OpinionMarch 7, 2000

Give credit to U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple for trying. He is the federal judge who dismissed the desegregation case in the Kansas City School District last November. He also upheld the state's decision to strip the Kansas City district's accreditation...

Give credit to U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple for trying. He is the federal judge who dismissed the desegregation case in the Kansas City School District last November. He also upheld the state's decision to strip the Kansas City district's accreditation.

But now the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned Whipple's ruling. And the Court of Appeals removed Whipple from the case. Clearly, in the view of the Court of Appeals, the judge who wanted to get rid of the case isn't the best candidate for taking it over again.

The Kansas City desegregation case has been active since 1977. Over the intervening years, the district has tried everything short of blowing up the district to satisfy federal mandates that forced students to be bused, created magnet schools and generated millions of dollars for new construction, equipment and furnishings.

Who paid? Missouri taxpayers. Between the Kansas City case and recently concluded desegregation case in St. Louis, Missourians have paid billions of dollars. The result? Both districts are unable to meet minimum accreditation guidelines, although the St. Louis district received a two-year reprieve during the transition from a judge to a school board.

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The lawyer who filed the original lawsuit more than 20 years ago in Kansas City, Arthur Benson III, convinced the Court of Appeals that the school district had failed to do everything it could to eliminate segregation and narrow the gap between white and black students regarding achievement. The Court of Appeals agreed that a federal judge could run the district better than the school board.

What an unfortunate decision. While it is beyond dispute that the school board in Kansas City is unlikely to ever create an educational system that would satisfy both the academic needs of students and the legal requirements of Arthur Benson, it is safe to say there is no federal judge anywhere who can do it either. After more than 20 years of failure, that should be apparent.

There are two things that can be said for certain in the wake of the Kansas City school fiasco: One is that federal judges, unelected an unaccountable to taxpayers or voters, are no better at running school districts than an elected school board. And the other is that no amount of money will ever solve the problems of urban districts. What has been shown to work are private schools and charter schools, both of which take students from all economic, social and academic levels and consistently turn out well-educated graduates.

If the Court of Appeals wanted to do the Kansas City district a favor, it would have chartered some more schools. Of course, the Legislature hasn't granted the Court of Appeals or federal judges the right to charter schools. But neither did the Missouri Legislature vote to turn over its two urban districts to federal courts -- and it happened anyway.

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