The KCMO School District

[pstokely]

VH is nearly 60% white, but still has 77% Free/Reduced Lunch, probably still more whiter and higher income than most KCMSD schools, Will they ever change the boundries of VH to include some of the Truman or WC attendance areas?

http://mcds.dese.mo.gov/guidedinquiry/D ... lYear=2010

Right, what I was wondering is if it was always that way, if KCMOSD had to do some racial leveling within the district to account for race?

white people abandoned the KCMSD years ago, if they want to bring in more white people, they'll have to start at the elementary level and hope they still around for HS, they probably lost all of the white population with the loss of Western Independence and Sugar Creek

[FangKC]

What Would Happen If the State Took Over Your School District?

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... ct/274527/

[tacitus]

Académie Lafayette announced to parents yesterday they intend to open a High School in the old Westport High School building. The curriculum will be International Baccalaureate, offering foreign language classes, but not immersion. They are looking to open in August, 2015 with a 9th grade class of 75 - 90 students, approximately half of which would be Lafayette 8th grade graduates. The other half of the student population will be open enrollment from the boundaries of KCMSD, and a lottery will be used if open enrollment exceeds capacity.

[PumpkinStalker]

Académie Lafayette announced to parents yesterday they intend to open a High School in the old Westport High School building. The curriculum will be International Baccalaureate, offering foreign language classes, but not immersion. They are looking to open in August, 2015 with a 9th grade class of 75 - 90 students, approximately half of which would be Lafayette 8th grade graduates. The other half of the student population will be open enrollment from the boundaries of KCMSD, and a lottery will be used if open enrollment exceeds capacity.

Great news, thanks for posting. We live in Waldo and are sending our child to St. Elizabeth in a few years. High School was always a big question mark, this will definitely help! I'm hell bent on staying in the city but not sure I can afford 8 years of college priced schooling. (4 at private high school, 4 in actual college)

[kucer]

Académie Lafayette announced to parents yesterday they intend to open a High School in the old Westport High School building. The curriculum will be International Baccalaureate, offering foreign language classes, but not immersion. They are looking to open in August, 2015 with a 9th grade class of 75 - 90 students, approximately half of which would be Lafayette 8th grade graduates. The other half of the student population will be open enrollment from the boundaries of KCMSD, and a lottery will be used if open enrollment exceeds capacity.

Love that it is not going to be immersion as it potentially provides us another option. We will be keeping a close look at how it goes.

[tacitus]

Enclosed in the same letter to parents was the following claim:

[...]this institution will contribute mightily to the renaissance of the central city. This past year, only 3 of 44 of our 8th grade graduates chose public high schools in Kansas City. The remainder either enrolled in private high school or moved out of the city[...]

I actually would have expected more than just 7% of AL students would end up at Lincoln.

[Gretz]

Decent critique of the mass chartering solution being kicked around for the KCSD.

http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2 ... eformy-bs/

I tend to agree with its conclusions that making the schools independent and private non-profits will do nothing to address the core, intractable demographic issues of the district and probably not make much difference at all in outcomes. Couple of particularly good points:

Outcomes in existing charter schools are pretty comparable to KCSD schools when poverty adjusted:



If everything becomes charter there is no school of last resort for delinquents and special needs kids:

"While the authors of this report so confidently conclude that the obvious solution is to replace the failed urban district with an under-regulated, loosely governed confederation of benevolent non-profit actors, one might easily alternatively conclude from the evidence herein… that simply put, large scale chartering in urban centers like Kansas City simply doesn’t work. It never has and likely never will. It fails to serve the neediest children because “market forces” and accountability measures favor avoiding those children and the neighborhoods in which they live."

I guess I'm all for trying more charters but I don't think it will make much difference. It might not be a great idea to completely dismantle the school district before they prove that they can significantly improve outcomes for the least successful populations in the district.

[bobbyhawks]

It looks like the trend takeaways from that diagram are that there is a direct correlation between degradation of quality in charter schools and poverty. Is there also a looser/less dramatic, but still apparent correlation between increase in quality of public schools and increase in poverty? Magnet schools seem to be consistent regardless of poverty, though the lowest performer is the data point with the highest level of poverty. I'd like to see another chart of public school performance compared to number of non-subsidized lunchers that opted for a charter school. There may be a correlation between a degredation of quality in the public schools with more well-off kids that opt to go to charter schools, so the net overall gain is nill.

