “the damn n*****s chased us out!”
It is, perhaps, a vain exercise to track down and analyze the many factors and influences that lead to and perpetuate oppression of blacks. For this thread, may it suffice to note that even while mixed-race administrations in Philly were seeing slow progress in serving their underachievers — somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of them black — they did so during an ongoing battle against a state legislature that never hesitated to spin them into political ammunition with the rest of the state, and which battle was essentially lost with the passing of NCLB. In the meantime, poverty, high unemployment and the traps of drug culture and violence remained. The very things teachers and principals wanted to help were beyond their reach, and made even more so by laws and regulations sometimes demanded by the very parents who were failing their own children.
To make my bias here clear: I am K-12 public ed as were all of my siblings, my wife has been a Philly teacher for over 35 years, and all three of our children went through public schools here, with the youngest becoming a HS senior next year.

Celtic, if you read that Cato analysis, it says toward the bottom that one of the errors the court made was assuming that the problem was segregation, not low educational achievement. The judge believed that if you just got a certain ratio of white people into the schools, then they would fix themselves.
When the white people left many of these school districts, they took certain economic and cultural assets with them…including the property taxes that many school districts rely upon.
Also, of course, they sent a rather distinct message that you are inferior and we will never have any thing to do with you.
The American (and Cato Institute) myth is that strong people will rise up above all the hardships, prosper accordingly and then will be rewarded because that is the American Way™. We have seen that is seldom the case with the African American community. I agree that cultural dysfunction with the community is strongly causative at present…but that does not address why that dysfunction was driven in the first place. Moreover, any judge aware of the toxic and racist reactions of whites towards desegregation is right to be wary of ‘principled resistance’ towards re-integration. Likewise, said judge would also be mindful of the history of African American schools being given pennies for every dollar given to white schools.
That is history, Rod.
There is no way to get around that.
We bought the 2 billion dollar boondoggle because 100 years of enforced serfdom and entrenched legal antipathy towards racial equality made failure a near certainty after African Americans were left to fall on their faces when segregation ended and whites ran away as fast as they could.
We have nobody but ourselves to blame.
The Cato institute is a champion of using free market forces to solve social problems. Do you really think that has any successful track record here either beyond one or two anecdotes?

Franklin Evans
I grew up in a school district to which the white tra… um, former residents of West Philly fled. Due to my upbringing, I was a rare, quiet dissenter (and later, starting around 8th grade, not so quiet) to the default racism of my neighbors and peers. The defining phrase I heard often was “the damn n*****s chased us out!”
Thanks you for that illustration and the stand you took.

The idea that schools must be integrated and whites with their “economic and cultural assets” must be in close proximity for African American students to learn is horribly insulting to African Americans. It is basically telling black parents and students that on their own they are incapable of knowing how to act or learn properly. It is only with the civilizing presence of white people that they can learn and succeed. Which is, of course, ridiculous and patronizing in the extreme. In the past when race was not so closely tied with social dysfunction, white flight was an immoral, cowardly thing with many negative consequences for a lot of communities. However, these kids are educable – even without the presence of white folks – but the educational models that work best for them are not the same as what works best for middle class kids with educated parents. An, unfortunately, we are not regularly using the educational models that do work for poor kids.

Sorry about the third post in row here…but this bears printing from the Cato report that Rod mentions:
As whites abandoned the schools, the school district’s ability to raise taxes disappeared. The last year that the voters approved a tax increase for the schools was 1969, the same year that blacks first became a majority. Over the next two decades, the voters of the district declined to approve a tax increase for the school district 19 times in a row.(3)
After middle-class whites pulled their children out of the school district, leadership declined. It was hard to find people to run for the school board. Those who did run tended not to be particularly sophisticated, usually earned less than $30,000 a year, and had difficulty dealing with complex financial issues.(4)
Yep. I think I mentioned something to that effect up above.

Slavery, the gift that keeps on giving.

