In 1985, after finding that the city and the state had maintained a racially segregated system, Federal District Judge Russell Clark ordered an ambitious overhaul of Kansas City's schools. As he put it, he "allowed the district planners to dream" and "provided the mechanism for those dreams to be realized." All on the White taxpayer's dime of course, $1.5 billion in all. Annual spending per pupil grew to twice that of nearby White suburbs. Rotted buildings were replaced with state-of-the-art facilities. Greenhouses, laboratories, a 25-acre farm, a planetarium, schools that offered "total immersion" in foreign languages, an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, lavish athletic arenas, radio and TV studios, computers in every classroom field trips to Mexico and Senegal. You name it, they were given it. Teacher salaries were substantially increased and the student:teacher ratio was reduced to the lowest in the country.
And the results were spectacular. SAT scores and attendance rates soared for black students while dropout rates declined dramatically. Many of them went on to found leading-edge companies and develop brilliant careers in science and technology. Well no, actually. In fact the experiment failed so badly that after ten years the Supreme Court stepped in to bring it to a halt. The dropout rate actually increased while daily attendance rates, despite the magnificent facilities, actually declined and 60% of the 'students' who started high school never finished. Performance on standardised tests showed "no measurable improvement" (PC-Speak for 'no improvement'). Worst of all the black/White achievement gap, the bridging of which was the program's centrepiece, remained as wide as ever. By some measurements it had actually widened. The forecast rebalancing of student demographics (70% black) not alone failed to emerge but actually got worse, rising to 80% in 1995. Even the Washington Post admitted that 'compared to students in the rest of the state, Kansas City pupils are worse off today than when Judge Clark began underwriting the school district's dreams'.
Heckuva job there Judgie, well done.
White taxpayers (but I repeat myself) naturally enough objected to Clark's social engineering. Not only had they to fork over more tax money for black kids but now also tens of thousands of after-tax dollars to send their own kids to safe schools. (At a given bus stop it was common to find ten local kids going to ten different schools.) This revolt prompted Clark to take over fiscal policy as well, inflicting massive tax increases on the unfortunate citizenry. So not alone was he making the law up as he went along he then ruled that citizens weren't taxing themselves enough.
The whole experiment was an unmitigated disaster, with ultimately no winners, not even the "teachers" (almost all black and described by one educator as "not focused, vacuous, totally devoid of intellectual capacity, ill suited for the mission at hand") feeding at the Gub'mint trough, most of whom eventually lost their sinecures. In fact it wasn't an experiment at all because the results of a real experiment are, ipso facto, unknown beforehand. Whereas the results of Clark's folly were utterly predictable. I mean, all it took was a couple of weeks in Nigeria and another few weeks in Rochester NY for me to understand the truth about blacks. How can people grow up in America and not realise the same thing?
I ask because not a single analysis of the Kansas 'experiment' even hinted at the real explanation. Even the "right wing"Cato Institute. The failure was attributed to lack of incentives, training, self-esteem, money and time. Or the legacy of slavery....you name it. We all know that the leading nation-wreckers were fully aware, rubbing their hands in glee as society disintegrated before their eyes. But what about Judge Clark and the army of White libtards who volunteered to implement the scheme? Apparently Clark went to his grave believing that with just a little more time and money the achievement gap would have been eliminated. And the madness continues to this day.
'They don't know enough to care or don't care enough to know'.
I ask because not a single analysis of the Kansas 'experiment' even hinted at the real explanation. Even the "right wing"Cato Institute. The failure was attributed to lack of incentives, training, self-esteem, money and time. Or the legacy of slavery....you name it. We all know that the leading nation-wreckers were fully aware, rubbing their hands in glee as society disintegrated before their eyes. But what about Judge Clark and the army of White libtards who volunteered to implement the scheme? Apparently Clark went to his grave believing that with just a little more time and money the achievement gap would have been eliminated. And the madness continues to this day.
'They don't know enough to care or don't care enough to know'.