What Brownback got wrong in his attack on Kansas City schools

Governors usually focus on issues in the states that they actually govern. But Tuesday night in his final State of the State address, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback reached across the Missouri state line to throw a barb at Kansas City Public Schools.

He alluded to the district’s costly desegregation case, holding it up as a disgraceful example of wasting taxpayer money.

“One need look no further than the Kansas City, Missouri, school district, sometimes called America’s most costly educational failure,” Brownback said.

Perhaps Brownback was hoping to score points with his fellow Republicans by falling back on a common trope within conservative circles about spending in urban public education. But the governor’s broadside revealed a lack of understanding of the complex challenges Kansas City schools have faced.

The Kansas City school district’s desegregation case was an interminable and incredibly expensive endeavor, costing $2 billion. It stretched across decades, from the initial filing by the district in 1977 through the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1995 to the courts finally releasing their grasp on outcomes in 2003.

What the governor is ignoring is that a lack of funding was a key reason why the district became so dysfunctional in the first place.

Citizens had not passed a tax levy increase for school funding in years. The result was a district where students were forced to make do by sharing outdated textbooks. Art and music classes were largely eliminated as administrators tried to focus only on what was absolutely necessary. Teacher salaries were low. School buildings had leaking roofs, broken windows and foul-smelling odors emanating from aging plumbing.

The deplorable conditions were a direct result of a lack of funding. The problems were exacerbated by the unwillingness of many families, including some who sent their own children to private schools, to approve a tax levy increase. Racism and white flight added to the district’s many challenges.

Remedies eventually were tied to court-ordered outcomes on test scores and on achieving a racial balance of students, an attempt to attract white students with some of the expensive magnet programs and upgrades that Brownback dismissed.

It would be naive to believe that simply dumping some cash into this struggling school district would reverse a downward slide that also was related to entrenched inter-generational poverty and the city’s long-term housing patterns.

Governor Brownback, if you don’t think that wealth has anything to do with the success of a school district, try telling that to some of the standout districts on your side of the state line where more affluent families reside.

Of course, the curious irony is that Brownback jabbed at the Kansas City district while calling for an additional $600 million to be invested in Kansas schools during the next five years. So, governor, money isn’t important?

This story was originally published January 10, 2018 at 6:30 PM with the headline "What Brownback got wrong in his attack on Kansas City schools."