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An Expensive Lesson
Many people think that lack of sufficient funding is the primary obstacle in the way of good public schools, but few realize that this theory has already been tested. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a federal judge forced Kansas City, MO to spend two billion dollars over 12 years on its approximately 35,000 students - doubling per-student spending, reducing class sizes, building dozens of expensive new schools, raising teacher salaries and so forth. It was a complete disaster - parents hated it, racial relations worsened, and corruption ran rampant. Test scores remained the same, as did the black/white achievement gap.
Now, the other shoe is dropping. As this article from the Wall Street Journal reports, the Kansas City school board has just voted to close nearly half its schools (despite their Olympic-size pools and state-of-the-art technology) and eliminate about 700 jobs in order to tackle its annual $50 million deficit. Student enrollment is way down and the schools are only half-filled.
There will soon be absolutely nothing to show for this expensive experiment. Missouri taxpayers might just as well have flushed their two billion dollars down the toilet.