Save a School District
by Albert P. Mauro
Imagine a city where people would rather have their children in the central schools than in the suburban ones. Imagine tens of thousands of additional kids in Kansas City School District classrooms. Imagine that they’re outperforming other districts academically.
An absurdity? No, it’s historical fact. That’s what the Kansas City schools looked like when I came to this city from Connecticut in 1952. Can they ever regain that lost status? I think they can, but the community is going to have to make a concerted effort to undo decades of concerted indifference.
Some of that will have to come from parents. Some from district administrators and teachers. Some from the students themselves. And some from the business community, which has to assert its own interests to change the face of academic administration in this city’s schools.
But first, some perspective. A decade ago, I was privileged to be able to sit on the Kansas City Board of Education, including time as the board president. Yes, the district had its issues even then—it was two decades into a federal desegregation lawsuit that provided constant distractions from the goal of teaching children, for one. It also was hemorrhaging students to outlying districts, it was caught in a vicious circle of superintendent churn, and competing factional interests among school board members had reduced the body to a micromanaging mess.
For a while, the board was able to restore some stability. But the underlying fundamentals of effective leadership had already been eroded by the corrosive nature of the district’s own governance structure.
So if we really want to fix what’s wrong with our schools, we’ll have to show the collective guts to take some dramatic steps on our own, rather than turn it over to state-level bureaucrats who have no direct stake in the educational outcomes here. Here’s what we should do:
• Change the way we elect the school board. This is the only board of education in Missouri that elects a majority of its board members on a district basis—six of them, joined by three at-large members. That’s a recipe for turf battles if I ever saw one. Scrap that system, and make them all at-large, responsible for the district as a whole. And while we are at it, revisit the August 16, 2001 report of the Kansas City Consensus Governance Task Force report, chaired by Bart Hakan. That report lays out a blueprint for governance reforms that I believe can change the course of the district.
• Absent that, dissolve the board and turn policy-making over to the Metropolitan Community College board. They seem to be doing a good job running an educational system, and they’re dealing with largely the same students. Have that board appoint a vice chancellor in charge of K-12, give him taxing authority, and let the professionals run the system.
• Create a structure that compels policy-makers to do just that: Make policy. It’s madness to expect a school board to rule on every contract needed to administer a system with 17,000 students, to hold disciplinary hearings on teachers, or get involved in decisions about which individuals will be principals at which schools.
• Collaborate. The surrounding districts have some exceptional programs in place that Kansas City’s schools could tap into, if we could find a way to make the arrangement productive for both parties. Let’s at least have the conversations.
• And for goodness sake, let’s get the business community truly involved with this district. Educating urban students, with the baggage they bring to class each day, is expensive enough as it is. At the board and administrative levels, Kansas City’s schools lack talented business leadership that can address the inefficiencies and systemic operational flaws that are diverting resources away from classroom instruction. Let’s formalize policies of not penalizing employees who choose to serve on the school board or in consultative administrative positions, so that their prospects of career advancement aren’t jeopardized because they chose to do the right thing.
School boards are policy makers. You look at that picture of Washington crossing the Delaware, and you’ll notice that he’s not rowing the boat. It’s an apt analogy, because it deals with the whole issue of what I believe should be done: Create a governance structure that starts with true policy-making, not micro-managing, at the board level.
We need to focus on the fact that the school board members must understand that they steer the boat—they don’t have the oars to get it across the river.
Kansas City already has many of the assets needed to pull this off—and they include the competent, qualified and skilled business executives driving corporate success in this town. If we strengthen the bond between business and education, and make some of the other long-overdue structural changes, we can take the first important steps to restoring this district not only to stability, but respectability. 
