SPENDING AFTER DESEG: WHERE IS SAVINGS FOR TAXPAYERS?

State Sen. Harold Caskey is proposing to divert much of the money Missouri has been spending on court-ordered desegregation in St. Louis and Kansas City to poor school districts. But his plan comes with no guarantees that students in those districts would get a better education.

Caskey's idea, which former U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth supports, is based on the unproven principle that putting more money into schools is the key to a better education. It can help, of course. But Rep. Caskey's measure falls short of proposing any programs that would clearly benefit the schools.

The Butler Democrat wants to change the state's school funding formula to direct the money to districts with the highest concentration of poor students. He says at least $146 million a year should be used thisway if the court-ordered payments end. About $86 million would go to urban schools, the rest to poor outstate districts -- "poor" being measured by the number of students in a school's free or reduced-price lunch programs.

The fact that a school district has a large number of students getting free and reduced-price lunches doesn't mean it is a poor district. It could mean a large population of poor people live in the district or that parents in large families are taking advantage of the government's liberal income limits for lunch assistance, or both.

His measure also would give financial incentives to urban school districts that agree to accept nonresident students and allow local school boards to sponsor experimental charter schools. Past efforts to establish charter schools have produced more of the same, because those efforts haven't been free of government intervention, and neither would Caskey's approach.

The current state budget includes $262 million for the desegregation programs in St. Louis and Kansas City. Missouri already has pumped approximately $3 billion into the federally ordered desegregation programs, which have failed miserably.

Caskey's approach is that taxpayer money already is being spent, so it wouldn't be missed if the bulk of it went to school districts in urban areas where the desegregation effort didn't work. Desegregation, like the Outstanding Schools Act, has done nothing to improve education despite the billions of dollars, and neither would Caskey's bill.

A better approach would be to let the local school districts take care of themselves and give Missouri taxpayers some relief instead of wasting more money on programs that simply don't work.