Uncharted Territory

Charter Schools in KC were always a bad idea and now the mistake may cost the KC School District millions of dollars.

The basis for charter schools was a desperate acknowledgement that the KC School District was doing such a shitty job of providing an education that parents, teachers and rouge administrators could band together and create something better. Turns out the initiative spawned nothing more than a union of money hungry misanthropes who couldn’t hack it in public education but somehow resurfaced to extort cash from a foolhardy schooling plan.

In the end, the charter schools have been an overwhelming failure unless teenage pregnancy, embarrassing after school fights and preparing future convicts for jail was the objective. In spite of all the trumpeting of charter schools as the panacea to this town’s decades long public education decline that began with desegregation, kids in KC still have a substandard educational system that is marked by violence, inefficiency and insolvency.

And after slamming KC schools I always like to point out that Latinos drop out of the KC School District at a rate of more than 60%. The number of Latino dropouts has been shamefully high for more than a generation and neither Dr. Taylor nor any of the (predominantly Black) longtime school district officials have made any headway in addressing the situation. And as more Latinos populate the district year after year, officials continually ignore this growing constituency in favor of throwing even more resources at young gangsta rappers and other crackheads/meth addicts in training.

At any rate, like “magnet schools” the Charter program has turned out to be just another bad idea that will cost an exorbitant amount to fix. This time the KC School District may be forced pay for one of their mistakes. Usually, the students are the ones who end up paying the price.