Massive school closures in KC to be done by fall:

The politics of ‘compassionate conservatism”

You’ve no doubt heard the dismal news out Wednesday, March 12, 2020.  Kansas City’s school superintendent said he is going to shutter nearly half the district’s schools due to plummeting enrollment and budget deficits.  Perhaps, more grotesque was his comment noting that while “painful,” he will move forward quickly so that all the closures will be complete by fall.  This is school leadership in the era of ‘compassionate conservative’ economics.  I guess “too big to fail” doesn’t apply to our nation’s schools like it does to Wall Street bankers.

The school board narrowly approved the plan Wednesday night to close 29 of the district’s 61 schools to try to stave off bankruptcy. The closures have angered many parents, students and teachers, but administrators say they had no choice because without them, the district would have been in the red by 2011 (Massive school closures in KC to be done by fall HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5itXI7J7kJ7Eka6sEx9IofeKycRqgD9ECJAA80).

Under the current political regime that fails to assist foreclosing homeowners, fails to stimulate the economy with massive amounts of capital unlike the way they stimulated their friends on Wall Street; under an administration that will not spend the money needed to create federal jobs knowing the private sector has gruesomely failed in creating any jobs but instead is destroying them (either by outsourcing them to third world countries through their privatized trade agreements or decimating the public sector), we can expect that bankruptcy for the entire school district is around the corner.  Add to this reckoning two trillion dollars spent on two illegal wars and Kansas City, like much of America, is looking down the barrel of some serious economic and social unrest.

Although other school districts nationwide have, continue or are considering closures as the Second Great depression ravages their budgets, Kansas City’s plan is striking. In rapidly shrinking Detroit, 29 schools closed before classes began this fall, but that still left the district with 172 schools. Most other districts are closing just one or two schools (ibid).  But not Kansas City.  They are moving quickly to destroy as many as they can.  This is not simply an attack on public education; it is an all out “shock and awe” bombardment of our nation’s schools.

Superintendent for the Kansas City schools, John Covington groveled at a recent news conference:

“It has been a difficult and painful and emotional process that affects our entire community. No one likes closing schools.” (ibid).

Nor do they like politicians like Covington who close them. These are spineless officials that did nothing and do nothing (other than accept high administrative salaries) while deficits and bankruptcies roll like Tsunamis across our nation’s cities.  A close look at the school board’s recent history reveals a chaotic, almost nonfunctioning body that put off making tough choices and even routine improvements for generations.

Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a research group in Washington had this to say:

“This is extraordinary. The school board was dysfunctional for years. There was very poor governance for a long period of time, and it was like a revolving door with superintendents.” (SUSAN SAULNY Board’s Decision to Close 28 Kansas City Schools Follows Years of Inaction http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/12schools.html)

Mr. Jennings also said the board was plagued with “a general unwillingness to face the facts” of the chaos it created.

Of course this brings up the other troubling item — the state of the nation’s journalism and corporate media.  Citizens of Kansas City had no idea that fiscal crisis’ hunted down their public schools.  Nor do many of them understand the economic policies behind the urban political posturing that has gone on for decades in both Kansas City and elsewhere.  This crisis was created from whole cloth, just as the financial crisis on Wall Street was, but when did you see the media put a critical lens on the rapacious policies that raped the city of funds?  And if you did, it was usually clothed and disguised as a “black mother with two kids” getting welfare while the corporate welfare and public trough feeding by corporatized forces is touted as free market capitalism, when the only thing that is free is the private pillage unfettered by the supplicant media forces.

In 2006, the Council of the Great City Schools, a Washington-based coalition of the nation’s largest school districts, produced an extensive analysis of what was going wrong in the Kansas City schools. It concluded that the board wasted too much time on administrative trivia, its instructional program lacked “cohesion and forward momentum” and it had “no machinery” for intervening when students fell behind. The council included advice in the report on how the schools could fix themselves, but little if any action appeared to have been taken as a result (ibid).

The school closures and issues surround them are multi-faceted

The school closures in Kansas City, Missouri are part of the historical seeds of economic rot that have now come home to roost and given rise to the deplorable Race to the Top, the privatized educational policy being pursued by the Obama administration which stresses school closures in favor of charter schools and no doubt inevitably public school vouchers.

White flight, racism and neo-liberal economics

The issues behind the school closures in Kansas City, Missouri also involve decades and decades of racism, the growth of the suburbs and white-flight and the role of real estate developers and corporate Wall Street banksters in financing the suburban development for profit while destroying urban Kansas City, Missouri through urban ‘removal’ and gentrification.  Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks said it succinctly:

“The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment. And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district. It is shameful and sinful.” (ibid).

As middle class whites fled the inner city and deindustrialization left a hole where jobs once existed, financial capital was used to finance real estate development that created massive deficits that have now bankrupted public services and swallowed the schools.  Over the years, many students left for publicly funded charter schools, private and parochial schools and the suburbs (ibid).

