They barely seem to understand simple arithmetic. They appear unwilling to read and fail to master basic comprehension skills. They struggle to express themselves coherently and won’t study history or science.
But enough about some members of the Missouri General Assembly. It turns out, there are kids in St. Louis struggling just as badly.
The state is all abuzz today about failing school districts—not failing legislative districts. And while the latter greatly outnumber the former, the most pressing concern in St. Louis is to rescue the children in districts weak and strong from a crisis created by those intellectual giants in Jefferson City.
At the moment, an unknown number of students residing in the unaccredited Riverview Gardens and Normandy school districts is certain to transfer to other districts at an unknown cost to their home districts, whose future solvency is therefore unknown.
The impact on class sizes in the receiving districts is unknown, as is their legal right to turn down any transferring pupils. Whether transferring students can stay in their new district beyond the current school year is unknown. The number of lawyers warming up in the bullpen is unknown.
Perhaps most ominously, it is unknown how black students from Riverview Gardens and Normandy will be received in their new districts, most of which are largely white and, related to that or not, largely unenthusiastic about the prospective transfers. The attendant racial unease was, of course, the subject that caught the eye of the media—local and national—and it is unknown how many unpleasant YouTube videos might follow.
About all we know for sure is this: The whole mess could have been avoided were it not for dysfunctional lawmakers. They flunked this civics test, plain and simple.
The crisis unfolded in June, when the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously decided the state legislature actually meant what it said when it enacted an innocuous little statute in 1993 to punish school districts that failed to maintain accredited schools. In just 263 words, Section 167.131 of the Missouri Revised Statutes stated simply—and simplistically—that a district with unaccredited schools must pay tuition and transportation costs for any of its students who wish to attend an accredited school in the same county or an adjoining one. And there was this: “Each pupil shall be free to attend the public school of his or her choice.”
That’s a noble enough principle—students in failing districts should have some way out—and it was the basis for sending some 100 kids in the Wellston School District to neighboring districts in 2003, leaving that failing district with $1 million in annual costs it couldn’t bear. After the state briefly tried to stop the bleeding by giving Wellston “interim accreditation,” it threw in the towel by dissolving the district (and sending the kids to Normandy).
But when St. Louis Public Schools lost its state accreditation in 2007, it was a whole new ballgame, with minds suddenly blown over the prospect of thousands of transfers to county districts. Around then, the world noticed a heretofore trifling detail: The noble 263-word legislation of 1993 left out a few details.
Actually, it left out all of them.
Turns out, there were no rules, not even guidelines. No one had bothered to consider any of the logistics that would be involved if pupils in unaccredited districts were to exercise their newly granted legal right to show up at any school of their choosing in their county or an adjacent one. Districts on the receiving end were granted no rights at all to protect themselves from a giant influx of kids that couldn’t be physically accommodated.
Nor was a moment’s reflection given to the obviously impossible notion that a struggling, underfunded district losing both students and accreditation could be expected to pay for it without suffering instant insolvency. Were they joking or just blustering with this strange new law? Welcome to the Wild West of school transfers.
A city parent named Jane Turner had sent her kids to the School District of Clayton, and she had the audacity to expect the city schools to follow their new legal obligation to foot the bill. When Clayton declined to bill the city, she sued, and it was her battle (decided long after she left the scene) that was the basis of the court’s June decision.
In retrospect, it’s surprising the case took this long to get resolved. What we have here is the proper application of a really awful piece of legislation. Which brings us back to the real story here: one more sad chapter in the annals of a legislature that has lost its way.
For those of us on the progressive side, there’s some sad irony here. It all started as an unintended consequence of Gov. Mel Carnahan’s proudest achievement: the overhaul of state funding for public education in 1993, during his first year in office. The small print that’s causing all of the strife was nothing more than a footnote to Carnahan’s education initiative, in which he, fellow Democrats, and a handful of Republicans were able to enact a record $315 million tax increase that would pump new life into public-education funding.
But it wasn’t just about money. The effort also included a major overhaul of the state’s funding formula in an effort to improve equity among the districts, and it also attempted to improve school performance in a variety of ways, from smaller class sizes to all-day kindergarten, more computers in classrooms to improving accreditation standards.
That last item, I believe, is the one best remembered today. There’s no archived news coverage to be found regarding any great debate in 1993 over the rights of children to move freely out of their district if it were to lose accreditation, nor over that trifling detail of how poor school districts losing accreditation and kids could possibly foot the bill.
That’s such an inane notion that it seems certain the 1993 transfer law was nothing more than a warning shot to districts that were failing to perform. It was a law never intended or expected to go into effect.
But that’s how it’s long been done in Jefferson City, on both sides of the aisle, with lawmakers enacting statutes that make the right political “statement” for today without regard to how they could actually be implemented tomorrow. There’s often an assumption that even the clumsiest bill can be fixed in the next session.
Ah, the fix. In this case, it became known as “the Turner fix,” in honor of the lawsuit.
The current disaster could have easily been avoided—or at least minimized—had legislators in recent years enacted some common-sense rules for school districts on both sides of the transfers.
They could have essentially made law out of the guidelines recently advanced by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. They might have even considered some sort of real-world financial solution in place of the Mission Impossible scenario that unaccredited districts now face.
Here’s where the Republican Party took center stage and served up its own brand of mindlessness, refusing year after year to respond to educators’ pleas to bring some sanity to the process. GOP legislators annually held the Turner fix hostage to such unrelated pet crusades as private-school vouchers and torching the teachers’ unions through “tenure reform.”
The unsettled legal status of the Turner case was legislators’ fig leaf for doing the thing they most like doing for public education: nothing. The only thing that these legislators have offered to teachers in recent memory is the right to bring guns to school.
In fairness to the Democrats of 1993, they might have been sloppy in their legislation, but at least their hearts were in the right place. Who knew that two decades later, the legislature would be firmly controlled by individuals whose greatest political fear is to get “primaried” (not a verb in 1993) for such sins as looking too liberal on book-learnin’ stuff?
Of course, there are plenty of educated state legislators on both sides of the aisle today. Just like there are plenty of dedicated educators, students, and parents in failing school districts. Just like there are plenty of unhappy parents who aren’t motivated by racism in the proposed receiving districts.
People are often painted unfairly with the same brush when what’s happening around them doesn’t look so good. It’s not fair, but it’s real. So when you’re part of a legislature that’s the governmental equivalent of a failing school district, it’s just how it goes.
And as bad as Republicans have looked in recent years about stonewalling a Turner fix, the Democrats of 2013 (admittedly, a scattered tribe) don’t look anything like their predecessors two decades earlier. Carnahan was a warrior on public-education issues—even those who despised him and ran against his tax increases would concede that—while the current governor apparently would rather join the Witness Protection Program than take center stage in the current crisis.
I don’t purport to be so smart about this issue. I thought it was a terrible idea to blow up democracy and bring in a state-appointed Special Administrative Board to run the city’s St. Louis Public Schools district in 2007. I was wrong—it was an important, if distasteful, step that seems to have helped turn things around. Now I think it would be a good idea to bring in a Special Administrative Board for the failing districts. I’d sooner give up on the school board than scatter the kids.
And speaking of failure, allowing state funding of education to fall to 47th in the nation is a crime. And whose fault is that? Oh yeah, those guys again.
So, Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be legislators. At least not until there’s some kind of fix.
SLM co-owner is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
