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Everything’s up the Spout in Kansas City
There is nothing new in education theory, ever.

By John Derbyshire

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is an excerpt from John Derbyshire’s upcoming We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, to be released Sept. 29, 2009.

Okay, you’re probably thinking that when politicians and edbiz theorists talk about spending more money on education, they don’t have leafy suburbs and ivy-clad universities in mind. It’s those inner-city schools that are “failing our children.” That’s where we should be spending more money, right?

The optimists’ faith that spending oodles of money will solve any problem is quite touching. In the case of education, though, the spend-more-money theory has actually been tested to destruction in several places. The Thernstroms cover two of these tests in detail in No Excuses: Kansas City, Mo., and Cambridge, Mass.

Kansas City is the more interesting case. The Thernstroms give it a page and a half, leaving out some of the juicier details. There is a much fuller report on the Cato Institute website, written by education reporter Paul Ciotti.

In 1977, when the story begins, Kansas City’s schools were in simply terrible shape. The city, like most others of its size (pop. 460,000), had experienced white flight from the 1950s on, and the school district even more so, even whites resident in the city pulling their kids out of the public schools. By 1977 enrollment was 36,000, three quarters of them racial minorities[/color] (which at that point meant mostly African Americans). The voters had not approved a tax increase for the district since 1969. In 1977 litigation commenced, members of the school board, district parents, and some token children suing the state and some federal agencies on the grounds they had permitted racial segregation. Federal judge Russell Clark, a Jimmy Carter appointee, got the case.

After eight years of litigation, Clark gave the plaintiffs everything they wanted, and then some. He in fact ordered them to “dream” — to draw up a money-no-object plan for the Kansas City school system.

Dreaming is no problem for educationists. The plaintiffs — education activists and their lawyers — duly dreamt, with an initial price tag of $250 million for their dreams. This was twice the district’s normal annual budget.

It proved to be only a start, however. Over the next twelve years the district spent over 2 billion dollars, most of it from the state of Missouri, the balance from increased local property taxes. Fifteen new schools were built and 54 others renovated. New amenities included, Ciotti tells us:

The whole project was a comprehensive failure. After twelve years, test scores in reading and math had declined, dropout rates had increased, and the system was as segregated as ever, in spite of heroic efforts to lure white students back into the system.

Kansas City did all the things that educators had always said needed to be done to increase student achievement — it reduced class size, decreased teacher workload, increased teacher pay, and dramatically expanded spending per pupil — but none of it worked.

The great C-130-loads of money being air-dropped on the system also brought about waste and corruption on a heroic scale. Theft was rampant. So was overmanning: The project became a huge jobs and patronage program, with the inevitable mismanagement and scandals.


I have just (late 2008) been on GreatSchools.net, looking up Kansas City’s Central High School. That’s the one with the Olympic-size swimming pool; the school was rebuilt from scratch at a cost of $32 million under Judge Clark’s supervision. Nine percent of students are testing “above proficient” in math, against a state average of 46 percent. For Communication Arts the corresponding numbers are 6 percent, 39 percent.

(The Cato report has a postscript on the Sausalito, Calif., elementary-school district, which serves not the prosperous white liberals of that Sausalito, but a mostly-minority public housing project close by. Same limitless expenditures, same results. Kansas City is by no means the only case.)

With some honorable exceptions like the Thernstroms, who, as I have said, give the Kansas City experiment a page and a half in their book, this dismal story has mainly been flushed down the memory hole by education theorists. They would rather not have it mentioned. A decade after the whole thing collapsed in grisly and obvious failure, politicians and edbiz bureaucrats are still routinely calling for more money to be spent on schools as a way to improve student achievement.

Barack Obama, for example. On the 2008 campaign trail, the day before the Martin Luther King birthday holiday, Obama told a swooning congregation at King’s old church that: “We must push our elected officials to supply the resources to fix our schools. . . . We can’t pass a law called No Child Left Behind and then leave the money behind.”

Money is the answer! More money! That’ll fix the schools! That’ll close those pesky gaps!

Education theorists are great forgetters, and were even before Judge Clark came along. The first of the big modern government-sponsored papers on school reform, James Coleman’s 1966 report titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity” (but almost always referred to as “the Coleman Report”), surveyed 645,000 students in over 3,000 schools nationwide. Coleman found almost no relationship between school quality — spending, newness of facilities, teacher credentials — and student achievement.

If you rank schools from worst to best by these measures of quality, then work your way up the ranking from low to high, logging student achievement as you go, once you get above a tiny proportion of really, really bad schools, nothing much changes. A truly excellent school with terrific facilities does somewhat better by its students than a mediocre school, but the difference is not great. What makes the difference is family background.

All this was discovered, at considerable effort and expense, in 1966. Apparently nobody told Judge Clark. Who knows? — perhaps some future government will commission some new study to find out how student achievement relates to school quality. Then, a decade later, perhaps some new federal judge will order some new spend-a-thon, beggaring the taxpayers of his state to no effect at all. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It is not quite true that there is nothing new under the sun, but there is nothing new in education theory, ever: just the same truths, revealed again and again, then pushed down the same memory hole by the same lying careerists, the same wishful-thinking fantasists, and the same parrot-brained politicians.


— John Derbyshire is an NRO columnist and author, most recently, of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.

The Underdogs
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

It is a good reflection on Americans that they tend to be on the side of the underdog. But it is often hard to tell who is in fact the underdog, or why.

Many years ago, there was a big, lumbering catcher named Ernie Lombardi whose slowness afoot was legendary. Someone once said that not only was Ernie Lombardi the slowest man who ever played major league baseball, whoever was second slowest was probably a lot faster runner than Ernie Lombardi.


