Are Kansas City public schools underfunded?
It’s a question worth asking as KCUR reports the Kansas City Public School District will seek a bond increase in 2025 for technology purchases and school construction. This follows district leadership voting to maintain its tax levy at the current rate, reaping a windfall from recent increases in Jackson County property assessments.
A recent guest commentary in The Star admitted Missouri schools are failing students and attributed it to “anti-Black racism, both by design and function,” arguing the schools need much more money
Is that really the case? For some context, I turned to Mike McShane, my colleague at the Show-Me Institute. He now serves as director of national research at EdChoice, an organization advancing education freedom. McShane has published 12 books on education policy, holds a Ph.D. in education policy and taught high school in Montgomery, Alabama. Most important, he was born and raised right here in Kansas City.
McShane says the story of race and education in Kansas City is complicated. He tells me: “Kansas City was a model district for desegregation in the 1950s. It was one of only 15 districts across the country that voluntarily desegregated.” He recommends anyone interested in the history of race, school finances, and the politics of the Kansas City, Missouri, school district read Joshua Dunn’s book “Complex Justice,” which follows the city’s long-running school desegregation case. In that book, Dunn quotes the city’s longtime Black newspaper The Call as reporting that initially desegregation occurred “without a ripple of difficulty.” McShane says this was in part due to “the quality of institutions like Lincoln (College Preparatory Academy), a school that in the face of segregation grew to be an incredible educational institution,” white students were happy to attend.
The case Dunn wrote about, Missouri v. Jenkin, resulted from a 1977 claim that Kansas City schools were unconstitutionally segregated. The first substantive decision came down in 1984, when Judge Russell Clark ruled in the plaintiff’s favor. The next 20 years, until the case was dismissed in 2003, were spent trying to reshape the school district — and pay for it.
Because of previous rulings, McShane explains, school districts “could not require suburban districts to cooperate, so Judge Clark signed off on a massive spending plan to renovate the physical plant of KCPS buildings and create a set of magnet schools that would draw white children in from outlying areas.”
‘Still struggles to provide adequate education’
The spending totaled more than $2 billion. McShane tells me: “From 1987 to 1993, Kansas City teachers saw a 44% increase in their base pay. By 1996, it was the highest spending of the nation’s largest school districts. It had much lower teacher-student ratios than comparable districts, a nearly limitless technology budget, an army of administrators and school facilities that were second to none.”
“Central High School was called the ‘Taj Mahal’ for its incredible sports facilities,” McShane points out, “and Southwest had a working planetarium and a model (United Nations) facility with functioning simultaneous translation capabilities.”
“If money was the answer,” McShane notes, “Kansas City was the place that tried to prove it.”
But money wasn’t the answer.
Judge Dean Whipple, assigned to the case after Clark retired, observed in dismissing the case: “Despite the expenditure of vast sums, the prolonged oversight of a federal court and its appointees, the efforts of multiple parties, and the passage of 40 years since the end of official de jure segregation in Kansas City, Missouri, the (public school district) still struggles to provide an adequate education to its pupils.”
Arthur Benson, the lawyer for the plaintiffs and later school board member, said: “We’ve done the easy and expensive things. What remains now are the relatively inexpensive but extraordinarily difficult things to accomplish and that’s to change how teachers teach and kids learn and buildings are organized and administered.”
McShane, like me and many voters, wonders how spending more money is going accomplish those inexpensive but difficult things that remain.
Money didn’t solve those problems before. It beggars belief that it will do so now.
Patrick Tuohey is co-founder of Better Cities Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on municipal policy solutions, and a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to Missouri state policy work.
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