DESEG HEARINGS FOCUS ON MORE SPENDING

In the wake of a recent hearing in Cape Girardeau by the Joint Interim Committee on Desegregation, there certainly is no clear vision of the future of school funding in St. Louis and Kansas City when court-ordered state payments for desegregation programs come to an end.

The first of several hearings to be held around Missouri by the legislative committee made one thing crystal clear, however: All of the attention will be devoted to finding ways to spend more money on public education, not finding ways to ease the minds of taxpayers who have forked over billions of dollars in court-ordered aid to the two urban districts over the past 20 years.

Instead, the focus of educators who will parade before the hearings in the weeks to come will be on more spending on more programs, because it is the mistaken belief that the more you spend, the better the results for students.

Not so. It has been proven again and again that massive spending isn't the answer to public education. Surely the legislative committee need look no further than the desegregation programs in St. Louis and Kansas City for plain-as-your-nose evidence. Kansas City's magnet schools and posh programs have clearly failed, both in their attempts to create a better racial balance among students and to improve student performance.

The real issue in both urban areas has always been money. The inability of urban areas with declining populations and eroding financial bases to raise funding was cloaked in the desegregation disguise so federal judges would have a mechanism for forcing the state to infuse millions and millions of dollars.

In fact, had the urban districts been given a mechanism -- by changes in state laws -- that would have allowed them to raise needed funds for basic capital improvements and programs, they would have been able to manage quite well on their own, with critical decisions being made by duly elected local school boards instead of federal judges, whose agendas were motivated less by educational concerns than misguided judicial correctness.

Unfortunately, the new model of public education is measured by how much the taxpayers are soaked. The more we spend, the better off we will be, the thinking goes. And this quest for more dollars is accompanied by a lurch toward more and more so-called standards that attempt to justify all the spending with little regard for what any common-sense teacher can provide in a classroom.

Taxpayers had better show up at future hearings of the legislative committee. Otherwise they can only look forward to bigger bites in their pocketbooks.