A Regional Issue
The success of Kansas City’s schools is not merely a local concern, it’s part of a larger, regional issue weighing heavily on the business climates of both Missouri and Kansas. The long-troubled St. Louis school district, with a history of failures that rivals Kansas City’s, is on its seventh superintendent since 2003.
And despite promising indications of academic improvements in the Kansas City, Kan., district and the much larger Wichita school district, both remain well behind state averages in student performance.
Combined, those four districts enroll nearly 10 percent of the roughly 1.3 million public school students in the two-state region.
As Anglemyer notes, however, the suburban fringe, even with its higher-performing schools, is not safeguarded by the distances between their communities and the educational shortcomings of urban districts—we’re all in this together, he suggests, whether we realize it or not.
“Employers have a stake in those student outcomes, and they get that,” he said. “If you look at any employer of any size, 50 or more employees, you’re going to see people who travel 50 or 60 miles to get to that job. So you can’t just focus on the educational system in the Blue Valley, Olathe or Shawnee Mission districts. Some of your employees are going to end up being people educated in
North Kansas City, Leavenworth, Lee’s Summit or throughout the metropolitan area.”
A Cautionary Tale
Can it get any worse?
If Kansas City doesn’t get its academic house in order, things can indeed become more complicated. A prime example of just how difficult things can get sits on the other side of the state. Three years ago, the Missouri State Board of Education stripped accreditation from the St. Louis city school system, triggering the effective state takeover of a district serving more than 35,000 students at that time.
There is a faction in Kansas City that favors a similar approach here, arguing that the KC district’s difficulties have proven impervious to local solutions.
But in St. Louis, some in a community bitterly divided for decades over approaches to “fixing” those schools went into conniptions when the state stepped in. Their schools remain governed by a three-member panel appointed by the state board—and will remain under that control for the foreseeable future.
“There was considerable turmoil in the community, anger over the loss of local control,” said Jim Morris, director of the public information office for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “The biggest argument in St. Louis was probably that we’d removed a popularly elected board of education, and therefore removed that local-accountability piece.”
The other side of those arguments, Morris said—and this should be familiar to anyone who has followed Kansas City’s protracted decline—is that the St. Louis district had “stumbled and fumbled and struggled for too long, making little-to-no progress, the students continued to struggle, and that something needed to be done to turn things around.”
Three years on, the St. Louis experience may provide some guidance for those with a stake in Kansas City’s situation. But William Danforth, chancellor emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the state panel reviewing progress in the district there, cautioned against drawing too direct a comparison.
A cardiologist by training before becoming a college administrator, Danforth declines to offer an assessment how sub-par school performance has affected the business community there. But he did note that, without effective direction from the top—something deemed missing in St. Louis before the takeover—educational reform programs were unlikely to have their intended effect.
“My background is in medicine, so I have a simple, simplistic view,” he said. “The human body has to have a lot of things functioning well—the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, brain. If anything goes really bad with any one of those, the whole body is in trouble.
“The same is true in any organization,” said Danforth. “Governance can be a terrible problem or it can be a great help. Alone, it doesn’t solve the social or educational problems, but without good governance, you don’t have a chance.”
The bottom line for Danforth, who was part of the original panel that recommended state takeover of the St. Louis district, is that it was the right call for that district at that time. Nothing that’s happened in the three years since makes him think the outcome should have been, or could have been, any different.
The Role of Business
Is there more that business can do to shore up a weak educational system? Yes, says Anglemyer, but only to a point.
“In so many of the jobs I’ve had in social services or non-profit or government work, the conversation comes around to, ‘If business would only do this…’” he said. But attempts to play the corporate-responsibility card, he said, “are of limited utility.”
As an official at an organization dedicated to improving the quality of the work force, he said, “it is our responsibility to go to businesses and say, ‘What would it take, what could we do, how could we prepare employees in a way that will benefit you?’
“It takes some businesses stepping up on their own and developing a sense of corporate responsibility” by hiring some workers who may be under-skilled and absorbing the costs of bringing them up to speed, he acknowledged.
But that, as well, is only a small piece of what’s needed, he said: “More than half the battle is with those of us on the workforce preparation side,” and that includes the public schools. “We need to understand what businesses want and need, and to think like businesses. Not to tell them that doing this or that will make you look good, but to show them that doing it will make your bottom line look good.”
From the Chamber’s perspective, deSilva acknowledges that efforts to reform a district in decline for half a century will not be resolved quickly.
“This is a journey; let’s not kid ourselves,” he said. “But you never finish something you don’t start. The plan proposed here is good, it should be supported and it should be implemented—but it’s just a first step.” 