Fixing Kansas City Schools Will Not Be Easy

America's press has told you the Joe Friday version of the story of the boy who was set on fire in Kansas City.  Just the facts, and fairly sterilized at that.  If you read enough news reports you can get the idea that this was a racially motivated attack. But it appears you have to leave American news reports to get the bigger picture (remember the zoom out post).  Selwyn Duke reported in the Canada Free Press on the atmosphere in the Kansas City schools that made this type of attack almost inevitable.

The boy raised his hand, eager to answer the question.  “What would you know about it?” exclaimed the teacher dismissively.  “You’re not our race."

This was not dialogue from a Hollywood movie.  According to a woman named Melissa Coon, it was what a teacher at East High School in Kansas City told her 13-year-old son, Allen, when he attempted to answer a question during Black History Month.  Coon identifies that teacher as Mrs. Karla Dorsey, who is black; Allen is white.

As has already been reported, Allen was a victim of a vicious racial attack last week in which two older black teens doused him with gasoline and set him alight, saying “This is what you deserve.  You get what you deserve, white boy.”  Not surprisingly, Coon has pulled her son out of East High and, concerned about further racial violence, intends to leave the K.C. area. 

While this crime is making headlines, Coon states that it was merely the horrible culmination of continual racial harassment her son had to endure at East High.  Moreover, after conducting an investigation that included extensive interviews with parents and students, I’ve learned that Coon’s son is not alone.  Other white students also report a pattern of racial harassment at the high school at the hands of their peers – and, shockingly, their teachers. 

Two of these victims were the twin 14-year-old daughters (first names withheld upon request) of Karin Wildeisen.  Ever since their family relocated from Texas they had endured racial animosity in the Kansas City school system and inappropriate behavior by staff, which included teachers laughing while boys humiliatingly manhandled the girls and a teacher slapping one of them on the backside.  But there was far worse to come.

The twins started coming home and talking about the goings-on in an advanced-English class taught by a teacher Wildeisen identifies as Ms. Veda Monday.  Wildeisen said that her daughters told her, “There are four white kids in the class; they are being targeted racially.”  They said that Monday, who is black, was feeding the class racial material, about which Wildeisen notes, “She’s teaching advanced English; she has no reason to be teaching civil rights.” 

But then there was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  One day Monday allegedly showed an explicit film involving portrayals of whites lynching blacks and then, reports ex-Texan Wildeisen, “in front of the class attacked my daughters, telling them that ‘everybody from Texas is ignorant rednecks’” and that all white people were ‘responsible for Jasper because [their] skin is white.’”  This reference is to an atrocity in Jasper, TX, in which three white men murdered a black man in 1998.

Where would a teacher get the idea that all whites are responsible for the Jasper tragedy?  It’s not hard to figure out.  Black-liberation theology (BLT) instructs, writes the man some regard as its father, Professor James Cone, “All white men are responsible for white oppression.”  And how common is BLT?  Well, Cone’s books were required reading at Barack Obama’s long-time house of worship in Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ.

The end result of this is that Wildeisen, like Melissa Coon, decided to pull her children out of East High.  Also like Coon, she intends to leave the area, saying that it and the school are a “powder keg.”  As for now, her daughters are studying at home via a distance-learning program.

Another white victim is 15-year-old Ashley Miller, whose family had moved to K.C., MO, from Kansas.  Subject to racial harassment, she was called names such as “white b****.”  She also actually shared a class with Allen Coon, and as the only two white students in the room they became the target of sexual comments.  Moreover, she reports the same experience with race-baiting videos as do the Wildeisens: they would be shown, and an onus would be placed on the white students.  Her mother Melissa told me that she now fears for her daughter’s safety and, you guessed it, is in the process of withdrawing Ashley from East High.  And the rest of the pattern is holding, too: the Millers are contemplating leaving the area.

Yet even putting the brutal fire attack aside, Melissa Coon’s young boy by far got the worst of it.  The tow-headed Allen looks like “the classic all-American white boy,” says his mother, and “after the first week [of school] he was nothing but racially harassed.”  She says that “he was called every racial slur you can imagine,” such as “honkey,” “cracker,” “whitey” and “guero” (a Spanish slang term for whites that can be used in a derogatory way).  He was, she reports, pushed into lockers and was jumped in the bathroom.  And, even before the recent attack, he was sometimes menaced by groups that would follow him part of the way home.

Even more damning, though, is that multiple educators were complicit in the harassment.  Mrs. Coon related an incident in which a teacher she identifies as Ms. Carla Kinder called Allen “Casper” and then “got all the students to get involved.”  Other times, the students would initiate the harassment and the teachers would pick up the baton.  “They would tease him; people would make fun of him and they’d chime in,” said Coon.

This is the atmosphere in the Kansas City schools and the teachers, and even the administration, seem to be tacitly supporting it. Duke continues,

And Indifference 101seems to be a course offering at East High, too.  Melissa Coon had been complaining to the school’s administration about her son’s harassment repeatedly – only to be ignored and stonewalled – repeatedly.  At one point an administrator told her that her son could only have a transfer to another district school but said that Allen would have “more problems there” and that he should stay at more “racially diverse” East High (which has no more than 20 white students).  At another, a vice Principal Coon identifies as Ms. Jessica Bassett denied, while shaking and rubbing her hands together nervously, ever having heard about Allen’s problems even though they had been brought to her attention on at least five occasions.

