Kansas City To Shutter 28 Schools

This probably won't make it to the top of the culture's radar this week, but the Kansas City School Board voted yesterday to close twenty-eight schools.

(After all, really important news like the sentencing of rap star Lil Wayne is breaking...)

Well, anyway... 

(CNN) -- Superintendent John Covington called for the closing or consolidation of almost half of the schools in the Kansas City, Missouri, school district, and a school board voted Wednesday to approve the downsizing.

Covington said the closures were the first phase of "right-sizing" a district where enrollments have plummeted from more than 35,000 in the 1999-2000 school year to about 17,000 in 2009-10.

"Closing schools is hard, and it is tough on the community," Covington said recently in remarks posted on the superintendent's Web site.

"Closing schools and making the remaining schools much stronger academically is unquestionably the right thing to do for kids," he said. "Keeping all of the schools open with too few children in them is draining the resources we need to improve the education of all students."

[end quote]

Notice the bit highlighted in the second paragraph, especially if you don't live in the US.  This is what is happening, not just in Kansas City.  The Great Recession has been the final tipping point, the creator of the inescapable crisis, in this situation. But the deterioration has been underway for a long, long time.

Those who had the means to leave the public schools departed, to private schools and into home education, both of which have grown dramatically in the past forty years or so.  The population has aged, and there are fewer children born, especially to the educated and upwardly mobile. OS has a number of friends who are 40+ who simply never married and started families. A few were homosexual, but only a few. Most just never 'nested'. He sees well-educated, beautiful young women friends who are eminently marriageable, but struggling to locate men who are equally marriageable, stable enough to nest.

And then, there is the government, at many levels, who in the 1960's began to view the schools not as institutions of learning and conveyance of the cultural inheritance, but as laboratories for social work and utopian ideas. With that came the enormous disruption in the 1970's of the forced desegregation of each city's schools, mandated by the Federal courts, in which children from one neighborhood were placed on school buses and transported across town to other neighborhood schools, all in the name of 'fairness'. The exodus began, with entire families turning away from public schools. Their children were placed in the private schools, and their children did the same, or went further into home-schooling life. The political support for taxes to support the public schools walked out the door with them, as families also began abandoning the neighborhoods for the suburbs.

This has been a long time coming, and we are on the front end of The Great Reckoning precipitated by The Great Recession.  There is no amount of money that can be printed and borrowed to funnel to the Kansas City public school system that will fix this problem, so long as families refuse to participate. The invaluable element of trust has been eroded, and if everything goes well in KC from this day forward, that trust will be fully restored by about the year 2030.

Attempts to ban home schooling and close private schools, in order to force children into the state system would be met with violence. South Boston and Louisville were just two cities that exploded in the 1970's when families were told they would have to begin putting their children on buses in the name of 'fairness', in the middle of a grinding recession. OS was in Louisville when the riots broke out in 1974. It was seriously ugly. The protestors had CB radios (Citizen Band), and their crowds outflanked the police during protests, directed by protestors sitting on top of their pickup trucks. The police had to respond with with equipment that jammed transmission across that part of the radio spectrum. Imagine the scene now, with bluetooth phones, and literally millions more guns (and rounds of ammo) in the hands of the households.

OS does NOT NOT NOT endorse violence, but keeps plugging away every morning, hoping a few of his words stick to the cultural wall, and will help head off these sorts of tragedies. He wishes the school systems well. In the meantime, he's got to get back to work, building his business so he has money to put away for his unborn grandchildren's private or home-school education.

And, ironically, he drives to the courthouse today to pay his property taxes, which mainly go to underwrite the local school system.

The culture shapes the economy.

All birds come home to roost.