A Lesson in Throwing Money.

We close the 1997-98 school year with a report being taken by the Right - and by some moderates, too - as the latest and most powerful proof that throwing money at the schools doesn't work. This apparent downer, dated 16 March 1998, is a report from Paul Ciotti, a Los Angeles writer who put together a monograph for the Cato Institute titled Money and School Performance. There are problems with Ciotti's exposition. For example, anyone who uncritically accepts Eric Hanushek's analyses isn't examining data very analytically. In addition, Ciotti reports interviews from single sources without "triangulating" the data to see if different sources give the same story about the same situation. But there are lessons in the monograph, too. The "news" in this report - the desegregation debacle in Kansas City, Missouri - is not new. "60 Minutes" provided an account a few years back. Even allowing for the rightward slant in Ciotti's analysis, he presents some pretty clear evidence on how not to spend money, and that is worth knowing. Indeed, what comes out of his monograph is that the money in question was not being thrown at what most people would call an "education system." I have no doubt that, had the money come into the school districts where I have lived or worked, it would have had an impact. From 1954 to 1984, enrollment in the Kansas City School District (KCSD) declined from 70,000 to 36,000; ethnically, it changed from 75% white to 75% nonwhite (mostly black). Voters turned down school tax increases 19 times in a row. A group of plaintiffs sued in an attempt to force consolidation of the KCSD with suburban districts. When the federal judge in the suit, Russell Clark, ruled against the plaintiffs and released the suburban districts from the court, the plaintiffs' lawyer, Arthur Benson, launched a "Field of Dreams" strategy: make KCSD attractive to whites in the suburbs, and they will come. Indeed, Judge Clark invited Benson and the plaintiffs to "dream" about what they might want in a school district. Their dreams and Judge Clark's decision sent the school budget from $125 million in 1985 to $432 million in 1992. No one knew how to handle all that money. Waste and fraud abounded. "Perhaps the worst problem for what one school board president called the district's 'modestly qualified' administrators," Ciotti writes, "was the sheer volume of paperwork. When the judge started building schools and inviting school principals to order whatever they wanted, purchase orders flooded into the central office at the rate of 12,000 a month. Clerks were overwhelmed, devastated, and too ashamed to admit they couldn't handle the crush. The system just collapsed." Earlier in the report, Ciotti had observed that, as KCSD declined, "it was hard to find people to run for the school board. Those who did run tended not to be particularly sophisticated, usually earned less than $30,000 a year, and had difficulty dealing with complex financial issues." Just the kind of people you want overseeing a $432 million budget. As gold flowed in the streets, other districts began to hate and resent Kansas City. Judge Clark was labeled "King George" and derided as the "Poster Boy of the Imperial Judiciary." The money, though, mostly seemed to be spent on physical goodies, as the 12,000 monthly purchase orders attest. Not once does Ciotti mention anything about staff development, save to say that the district was powerless to improve teacher quality. People who might have had some ideas about how to improve the system steered clear. "Candidates with national reputations voluntarily took themselves out of consideration for the Kansas City superintendent's position once they actually met the school board," writes Ciotti. When the board hired a superintendent, it did little to make him comfortable. Thus KCSD had 10 superintendents in nine years. Such transitoriness at the top made it hard to hold anyone accountable, and "the turnover problem also left the district with neither the ability nor the political will to do anything about improving the quality of teachers and principals. …