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No. 298

March 16, 1998

Policy Analysis

MONEY AND SCHOOL PERFORMANCE

Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment

by Paul Ciotti

Executive Summary

For decades critics of the public schools have been

saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing

money at them."  The education establishment and its support-

ers have replied, "No one's ever tried."  In Kansas City they

did try.  To improve the education of black students and

encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas

City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-

object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers

to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more

money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any

other of the 280 largest districts in the country.  The money

bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such

amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwa-

ter viewing room, television and animation studios, a robot-

ics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United

Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field

trips to Mexico and Senegal.  The student-teacher ratio was

12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the

country.

The results were dismal.  Test scores did not rise; the

black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not

greater, integration.

The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educa-

tional problems can't be solved by throwing money at them,

that the structural problems of our current educational

system are far more important than a lack of material re-

sources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted atten-

tion from the real problem, low achievement.

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Paul Ciotti lives in Los Angeles and writes about education.