St Louis Public Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams spoke of the difficulty in firing a bad teacher in Missouri's metropolitan districts which has led to the retention of some really awful teachers. His comments, at a Show Me Institute Policy breakfast, indicated that it can take up to 100 days to get rid of a bad teacher. If you do the math, this is more than half a school year (180 days) that kids are subjected to teachers the administration would like to get rid of.  Is this the excuse that Kansas City officials will give for not disciplining their teachers who incite such behavior in their classrooms? Probably not, because the problem extends beyond the schools.   

And Coon’s experience with the local police hasn’t been much better.  Listening to her testimony I got the feeling that K.C. law enforcement didn’t want the arrest and prosecution of two black youths on a hate-crime charge, possibly for fear of the “powder keg."

Does anyone think that replacing the school board or superintendent is going to fix this problem? This problem is deeply embedded in the community.  You can read many explanations of why here and here, but one salient point both authors make is this.  If you repeatedly expose people to a limited set of facts designed to prove an agenda (otherwise known as propaganda), you will inevitably create people who believe your agenda to their core. If you do this in class, you end up with students who do what they did to Allen Coon. If you do this in the broader media, as Jack Cashill of the American Thinker posited on the  refusal of the media to report politically incorrect “hate crimes", you find the cumulative effect to be one that leads minorities, especially blacks, to think themselves "uniquely victimized.” And when you thus believe, you’re more likely to lash out.

If you display a group’s sins to the exclusion of its triumphs ad infinitum, you can make it appear a den of demons.  And, ever since the advent of video technology, propaganda films have been used the world over to cultivate racial and ethnic hostility.  It is Hate 101.

This is one cautionary tale regarding local control, but I mention it in the name of putting all the cards on the table. Surely we can turn curricula over to the schools and teachers without allowing them to teach hate and divisiveness. Can't we?

A Paradigm Shift in the Kansas City School District

You may or may not be aware of the new classroom structure being tried in the Kansas City, MO school system. When classes begin in just under a month, classes will begin with two weeks of testing, and then students will be grouped by ability, not age.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/07/21/forget-grade-levels-schools-try-something-new/?

Kansas City, MO schools need to try something new. Test scores have been failing for years even as huge amounts of federal money have flowed into the district. The district has gone through two BILLION dollars from a desegregation settlement...with nothing to show for it in terms of increased student achievement. Read this excellent analysis on the history of Kansas City, MO schools and the collapse of the school district and system:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html


This report delves into the myriad of problems facing this district over 30 years and illustrates throwing money or mandates at failing schools doesn't work. Race to the Top is not the answer for failing districts. It will cost the states money they don't have to institute the mandates. It's a bureaucratic nightmare. So what is the answer?

Kansas City hopes it has found a solution grouping children according to ability. I applaud the KCMSD's approach to teaching its students by this new method. Denver has tried it with success, and school districts in Maine are beginning the process of ability grouping. I have some experience as a parent with this approach. When my son was attending an oral deaf school, he was grouped with kids with similar abilities. As a parent, I was satisfied my son was placed where he could be most successful. A school should ensure a child achieves success at the rate he/she is able. A child who is failing will become frustrated and give up. This pattern is replayed year after year and the child falls farther and farther behind. By the time middle school comes around, the student has probably lost any interest in learning. Then districts are in the warehousing mode with these students, rather than educating them.

The most important two sentences in the eschoolnews.com article reads:

But backers acknowledge that implementation is tricky, and the change is so drastic it can take time to explain to parents, teachers and students. "If the community isn't sold on the effort, it will bomb", said RichardDeLorenzo, co-founder of the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition, which coaches schools on implementing the reform.

Why are these sentences so important? If you read through the original 800 page Race to the Top document prepared by the Department of Education, it is clear parents are never considered to be an important "stakeholder" in student progress. In Missouri, the original Race to the Top state proposal never listed parents as important stakeholders; instead, it was superintendents, teachers, principals and union representatives who are most important in your student's educational life. I have great hopes for the KCMSD plan, as these educators are aware of the profound responsibility parents have in the their children's educational progress. This approach is a "team approach" which is necessary for success.

I wish the school district, parents and students well. I hope it works. I understand the social and emotional skill levels are particularly important to address in elementary school. It appears the groupings will only occur in the subjects of math and reading. Children will still be with their peers for social learning. Perhaps NOT "teaching to the middle" in core subjects will be of great benefit to both remedial and gifted learners.

I remember when the director of my son's school told me, "If a child is not succeeding, WE need to do something different to reach that child. It is OUR responsibility to help that child succeed". I hope the KCMSD is turning the corner and these kids will receive a diploma that's worth something.

And guess what? It won't cost the state of Missouri $150 Million it doesn't have to try what the Department of Education wants us to buy into. It also lets the local district make the decision to do what it believes it needs to do to turn around disastrous scores and failing students. Two billion dollars of federal money and mandates, expensive buildings and swimming pools haven't helped Kansas City students. I hope this latest round of educational reform is the ticket out of mediocrity for these kids.