Urban Preparatory Academy in Wichita is a private K-through-eight school that serves low-income and mixed-income students. Most students attend on scholarships provided through a tax credit scholarship program for low-income students, which is the only school choice program available in Kansas.
“Many students come here thinking no one cares about them at school,” said Headmaster Wade Moore. “They know they are behind, and they are embarrassed by not being able to read and do math at grade level. And that’s a big part of the behavior problems. But their behavior gets a lot better when they see how hard our staff works to get them caught up, and that gives students and their parents hope that they didn’t believe was possible.”
There are stories like this all across the nation: low-income children and students of color use of several school choice options to leave public schools where they are several years’ worth of learning behind.
Public school officials enthusiastically declare their devotion to ending racism and discrimination, yet they perpetuate race-based and income-based educational discrimination in the results they achieve. Black eighth graders are nearly three years’ worth of learning behind white students in reading across the nation. That’s been relatively unchanged over the last 20 years. Here in Kansas, low-income fourth graders are reading 2.7 years behind other students, and it is getting worse.
You’d think the education bureaucracy would be laser-focused on ending educational discrimination, but you’d be wrong. Parents cannot count on the public education system to resolve this social justice issue because the system works against student interests; it is designed to sustain itself and the adults who work in it.
Giving Kids a Fighting Chance with School Choice exposes the many ways that the Kansas public education system perpetuates race-based and income-based educational discrimination. The book relates one story after another of state and local education officials consciously deceiving legislators and parents, deemphasizing academics, and ignoring laws and state administrative policy. It also lays out the ugly facts of student achievement in Kansas to motivate parents and community leaders to get engaged and support proven solutions, including school choice.
So, why should you read a detailed analysis of the Kansas education bureaucracy?
Robert Enlow, CEO and president of EdChoice, writes in the foreword, “The sad reality is that a similar book could be written about every state in the union. Ultimately, the painting that we are looking at in Kansas and in America right now is more of a Hieronymus Bosch-like dystopian nightmare.”
This is not a teacher problem; it is a management problem. Local school boards and superintendents have made it clear that accountability measures are unwelcome, whether in state law or policy. For example, a 2019 state audit examining how Kansas schools spend at-risk funding concluded that “most at-risk spending was used for teachers and programs for all students and did not appear to specifically address at-risk students as required by state law.”
Legislators provided more than $5 billion of additional funding since 2005 to improve outcomes for low-income students and those considered academically at risk. But school district management blithely ignored state law and spent the money as they wished. The state board of education’s reaction to the audit is even more telling. After a scathing editorial by the Kansas City Star, the state board of education president wrote a response that essentially said, “Shut up. Go away. We know what we’re doing.”
Arguably, they don’t. There are more high school students below grade level in Kansas than are proficient. The bureaucracy refuses to acknowledge this reality. The official position is that grade level isn’t measured on the state assessment, but the facts show otherwise.
Time and again, the state school board president has been caught trying to mislead legislators and parents about academic performance. The Department of Education last year gave out 91 gold and silver awards for graduation rates with pep-rally-like fanfare. But it didn’t mention there was only one award for academic preparation, and it was on a military base.
Academics are being shoved aside by diversity, equity, and inclusion. Proficiency improvement is absent from the Department of Education’s five outcomes for measuring progress for accreditation, but social/emotional growth tops the list.
The education bureaucracy in Kansas — and probably every other state — is unbending. It will protect the system to the detriment of students until it is incentivized to put students first. And that’s another reason that states need universal school choice.
The only thing that gets the bureaucracy’s attention is the threat of losing a dollar. Knowing that parents can send their child’s funding to the school of their choice forces school districts to compete and reallocate resources for students’ benefit. Robust choice programs and a healthy dose of transparency propelled Florida from one of the worst states 20 years ago to now one of the best. Arizona also registered outsize gains since expanding school choice, and Gov. Doug Ducey just signed a massive school choice expansion.
Confining students to the ZIP code where their parents can afford to live effectively condemns many of them to a lifetime of underperforming. Every child deserves an equal opportunity to a quality education, and that can happen if parents and business leaders demand that legislators pass school choice programs to give children a fighting chance.
The bureaucracy won’t change on its own. If you want change, you have to fight for it.
Dave Trabert is CEO of the Kansas Policy Institute.