Hmmmm….
I want to address the numerous posts blaming “flight” from these neighborhoods.
My current neighborhood is rife with dysfunction — drug dealing, domestic violence, coarse language and chronically unemployed people. And this is an all white, rural neighborhood.
We are moving our family out at the end of the month. I have a two year old. I cannot wait to move.
Is it discriminatory that I have concerns about living among poor people, and raising my child in this environment?
Is it unChristian, in that Jesus preached to be generous to the poor?

PS I disagree with the idea that discrimination is mostly racial. I would bet that many people would have difficulty living with people who are poor (or have different value systems) of their own race.

In second grade at Border Star School my teacher was Mrs. Dorothy Dreher. Do you know her? My class graduated from Southwest in 1964 and at that time Southwest was in the top ten in the United States. We were given an excellent education. I’m sorry that the generations after us have not been.
[Note from Rod: Well, my mom is Mrs. Dorothy Dreher, but she's not the same as your Dorothy Dreher. -- RD]

Wow! Every education professional in the country needs to read this! I teach in a large urban disrict that is struggling with high drop-out rates and a huge achievement gap. The staff at my school realized a few years ago that it was pointless to target particular minority groups with intensive interventions – what we needed to do was focus on our “free/reduced lunch” population which includes kids from all ethnic backgrounds. Poverty seems to be the thing that holds these kids back. And not so much financial poverty, which many kids (myself included) have overcome. It’s a poverty of ideas, love, responsibility, morals, relationships, faith, community, experiences, goals, etc. The very things parents and families are supposed to provide. Our most severly impacted students overwhelmingly come from single-parent homes that are utterly chaotic and unstable. We spend way too much time providing basic needs to these emotionally damaged kids and instructing them on appropriate social behavior just so they can be in school, let alone learn. Since the number of students like this keeps increasing, we decided at my school to study the book by Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, in an effort to try to understand the issues our students are dealing with. It was an eye-opener, but completely supports the idea that the breakdown of the family is our biggest challenge. I work with some of the smartest, most generous people who put in 110% every day. Yet, our poor kids improve minimally and ever so slowly year after year. I’m on one of the country’s most inovative pay-for-performance systems, set (and make) annual student achievement goals and receive nice bonuses for my hard work. And yet the money means nothing to me because I still have way too many kids who fail. I beat myself up every day and wonder what I’m doing wrong. I study the latest and greatest techniques and try new strategies to no avail. Our district is always cutting budgets and yet I want for nothing in my classroom. I’ve experienced first-hand that money and the very best teachers can’t improve student achievement if the families and culture these kids come from are constantly pulling them down. Many of my most-liberal teacher friends admit this, too. However, we’re not allowed to say such things. We’re harshly accused of “making excuses”. We’re forced to ignore the truth and pretend that a government system and unrelated people can help kids learn and find peace and happiness in life regardless of what they go home to every day. It’s absurd for our nation to continue on this path of pretending public schools can fix broken families and their children and then punishing us when we don’t.

Lisa,
Thanks for your comments. This is the kind of on-the-ground story that people need to hear. God Bless in your efforts.

I grew up in a small town in coastal California. I attended three public schools (elementary, middle, high) that were very good. Today those three schools happen to be on the State of California blacklist of unacceptably-performing schools. They’ll be required to take drastic measures like fire the principal, teachers, or other options. What happened? Demography. The town is now 80% middle/lower class hispanic for whom education and academic achievement is not at the top of the list. White kids get harassed which accelerates the white abandonment of the schools. Throw a million, a billion dollars at the failing schools issue, nothing will change unless the home and culture change.