[KCMax]

I also tend to be pro-charter school, but I admit there is scant little evidence that they perform any better than public schools.

[swid]

Here's a line of contrarian reasoning I've had rolling around in the back of my mind for a long time... (Note: I'm not a parent, so take the following with the very large grain of salt.)

Hypothetically speaking, if you/your children are relatively intelligent and you're the sort of parent who takes an interest in your child's intellectual development, does it really matter at all what school you send your children to? In addition, presumably, for many parents, isn't the overarching goal with respect to education is "get my kid accepted into a decent college", so the narrative of "I went to and graduated from a terrible school" would be a fantastic alternative to the usual "I was a small fish in the big pond that is every private urban/suburban school district in the country".

[longviewmo]

Here's a line of contrarian reasoning I've had rolling around in the back of my mind for a long time... (Note: I'm not a parent, so take the following with the very large grain of salt.)

Hypothetically speaking, if you/your children are relatively intelligent and you're the sort of parent who takes an interest in your child's intellectual development, does it really matter at all what school you send your children to? In addition, presumably, for many parents, isn't the overarching goal with respect to education is "get my kid accepted into a decent college", so the narrative of "I went to and graduated from a terrible school" would be a fantastic alternative to the usual "I was a small fish in the big pond that is every private urban/suburban school district in the country".

I don't think it matters. The problem is that those types of parents are in the very small minority.

[Eon Blue]

Here's a line of contrarian reasoning I've had rolling around in the back of my mind for a long time... (Note: I'm not a parent, so take the following with the very large grain of salt.)

Hypothetically speaking, if you/your children are relatively intelligent and you're the sort of parent who takes an interest in your child's intellectual development, does it really matter at all what school you send your children to? In addition, presumably, for many parents, isn't the overarching goal with respect to education is "get my kid accepted into a decent college", so the narrative of "I went to and graduated from a terrible school" would be a fantastic alternative to the usual "I was a small fish in the big pond that is every private urban/suburban school district in the country".

That's not the first time I've heard that. Also, consider that the magnet high schools in both the KC and STL school districts are typically among the highest performing in the state.

[slimwhitman]

Could the KCMOSD be broken up into a dozen school-based districts?

Think about how most schools were formed in the 1800s and before the 1950s. If a school was needed, local leaders would seek to get district boundary set and then they would build a new school. Property taxes in the district paid the bills. These were run by people within the district. These were not just “neighborhood schools”, but were “neighborhood school districts”. If you saw the leadership destroy the school, you and your neighbors voted them out. It was a tight-knit group, almost like a P.T.A. Some of these schools were K-12, but others in higher population areas were K-8 or K-9 and came together with a few neighboring districts to build a high school. (KCMOSD grew in a different way. It absorbed adjacent rural districts as the city grew.) If you ever saw a Shawnee Mission SD map from the early 1950’s it is interesting. Every grade school was its own school district and most of them fed into the Shawnee Mission Rural High School (SM North).

Then came school unification in the 1950s. It seemed to make sense, and it did for many districts. Pool resources together to increase efficiencies. But this format seems to have failed many of the poor urban districts like KCMOSD.

Imagine if each region/neighborhood within the KCMOSD were able to run everything on its own. The Brookside SD, Waldo SD, Downtown SD, Northeast SD, Ivanhoe SD, Etc…. Do you think this could work? No more busing. No more city-wide politics. Some districts would excel….others will wallow in their filth. The districts that fail would be easier to turn around with just a few committed local citizens that demand change.

“Too big to fail” is a phrase I would place on the KCPS over the past 50 years. If the district was a business, it would have gone out of business 10 times over by now with the assets sold off at auction (10 times over). The only way I see that it could be quickly fixed is if it was broken up into neighborhood school districts. The assets have value, but not in their current form.

I still stand behind this comment. Break up the KCPS into a half dozen neighborhood districts with 3 or 4 elementary schools and one middle and high school. Northeast District, Southwest District, Central District, Southeast District....and others, but with names that mean something like Paseo School District, Country Club School District, Old Northeast School District, Westport School District, etc. The names help build the neighborhood identity and make it more likely that local residents will take ownership in the district.

Imagine the turnaround that would happen in the Brookside area! Young families would stop moving out when a neighborhood school district excels, causing home prices to skyrocket and forcing homes in areas currently not gentrifying east of Troost to suddenly become the next investment frontier.

