Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri V. Jenkins

by Joshua M. Dunn

In 1987 Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure white students and quality teachers back to the inner-city district. Yet even after increasing employee salaries and constructing elaborate facilities at a cost of more than $2 billion, the district remained overwhelmingly segregated and student achievement remained far below national averages.Just eight years later the U.S. Supreme Court began reversing these initiatives, signifying a major retreat from Brown v. Board of Education. In Kansas City, African American families opposed to the district court's efforts organized a takeover of the school board and requested that the court case be closed. Joshua Dunn argues that Judge Clark's ruling was not the result of tyrannical "judicial activism" but was rather the logical outcome of previous contradictory Supreme Court doctrines. High Court decisions, Dunn explains, necessarily limit

Genres: Education

226 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2008

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this book does a really great job of examining Kansas City, Missouri's school system's history as well as the experience with desegregation in this city. As a citizen of KC, as well as someone who is very involved with KCPS, this book truly helped me understand the history of the school system and why some of the issues it faces today are in place. It helps me learn more about the experience of desegregation in the city and some of the challenges that were faced. As someone that will hopefully work to alleviate racial tension in this city, this book taught me the importance of listening to the black community and evaluating whether solutions are truly helping the black community, or if it is just something that looks and sounds good on paper.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a federal judge from a conservative background ordered some unusual remedies in a Kansas City, Mo. school desegregation case; instead of requiring busing or manipulating school attendance zone boundaries, he sought to improve city schools (and thus bring whites to Kansas City from the suburbs, thus integrating city schools) by ordering tax increases leading to billions of dollars of spending, raising teacher salaries by 44 percent, reducing class sizes so that student-teacher ratios were less than 13-1 (well below the national average), and ordering the creation of gold-plated magnet schools with magnificent physical facilities. The results were dismal: white enrollment continued to decline (ensuring segregated schools) and student test scores did not improve.

What went wrong? Dunn points out that the magnet school format was unlikely to work, because white suburbanites were basically satisfied with their schools, and both whites and blacks were more interested in quality basic education than the exotic curricula of magnet schools.

This book explains why the judge endorsed the policies he did. Judge Clark (the trial court judge presiding over the Kansas City case) was not a left-wing activist; however, he was constrained by Eighth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent that (1) required some sort of aggressive action in urban school districts, even those that had sought to comply in good faith with earlier supreme court decisions but (2) prohibited busing students to or from suburban school districts, thus ensuring that the Kansas City schools would forever continue to be overwhelmingly African-American. So Judge Clark couldn't (a) face reality and admit that the schools would always be nearly all-black or (b) integrate the schools by busing in suburbanites. His only option was to somehow try to improve the city schools, and the only alternatives given him by the litigants involved lots of government spending.

Dunn doesn't try to answer the most interesting (to me) question: would anything done inside the schools make much of a difference? Or are the deprived backgrounds of the urban poor so overwhelming that no educational policy would make suburbanites willing to send their children to school with them? One hint from the early days of desegregation: Kansas City's Central High School was almost 90 percent white in 1955, and by 1965 had only 16 white students (out of over 2000). Similarly, Paseo High School was 6 percent black in 1959 and 97 percent black in 1969- long before desegregation litigation. So it appears to me that Kansas City's whites were ready to move out as soon as blacks moved in.

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

A interesting though overly detailed look at the classic school desegregation case gone haywire, Missouri v. Jenkins.

In this case, a federal district court judge, egged on by the 8th Circuit Court, forced the Kansas City School District and the state of Missouri to spend almost $2 billion from 1984 to 1995 upgrading its system with the hope of attracting suburban white students and thus alleviating segregation. Against the wishes of most black parents, Judge Clark turned every high school in the city into a magnet school with 100s of millions of dollars worth of equipment (heated pools, fully equipped gyms, computers for every student). Of course magnet schools teaching classical Greek or political science did little good for urban students who could barely read or write. The percentage of black students at the schools actually went up over this period while test scores dropped (the few elementary schools that did not go magnet were the only ones that showed marked improvement).

Although he spends too much times of the intricacies of the court case and the individual motions and petitions of its plaintiffs, the book is a great reminder of the limits of social engineering and the failure of activist social policy.

[Kate]

An interesting look at what happened to KC schools after they poored money into the district to try and desegregate (without bussing) the schools. It was very dry but the topic is interesting. I hope I come back to it someday.