RULING EMPHASIZES IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL CONTROL OF SCHOOLS

After 18 years and $1.4 billion, Missouri taxpayers can breathe a sigh of relief after last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Kansas City school desegregation case. While the plan that has cost the state's taxpayers so much money remains in place, the court ruled that portions of the plan don't pass muster, and there should be immediate savings.

For example, Attorney General Jay Nixon announced that the state will withhold a $2.7 million payment that would have been used by the Kansas City district for salaries. That was one part of the desegregation plan the Supreme Court didn't like. The other payments affected by the decision are for education programs in the district.

Like most urban areas in the nation, Kansas City's core has seen the changes and deterioration that make running a school district difficult. Hampered by infighting among the district's elected and administrative officials, parents of students sought to remedy dilapidated buildings and what they considered low-quality education through the courts. The parents filed their lawsuit in 1977, and in 1984 U.S. District Judge Russell Clark of Springfield ruled that there had been a "systemwide reduction in student achievement" as a result of racial segregation.

Judge Clark's name became a household word around the state as he personally took charge of running the school district. He ordered massive amounts of money spent on new buildings, teachers' salaries and specialized programs. He established a system of magnet schools, each one specializing in a particular program or field of study, in an attempt to lure white students from affluent suburbs to attend classes in the Kansas City district with mostly black students.

Some of the $1.4 billion spent so far went for things like a 2,000-square-foot planetarium, a 25-acre farm complete with tractors and livestock and a model United Nations wired for language translation. Even the well-to-do suburban districts didn't have anything like what Judge Clark envisioned as the ideal schoolhouse. Moreover, the judge authorized the spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide transportation to students who chose to attend the magnet schools from suburbs as far away as 25 miles.

Missourians watched and scratched their heads as the judge continued to approve more and more bizarre programs that were costing every taxpayer in the state. That was because Judge Clark decided the state had failed to safeguard the educational opportunities for the students who were left in the Kansas City district.

Finally, the state drew a line in the sand. It sought relief from the payments for salaries and ongoing education programs -- relief that Judge Clark refused to give. After the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals failed to let the state off the hook, the case went to the Supreme Court.

One basic tenet that was upheld by the Supreme Court in its decision was that local schools need to be run by local parents, local administrators and local school boards. Even though the decision was greeted as a victory for the state by Gov. Mel Carnahan, the court's ruling also raises questions about the governor's own education push, including a bulldozed Senate Bill 380 (the Outstanding Schools Act) that raised taxes more than $300 million.

Much of the Outstanding Schools Act establishes priorities, programs and goals from the bowels of Jefferson City, where bureaucrats who have never been to Cape Girardeau or Kennett or Perryville decide what schools should teach and how students' progress should be measured.

It will take strong-minded legislators to recognize that centralized policy-making for local schools is a dangerous and, ultimately, expensive way to run public education. And the sooner members of local boards of education -- the very people chosen to make sound decisions -- realize that they need not rely on Jefferson City or a federal judge to run every school district, the sooner public education will begin to regain some of its meaning and purpose that have been so seriously eroded in recent decades.