Sure…this will leave a few poor parts of the current district even poorer, but those new smaller poor districts would get state aid and might be able to pick themselves out of the swamp with a few neighborhood activists wanting to improve their neighborhood.

[aknowledgeableperson]

Hypothetically speaking, if you/your children are relatively intelligent and you're the sort of parent who takes an interest in your child's intellectual development, does it really matter at all what school you send your children to? In addition, presumably, for many parents, isn't the overarching goal with respect to education is "get my kid accepted into a decent college", so the narrative of "I went to and graduated from a terrible school" would be a fantastic alternative to the usual "I was a small fish in the big pond that is every private urban/suburban school district in the country".

To a certain extent you are both correct and wrong. Mainly it depends on how do you define a "decent college". Knew of a student who graduated #1 in her class, all A's even with college credits, sports included volleyball and basketball, many other extra activities like yearbook. A lot of good references from coaches and teachers. Many thought she could get a full scholarship at a "decent college". But she graduated from Hickman Mills and got just a small token at a small state college. Her one weakness was the ACT. She scored high, higher than 25, but evidently not high enough.

[chaglang]

Here's a line of contrarian reasoning I've had rolling around in the back of my mind for a long time... (Note: I'm not a parent, so take the following with the very large grain of salt.)

Hypothetically speaking, if you/your children are relatively intelligent and you're the sort of parent who takes an interest in your child's intellectual development, does it really matter at all what school you send your children to? In addition, presumably, for many parents, isn't the overarching goal with respect to education is "get my kid accepted into a decent college", so the narrative of "I went to and graduated from a terrible school" would be a fantastic alternative to the usual "I was a small fish in the big pond that is every private urban/suburban school district in the country".

I don't think it matters. The problem is that those types of parents are in the very small minority.

Speaking as a Lincoln grad, I don't think it matters either.

To muddy things a little more, there's an argument that people are buying way more college than they need. Outside of Ivy League, unless you're going somewhere for a specific program, it really doesn't matter where you go to college. So "decent" can be almost anywhere. It's rare to find an employer who knows a good school from a bad one. More often than not, employers have used the schools listed on my resume to make small talk about sports.

[aknowledgeableperson]

"Outside of Ivy League, unless you're going somewhere for a specific program, it really doesn't matter where you go to college."


So very true. I think most parents, even the kids themselves, think of themselves as something move than average. But let's face it most of us are just average. Get the right degree with good grades and that should work for the average kid.

[chaglang]

"Outside of Ivy League, unless you're going somewhere for a specific program, it really doesn't matter where you go to college."


So very true. I think most parents, even the kids themselves, think of themselves as something move than average. But let's face it most of us are just average. Get the right degree with good grades and that should work for the average kid.

Even if a student is well above average, that doesn't put them anywhere close to being Ivy material.

[chingon]

Even if a student is well above average, that doesn't put them anywhere close to being Ivy material.

Nonsense. At the undergraduate level, the Ivy league schools are littered with below average students from above average economic circumstances. Home of "the gentleman's C".

[herrfrank]

Nonsense. At the undergraduate level, the Ivy league schools are littered with below average students from above average economic circumstances. Home of "the gentleman's C".

That was then, but this is now... 'The Gentleman's C' crowd is long gone. In any case, everyone now usually gets As and Bs at the best colleges. George W. Bush was at the end of that dying breed at Yale in 1968. Since co-education happened in the 1970s, these schools have become truly selective. There are very few slackers left. The best colleges really do exclude the vast majority of applicants including wealthy legacies. You have got to be in the top 5% in the standardized tests to get even a second look.

[bobbyhawks]

Nonsense. At the undergraduate level, the Ivy league schools are littered with below average students from above average economic circumstances. Home of "the gentleman's C".

That was then, but this is now... 'The Gentleman's C' crowd is long gone. In any case, everyone now usually gets As and Bs at the best colleges. George W. Bush was at the end of that dying breed at Yale in 1968. Since co-education happened in the 1970s, these schools have become truly selective. There are very few slackers left. The best colleges really do exclude the vast majority of applicants including wealthy legacies. You have got to be in the top 5% in the standardized tests to get even a second look.

Those schools are still full of legacies. I also wouldn't be extolling these institutions for assigning mostly As and Bs. Grade inflation is a serious problem at Ivy League schools.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/1 ... story.html
If over 60% of the students have an A average at some of these schools, it seems like you have to try pretty hard to get all the way down to a C average.