This is just mentioned as an aside in the article, but is this accurate?
"Even now, the schools in Kansas City, Missouri, are effectively segregated, with almost all white children at private schools. Just nine per cent of pupils in the state system are white. Almost 90 per cent are on free lunches."
That statistic was totally shocking to me. Are there any other places in the U.S. where there's such a dramatic disparity in the race of students in public school relative to the overall population?
That quote, while true, doesn't tell the whole story. Families with school-age children will normally locate on the Kansas side of the border and send their children to the public schools there. Right or wrong (I'm not in a position to say) the Missouri schools have a very bad reputation. If you're thinking about buying a house on the Missouri side of the border, you factor in the cost of sending all your kids to private school.
It's not just that—not every Missouri-side Kansas City address goes to KCMO schools. Many don't. Everything north of the river, for example. Source: my wife has been teaching or subbing in the region for years, we have a KCMO address, and we're ~8 miles away from the nearest KCMO school district boundary. Some of the non-KCMO districts serving KCMO addresses are damn good, actually (Platte, for example).
There appears to be some confusion of KCMO the school district with KCMO the city (let alone the metro area).
I noted that elsewhere, and got down voted for it for some reason. There's segregation, yes, but it doesn't work quite the way that's implied, even if we only consider the city proper—I highly doubt a majority of white people in KCMO are sending their kids to private schools. In the KCMO school district, OK, that could be. Maybe I came off as defending the situation, despite calling out that there is indeed segregation? Who knows.
There was a recent This American Life episodes about this. Apparently the best way to raise poor black children's scores is to remove segregation, but white communities don't want it:
Depends where you are. London is deeply racially divided. There are effectively black-only schools and white-only schools. There are also schools almost completely dominated by various other ethnic groups too. The divide includes both the teachers and the students.
Yes, the US has race disparities above and beyond what the UK has. Part of this is because the US brought slaves to its own shores, whereas the UK kept them far afield and ultimately denied them citizenship.
This statistic only relates to the rather small Kansas City Missouri public school district which only contains an estimated 17,500 students.
The author is misleading readers to believe that this statistic relates to all the schools in a relatively large US City named "Kansas City."
Per wikipedia:
In fact, there are portions of Kansas City, Missouri, where children attend 14 other "suburban" districts. In other words, the Kansas City District comprises the oldest parts of the city and is not contiguous with the boundaries of the city of Kansas City, Missouri.
So if we look up the total demographic of students that live in that same small geographic footprint I'd wager to say its not much higher than 9% white. (although that information is proving much more difficult to find)
As bachmeier comments - there is much more to the story.
I mostly agree, but there are far more white people living within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public School District than you realize. It's difficult to find numbers, but I guesstimate that at least 30% and probably more like 40–50% of residents there are white.
(To see this, look at the number of black people in Kansas City, Missouri, who live within the boundaries of the Hickman Mills, Center, Grandview, Raytown, and Independence school districts.)
If that's true, then the Kansas City Public School District really is very segregated, even considering only the very narrow context of the population living within the district's boundaries. How it got that way is well documented; it is less well recognized that a major reason the district remains so segregated is that the black political establishment has adamantly opposed every recent effort to make the district more attractive to its white residents, many of whom are wealthy enough to pursue better options. One current example is Académie Lafayette's stymied effort to establish a high school in partnership with the district.
> I mostly agree, but there are far more white people living within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public School District than you realize. It's difficult to find numbers, but I guesstimate that at least 30% and probably more like 40–50% of residents there are white.
Here [0] are the numbers from the most recent five-year estimates of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, aggregated over the census tracts within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public School District:
Total population: 192,692
Race:
White only: 87,765 (46%)
Black only: 80,627 (41%)
Then I suggest you start catching up by reading this article, which does a very good job of explaining how racism and segregation didn't just end with the Civil Rights movement, even though that has been a popular myth among people with privilege (often not intentionally, which is yet another reason to always check your assumptions).
Public school has always been the battleground for racial issues. After Brown v Board of Education, VA (and other states) circumvented the integration orders in what is known as the Massive Resistance[1]. This was the purpose behind the modern idea of "school vouchers": to get around an order to integrate public schools, vouchers were issued to give white people the "freedom of choice" to send their kids to a private school (aka "segregation academies"[2]), while minorities had to attend the (often deliberately underfunded) public school. We still see these ideas today, just with more obfuscation. The damage done to the public school system is going to take a long time to fix.
Although that isn't the exact same statistic. Basically in NY black kids go to school with black kids and white kids go to school with white kids, although there might be both a white public school and a black public school.
I very much doubt that even a majority of the white kids living at Kansas City, MO addresses are going to private school, let alone "almost all". And that's just KCMO, not considering the rest of the metro area.
KCMO school district, maybe, but (perhaps surprisingly) there are large parts of the city that have Kansas City addresses but don't fall in the KCMO school district.
To be clear, though, the broader point about schools being effective segregated is true, and the KCMO school district is awful.
Like most people, your links confuse people by combining St. Louis city with St. Louis county. However, St. Louis county is not part of St. Louis city. The statistics, such as this and the too often ballyhooed crime stats, are falsely skewed. It's like taking the crime stats of the baddest part of your town alone to represent the crime (or education) of your city as a whole.
Here's another example. The City of St. Louis has a population of under 300K. The County of St. Louis has a population of over one million! And that does NOT include St. Louis city. It's both fair and unfair to not include St. Charles City in this (for reasons I won't go into) which includes another 300K. So most stats you read about St. Louis are based on 300K out of a total population of 1.6 million! And the city is the baddest part of town.
