Judge Clark's Blunder

...the black-white achievement gap hasn't changed...

...It's not hard to see why...

...Clark had made a basic mistake...

...Once when the district needed a native-French-speaking teacher for a French-immersion magnet school, it hired a savvy African woman who had been educated in a convent school in Cameroon...

...Once you decided which way you are going on [race], you made the decision on the merits of what is left...

...Clark should have been able to do something about the school system's poor administration...

...Unfortunately for the students, such successes could only be duplicated in a small number of magnets...

...For despite what the professional educators may have thought, the problem wasn't money after all, but teachers...

...I knew it would take time, but I did believe by five years into this program we would see not just results, but dramatic results educationally...

...As a result, black ministers took a keen interest in the hiring and promotional practices of the school district, including Mayor Emanuel Cleaver, himself a Methodist minister...

...Judge Clark's Blunder by Paul Ciotti Over the last 10 years, a federal judge has spent $1.6 billion trying to desegregate the Kansas City, Missouri, schools and improve achievement for black students...

...An attempt to fire anyone would have been regarded as a grave insult and huge calamity...

...The same was true when it came to hiring teachers or principals...

...It is really disheartening," says black activist and Kansas City attorney Clinton Adams, "because this district had an opportunity like no other district in the country to really come in and deliver a quality education and truly desegregated educational experience for African-American kids-and they failed...

...When Judge Clark first took over the school district in 1984, his twin goals were "to integrate the system" and "to build a quality education program...

...New hires weren't based on merit but on a quota-one black for every white...

...But despite the best efforts of Judge Russell G. Clark, the school district is as segregated as it was 10 years ago...

...In an attempt to recruit black teachers, the district went to the teachers colleges, only to discover, says Benson, that only 3 percent of the graduates were black...

...Clark provided the money, and in the end it made no difference...

...Suddenly, a district that had never even been able to balance its own books found itself inundated with hundreds of millions of additional dollars per year for new schools, TV studios, computers, swimming pools, ceramics labs, planetariums, zoos, a model United Nations with simultaneous-translation capability, and a mock court, complete with a jury deliberation room and judge's chambers...

...Former school board president Fulson, whose children were plaintiffs in the original school-desegregation suit that led to Clark's takeover, "truly believed," she said recently, "if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed, that they would truly make a huge difference...

...average daily attendance is down...

...According to the estimate of plaintiffs' attorney Arthur Benson, 40 percent of the teachers in Kansas City are incompetent...

...He really had gone though a change of heart as to who was at fault," says Alison Morantz, a Harvard graduate student who has done a study of the case...

...I think it's 50 percent or better...

...The number of African Americans being trained to be teachers had plummeted in the last 15 years," he says...

...There were, however, a few shining exceptions...

...For teaching positions with such specialized requirements that they could only be filled from outside the locally available pool, the new hires were often extraordinarily well qualified...

...Together with the post office, they were the leading employers of the city's middle class blacks...

...They had as much money as any school district will ever get," says Gary Orfield, a Harvard sociologist who directed a study of the district...

...After all, anyone who can unilaterally double property taxes should have been able to find a way to replace bad teachers with good ones...

...In the two decades following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision barring separate-but-equal schools, whites gradually fled the school district, and the white population went from 75 percent to 25 percent...

...and the high school dropout rate is going up...

...But as the trial progressed, Clark's attitudes gradually changed from those of a farm boy raised in the redneck Ozarks to those of a fervent crusader...

...Race is the first and foremost consideration in almost anything to do with the district," says former school board president Sue Fulson, who served on the board from 1982 to 1994...

...He really wanted to make amends...

...It didn't do very much...

...Clark pushed the exceptionally broad powers granted to judges in school desegregation cases right to the limit, unilaterally doubling city property taxes and, when that proved insufficient, ordering the state to make up the difference...

...In Kansas City, the schools weren't just an institution for educating children...

...There was no gap between black and white students...

...Its students scored above national norms on standardized tests...

...As for the rest of the students, says Adams, too often they are being taught by teachers who are "ill prepared, ineffective, and [unable to] connect with them...

...But reaching the goals was more difficult than the judge ever dreamed...

...By the trial's end, he had rendered a decision so favorable to the plaintiffs that even they were stunned...

...As white voters lost interest in the school district, they quit passing school-bond measures, and by 1977, the year Clark was first assigned the case, schools were literally falling apart, with windows coming out, ceiling tiles tumbling down, and blue sky showing through the roofs...

...Forty percent is low," says black activist Adams...

...The fact that she and the rest of Kansas City never saw such results, she concluded, "is my bitterest disappointment...

...He had accepted without question the argument of professional educators that the district could bring test scores up to state averages in four or five years if they only had enough money...

...Test scores for black students hadn't improved at all, and high school dropout rates were about 55 percent and (slowly) rising...

...Inviting the district planners to go out and "dream"-build, buy, order, train, whatever they needed to reverse the downward trend of Kansas City's central city schools...

...Although Clark would soon become the most hated man in Missouri for the way he pushed the judicial envelope in trying to ingegrate the schools, at the start of the desegregation case he was far from a judicial activist...

...And in any case, "however you measure it, the kids going into schools of education [both black and white] are at the bottom of the barrel academically...

...Mistakenly deferring to the school district on educational matters, the judge did everything to fix the system but the one thing that would have made the most difference-firing incompetent teachers and replacing them with good ones...

...In fact, during one part of the eight-month trial, he so badly frightened the young NAACP lawyers who were helping to argue the plaintiffs' case that they would go into the bathroom and throw up before court...

...Furthermore, the school district's central administration is bloated, with three to five times as many employees as other districts the same size...

...But after $1.6 billion had been spent, the Kansas City Municipal School District was less integrated on average than before the plan started...

...Paul Ciotti is a Los Angeles writer who covers public schools...

...But Clark, an essentially modest man, seemed to feel himself unqualified to second-guess professional educators in their own field-his worst mistake...

...The school flourished...

...He did, and on a grandiose scale...