The issue is obviously economic and another sad tragedy in the tale of neo-liberal economics, the result of thirty years of Milton Friedman Chicago School of Economic policies.  The district now has a $50 million budget shortfall.  Like most other urban cities (not to mention school districts) in the United States along with the states that harbor them, the district is more than broke, it is insolvent and in bankruptcy.

All of this is the result of decades and decades of neo-liberal economic priorities and policies.  These neo-liberal policies have lowered state and federal taxation on the rich, allowed for public subsidies to private real estate developers through enterprise zones, waived myriad development fees, arranged mutual benefit agreements that socialize the cost of private business infrastructures such as public roads, public electrical infrastructure, institutions like Fire Departments, more police, crossing guards for children and many other public amenities we as citizens take for granted and pay for every day, but to which the corporations, developers and their banskster financiers contribute nothing.  This is the pillage of the ‘commons’.

What neo-liberal economic policies have managed to do, coupled with age old racism, redlining and white flight is to make easy money off suburban development while laying the ground work for the bankruptcy of American cities and with them, their schools.  Disinvestment in urban centers and/or gentrification has been a painful burden to bear for Kansas City residents and their children.

John Covington, for example, has stressed that the district’s buildings are only half-full as student population has plummeted amid political squabbling and chronically abysmal test scores under No Child Left Behind and state coordinated mandatory tests.  Students have been leaving the Kansas City public schools in droves. Close to 18,000 students exited to better suburban districts or charter schools in the last 10 years alone. The student enrollment is now 17,400 children, who are mostly black and impoverished (SUSAN SAULNY Board’s Decision to Close 28 Kansas City Schools Follows Years of Inaction http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/12schools.html)

The District administrators state the closures were necessary to keep the district from plowing through what little is left of the $2 billion it received as part of a groundbreaking desegregation case it had been involved with.  This means we can expect the economic situation to get worse as housing values fall, unemployment increases, transportation worsens, and many children cease to attend public schools.

The school closures and massive layoffs of multiple personnel, from teachers to janitors, will also have an economic and social ripple effect, economically slowing any possible progress Kansas City might experience in their job growth or housing markets.  According to Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks, the school closure plan had prompted some housing developers to consider backing out of projects (ibid).  Where will the fired teachers and staff go?  How will they live?

At times before Wednesday night’s vote, the board’s meeting threatened to fall into chaos, with members trading insults, not following rules of order and even crying. An angry audience shouted its general disapproval.

“This is too much, too fast,” said a parent, Carmen Edwards, after the vote.

Nakisha Eubanks, a mother of three students, said: “I don’t want my kids in this district, going through all this disruption. But I can’t move, and I don’t have transportation. So, this is it.” (ibid).

Now the work of disassembling public education begins

Now, according to the associated press article, officials have to focus on the massive job of downsizing the district — reworking school bus routes, figuring out what to do with vacant buildings and slashing payroll. Covington said he has been working on the transition plan for several weeks and that it would be in place for the start of the school year.  He has spent the past month making the case to sometimes angry groups of parents and students that the closures are necessary.  Like Robert Bobb in Detroit, Covington is busy putting on dog and pony shows for an angry and understandably low information public citizenry.

Covington gave few details to the press, but he said the plan would likely involve staggering start and class schedule times for middle school students who would now attend school with high school students.  Covington said

“We will be moving forward with deliberate speed to put together a transformation plan that we will be using to make sure that the quality of educational opportunities and the services that we provide for all children in the Kansas City schools that will remain open is of high quality,” (ibid)

Under the approved plan, teachers at six other low-performing schools will be required to reapply for their jobs and the district will try to sell its downtown central office. It also is expected to cut about 700 of the district’s 3,000 jobs, including about 285 teachers.

Emotional board member Duane Kelly told the crowd of more than 200 people Wednesday, “This is the most painful vote I have ever cast” in 10 years on the board. Some chanted for the removal of the superintendent, while one woman asked the crowd, “Is anyone else ready to home school their children?”

Opening for the Sultans?

Will Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Fisher Family, Reed Hastings of NetFlix and the Walton Family Fund now enter the fray?  Probably, the billionaire’s boy’s club is the only game in town now that cities are bereft of funds and saddled with decades of capitalist driven deficits.  This is the perfect economic storm for the disaster capitalists to profit from.  Much like New Orleans after Katrina, the school system is up for grabs due to lack of public funds.  So, as another city and another school system bite the dust, depriving our children of a decent education and educational opportunities, look for the philanthro-capitalists to put together a “bail-out” plan of their own, one that will closely resemble the plans they have put forth in cities like LA, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Michigan, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

This is all part and parcel of Race to the Top and with the corporate media concealing more than it is revealing the opportunity for the billionaire’s boy’s club to sell their pernicious privatization policies to a beleaguered public is greater than ever.  This is why it is so important to follow the resistance and strategies put forth in Detroit, Michigan in face of similar school closings and teacher firings.  For in Detroit, as I and teachers and students have tried to show, there is a strategy in place to rout out the Eli Broad graduates, the privatizers and assassins of public education and organize a people’s resistance to privatization.