Not that I don't agree that there is disparity but, as someone else pointed out, it's by choice, not anything the government does. That's another story, a truth, that no one on HN wants to believe and would downvote me into oblivion if I stated it.
People from St. Louis tend to over-play this -- it's pretty normal for cities to be separated from their surrounding suburbs in these sorts of statistics. Almost all of the mid-sized Midwest cities have populations in the 300k range and regional populations in the millions. St. Louis really is an exceptionally segregated city and region -- the city vs. county population trope is more of a favorite local excuse than a legitimate explanation.
Speaking more specifically, compare Normandy to Ladue. St. Louis County isn't just a mirror of its city -- if anything, it's a magnification of its city. This American Life did an excellent story that discusses this ( http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t... ):
* nearly 1/2 of black students in the St. Louis region (not the city -- the entire region, those 1.5m people) attended unaccreddited or provisionally accredited schools.
* Tellingly, the first wave of desegregation in St. Louis included County schools because, according to the judge, the county suburbs shared equal blame for the segregation of city schools.
In this case, they're not. Specifically, FBI crime data only only covers the city, so often used in news stories, only covers the city which, if it weren't for the state separating the city and county in the 1850s, would have also included the county.
It's not true of many other cities. There are only about three to five others in the USA with the unique separation of city and county government that St. Louis has.
In case you don't understand, the city is not part of any county but has both a chief of police and a sheriff. There are personnel that handle duties that cities don't typically have but do exist for county governments. The county is not part of the city and has no relationship with them whatsoever (this has changed slightly over the last decade or so but essentially still true).
I just realized I can get into a too long a list of the differences but there are articles online and, I think, a Wikipedia article.
> There are only about three to five others in the USA with the unique separation of city and county government that St. Louis has.
But a lot of other cities with a comparable population split, so St. Louis's situation isn't as special as its county's residents like to proclaim.
> In case you don't understand
Having spent several decades in St. Louis, I understand and disagree with this piece of regional folk knowledge:
1. The trivia that creates the population split in reporting is rather exceptional (and a nice testament to the dismal state of Missouri politics for the past N decades), but the occurance of city/county population splits on the order of 100,000's to millions is not nearly exceptional as people claim. St. Louis City really has been an exceptionally bad city for a while now.
2. This folk knowledge is usually used as an excuse to ignore the fact that the county is as segregated into rich/white and poor/black as the city is. I suppose I don't have to remind you that Normandy is in the County. The St. Louis that's been in the news for the past year absolutely 100% IS the County everyone pretends is so drastically different from the city.
3. This factoid also ignores the fact that White Flight defines the political geography of the St. Louis region (go to Main Street some time -- you won't have a hard time finding people proudly proclaiming that's why they live there, and after a few beers the language isn't even very coded; it's always funny to hear an apartement dweller cite home values as a reason for living in St. Charles...).
If this factoid were used with any degree of historical honesty or presence of mind toward improving the region, then it would be a harsh indict of the region and a call to reflection, rather than essentially an excuse for complacency.
In short, this factoid captures everything that I hated about St. Louis (and there was a lot I loved about it).
> The county is not part of the city and has no relationship with them whatsoever... but essentially still true
The city and county are tied together in a lot of ways that matter -- public transit funding, funding for major public parks in the city, regional city planning, etc.
I think for the past couple of decades at least, the degree of political inter-connection between the suburbs and the city rivals that of similar cities, even in spite of the weird political arrangement.
More to the point, we're quibbling over a detail that is irrelevant to the fundamental truth of the original post in the subthread -- St. Louis County school districts are strikingly and exceptionally segregated. There are only a few high schools in the entire region that have anything resembling a representative mix of the demographics found throughout the region.
I will reiterate, you absolutely don't understand the history and geopolitics, despite having lived here, and, no, the point I was trying to make was not about the school districts but about statistics defined by the city but given as if they represent the entire city defined in the same way as other cities are.
That you insist on thinking "a lot of other cities with a comparable population split" is the same thing shows you do not understand the geopolitics or the makeup of the region.
I do agree on the point that it is a choice for those exiting for private schools, or exercising their economically-empowered physical mobility. But to say that those students attending St. Louis Public Schools all choose their school is ludicrous. They are assigned a school, and many cannot afford to move into an area with a better school or attend a private school.
Missouri has a particularly bad problem. Basically, there is a lot of evidence that desegregation works in improving education outcomes. Yet, the issue is looked at with suspicion, since richer people in good school districts believe it is bad for them. The podcast features a shocking town hall meeting where you can hear the worst of people's racial prejudices. They looked at Ferguson, MO in particular, and how kids got bused to a predominantly-white suburban 'good' school district and the ensuing political drama viewed from the real implications on people's lives.
I think it's very common to see that type of behavior whenever the demographics will support it. The races tend to self-segregate, despite society's best efforts to stop it. It's really the bigger cities that are exceptions in this regard, because their demographics and geography are generally such that you can't escape the diversity. Anywhere that doesn't have those hard geographic and demographic constraints self-segregates naturally.
"Even now, the schools in Kansas City, Missouri, are effectively segregated, with almost all white children at private schools. Just nine per cent of pupils in the state system are white. Almost 90 per cent are on free lunches."
That statistic was totally shocking to me. Are there any other places in the U.S. where there's such a dramatic disparity in the race of students in public school relative to the overall population?