When Lombardi came to bat, infielders played back on the outfield grass. That gave them more range in getting to balls that Lombardi hit. They could snare line-drives that would otherwise be base hits. With ground balls, they could easily throw to first base from the outfield grass and get the slow-moving Lombardi out.

Despite all that, Ernie Lombardi had a lifetime batting average of .306 and even led the league in batting a couple of years. But many people said that, if Lombardi had had just average speed, he could have been a .400 hitter.

One day, as a teenager sitting in the Polo Grounds, the stadium where the then New York Giants played, I was privileged to watch a historic event. Ernie Lombardi laid down a bunt!

The crowd went wild. The play took forever, with Lombardi laboriously clumping down to first base-- running as hard as he could, but still not very fast-- while the third baseman made a long run in from left field to get to the bunt.

We cheered ourselves hoarse rooting for big Ernie as he doggedly but slowly made his way down the first base line. He barely beat the throw, which set off another explosion of cheers.

We were not just cheering for a home-town player. We were rooting for Lombardi to get revenge on those who had taken advantage of him for so long. We were cheering for the underdog.

But was Lombardi really an underdog? How many players end up their careers with a lifetime batting average over .300 or with two batting titles? Like most of us, Lombardi was handicapped in some ways and privileged in others.

Many people would consider it a handicap to be a black orphan, born in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the home into which I was adopted had four adults and I was the only child. Many years later, when I was a parent and asked one of the surviving members of that family how old I was when I started walking, she said: "Oh, Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you."

You can't buy that. A leading historian of education has said that the New York City public schools were the best in the country during the 1940s. That was when I went to school there. That was enough piece of sheer good luck that came my way. Today the classes are smaller, the buildings more modern-- but the education itself is a disaster. I got the kind of education that people have to go to expensive private schools to get today.

Perhaps more important, nobody told me that I couldn't make it because I was poor and black, or that I ought to hate white people today because of what some other white people did to my ancestors in some other time.

Nobody sugar-coated the facts of racial discrimination. But Professor Sterling Brown of Howard University, who wrote with eloquent bitterness about racism, nevertheless said to me when I prepared to transfer to Harvard: "Don't come back here and tell me you didn't make it 'cause white folks were mean."

He burned my bridges behind me, the way they used to do with armies going into battle, so that they had no place to retreat to, and so had to fight to win.

One of the problems with trying to help underdogs, especially with government programs, is that they and everyone else start to think of them as underdogs, focusing on their problems rather than their opportunities. Thinking of themselves as underdogs can also dissipate their energies in resentments of others, rather than spending that energy making the most of their own possibilities.

It must have been discouraging for Ernie Lombardi, especially in his early years, to be repeatedly thrown out at first base on balls that would have been base hits for anybody else. But he couldn't let himself dwell on that-- not and win two batting titles.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

One of the central complaints against a so-called "public option", a mechanism by which Americans may optionally purchase health insurance via the government, as opposed to private corporations, is that private insurance companies could of course never compete fairly in the marketplace against a such an ultra-efficient juggernaut. This is of course the exact opposite of conservative thinking of the last three decades, in which the government could not possibly -- could not possibly, I say! -- do anything half as competently as our private corporations, which is why everything from Amtrak to the post office has had to fight for every last scrap of congressional support, and why Social Security should be privatized and run by the titans of Wall Street, and why large portions of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are reliant on private companies to the tune of so many billions of dollars that nobody is entirely sure how many billions it is, any more, and is incidentally why our brave American soldiers in Iraq risk electrocution when they step into the shower. ..............

First off, if health insurance companies ran the mail service you couldn't actually expect to send mail anywhere. You would have a list of addresses it was OK to send mail to, and if you wanted to send your packages anywhere else you'd have to deliver it your own damn self.

If health insurance companies ran the mail service, you wouldn't know what it would cost to mail a package, because nobody involved would be able to tell you, even if you spent the better part of a week on the phone with them. You would know what it cost you one only after you received the bill for mailing it. This bill would come one month later, but additional charges would be added a month after that, more additions would come two months later, the total would be revised again in four months, and would be adjusted again after six months. If you want to complain, knock yourself out, but chances are you won't even remember what it was you mailed back in the summer of 2008 or whenever-that-was.........

It did start me thinking, though. Private companies like UPS and FedEx compete perfectly well with the socialist front that is the United States Post Office. How could this be?

Sen. Hatch: "We have done this long enough to know that when Washington tells you that something costs $5, it always costs at least $10 or more. Guess what? As our deficit continues to rise and our debt triples in the next decade, all of these taxes will continue to rise. This bill is laying -- we are giving washington a new check book. I commend the president's commitment to only sign a bill that does not add a penny to our growing deficit. I sincerely hope that we will apply the same standards of honesty on our accounting of this bill, as we are now demanding from families and businesses. First, it is important to know that most of the major provisions of this bill do not really start until 2013 or 2014. Once a deadly, right after the presidential elections. So the initial 10-year price tag of $856 billion is a significant underestimation. In reality this is not a 10-your score, but a six or seven-year best guess. The real 10-year cost will be significantly higher. More importantly, I am very concerned that this legislation -- that on this legislation, which the chairman rightfully described as 'the single largest social bill as the great depression' we will not have a complete score, at a time when americans all of the nation are outraged some members cannot even know what is in the bill, how can we justify making these decisions without fully understanding the impact of these policies?" [Senate Finance Committee Health Care Reform Mark-up, 9/22/09]