Lisa is correct in her evaluation. I work in a public high school. I attended school in this same city and district. Education is no where near the same as it was back when most of us attended school.
Lisa is correct in that the poverty but mostly the chaos of the students’ lives affect their abilities. Some of them come to school to sleep and eat. They are trying to survive. Learning is secondary.
Our minority and poverty levels are now at the 50% level. Our district is failing at an exponential rate. It is not the teachers who fail…. but the level of need from the student that has increased.
Simply getting kids to come to school on a regular basis is difficult. Many districts are being forced to cut funding, which only adds to the problem. Less adults to take care of more needy students.
Parents and caregivers need to step up to teach basic skills. They need to provide direction, discipline, expectations and general care. There is no other solution. Many of these children come from 2nd and 3rd generation of single parent homes. Many are living with grandparents because their parents have failed in society.

First, let me say that this is about the most intelligent discussion of this issue that I have encountered on the Web. I am fairly familiar with the problems of the KCMO district over the past several decades as I lived in Kansas City MO for more than twenty years, and I was involved in teacher education at the local public university. (Incidentally, dontbesilly, I lived a few blocks from Border Star and just down the street from Southwest.)
One thing that appears to be missing from this discussion, however, is what’s implied by the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Though Kansas City share most of the problems facing urban districts (though he does have some affluent neighborhoods, such as those along Ward Pkwy. and the above-mentioned area), demonizing the families of the district’s students accomplishes nothing. Many people, though probably not enough, realized that making concerted efforts to involve parents and caregivers, was necessary. It’s difficult, though. It takes a lot of time, effort, and dedication.
One successful example is a college preparatory charter school, started by an experienced educator and a local philantropist, which is now located in a new building at the former site of local synagogue. It is open to any student in Kansas City, and enrollment is determined by lottery. It just conducted a national search for a new superintendent (it’s name for its top administrator). Its students have scored very well on Missouri assessment tests, much better than other local public schools. One reason may be that it offers extensive remedial help, especially in math, reading, and writing.
Its attendance policies are quite strict, though, but it makes considerable efforts to keep its students in school. Parental/guardian involvement is also very important, and it schedules meetings and appointments at times convenient for the former. School personnel are expected to make appropriate adjustments as well. Not all students, parents, or teachers would be willing to meet this school’s expectations, but they appear to work. We need more dedicated people who are willing to try this approach. Whether an entire school system can do this or not is questionable.

Most people/parents in the inner city do not care about getting a good education. Most of them were raised that way, therefore, the problems we are having in the inner-city schools will never change.

“In Kansas City they did try. A sympathetic federal judge invited district educators literally to “dream”–forget about cost, let their imaginations soar, put together a list of everything they might possibly need to increase the achievement of inner-city blacks–and he, using the extraordinarily broad powers granted judges in school desegregation cases, would find a way to pay for it.”
KANSAS CITY DID NOT TRY. THIS JUDGE’S ORDER WOULD HAVE WORKED HAD THE RAIL LINES AND STREET CARS NOT BEEN TORN OUT, and a ridiculous amount of money been thrown at our overbuilt highway system in METRO KC.
STARTING IN THE 1960s after BROWN V BOARD, Everyone in KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI SCHOOL DISTRICT who could, moved to the KANSAS suburbs, or NORTH OF THE RIVER, or EAST OF INTERSTATE 435. IF WE HAD LAND USE LAWS AND WERE MORE CONSERVATIVE WITH TRANSPORTATION AND ENERGY USAGE, NONE OF THE DEMISE OF KCMO SCHOOLS OR KCMO PROPER WOULD HAVE HAPPENED BETWEEN 1960-PRESENT DAY. TOO BAD THIS JUDGE DIDN’T TAKE HIS TYRANNICAL LIBERAL BIAS and declare the need to preserve open space around our urban cores and make it illegal to build OVERLAND PARK style automobile slum sprawl all over the surrounding countryside.
A. Buehler proud resident of Waldo neighborhood, KCMO

“… the way out of this morass is not easy, or quick, and that it ultimately has relatively little to do with educational policy at all.”
Very true. It has everything to do with parental involvement and family support.