Kansas City Proves Money Isn’t the Answer : Schools: The $1.6 billion spent hasn’t reversed the downward trend because good teachers were not the priority."

Under Clark’s desegregation plan, the district didn’t just tear down decaying old schools and replace them with new shells. Among the amenities in the new magnet schools were an Olympic-size swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, a robotics lab, professional quality recording, television and animation studios, theaters, a planetarium, arboretum, zoo, a mock court with a judge’s chamber and jury deliberation room and a model United Nations with simultaneous language translation.

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Missouri taxpayers were appalled and angry. At one point, complained state Atty. Gen. Jay Nixon, the district couldn’t account for 23,000 items, including TV sets, CD players, bookcases, office furniture and (temporarily) a baby grand piano. The district spent $40,000 for a display case for a high school that had no trophies. Nixon charged that 44% of the entire state budget for elementary and secondary education was going to just the 9% of the state’s students who lived in Kansas City and St. Louis.

A school district less rife with racial politics would have had a permanent administrator with the vision and ability to do something about the problem. But once the desegregation money started rolling in, it was easier to concentrate on new buildings, equipment and business plans than on tackling the things that really make the difference--appointing qualified principals, supervising instructional practices, developing a curriculum, hiring good teachers and firing bad ones....

Clark would have avoided this Catch-22 if he had realized at the outset the true ingredients for school reform: strong principals with the ability to hire good teachers and fire bad ones and a voucher plan that would allow students to escape the worst public schools and attend private ones instead.

1.6 Billion Dollars bought $10,000,000 in infrastructure, 6,000 Cadillacs, and allowed 4,000 strippers to retire at age 34.