Closing Kansas City’s Central High isn’t a desegregation failure. It’s a wake-up call

Like many urban school districts, Kansas City schools had a history of segregation. Facilities for white students were superior to those for Black students. When the courts stepped in through the desegregation orders of the late 1970s and 1980s, billions of dollars were spent to fix these historical wrongs.

Today, some are pointing to the looming closure of Central High School as a prime example of the expensive failure of court-ordered desegregation in Kansas City. This is an incomplete point of view.

The failure was investing billions into an out-of-date and insufficient education model.

When I was Missouri’s deputy commissioner of education, I visited Central many times. I was awestruck by the impressive facilities on its campus. Everything was new, top-rate and expensive. Many other Missouri schools had similar amenities, but Central High School was unique.

Looking back, it seems clear that we invested too much in building school structures and not enough in the people who would ensure school success. The court and lawyers in the Kansas City desegregation case seemed to believe that if you build it, they will come. They added new paint to an antiquated education system to hide its defects and ensure its failure. It was, at best, a very shaky system and still is. Rather than attracting middle-class families to the system, the result was a profound decline in enrollment from then until now.

The failure of this $2 billion investment to integrate the Kansas City schools is evidence that our traditional system of American education does not meet the reality of today’s educational demands. There has always been tension between the needs of our society and the various needs of children and families.

Our current system is not responding. It is a fool’s errand to keep investing in a system that needs to be reimagined. As Abraham Lincoln stated a month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present.”

To build on our education system for the future, all of us must think and act anew. We must separate ourselves from status quo policies and use this time to reinvent the current system. We must agree on a new vision for educating all our children to ensure equitable access and opportunity. All parties must be willing to see education possibilities from a new perspective. All parents need better choices to match the strengths and interests of students for a successful education experience.

We must challenge the vested interests in our current system. Our schools should be designed for the needs of our children. The future of American education is at stake as our children continue to fall behind on international assessments. We need a national conversation about how federal and state education policies and agencies must be restructured to provide more coherence and stimulate innovation. They must also be staffed by interdisciplinary teams that understand the sciences behind how we learn.

We need a strong private-public partnership to fund a national competition to reinvent a new system of schools for all children. New models must be developed, tried and evaluated. This can be an evolutionary process and can help our nation solve the culture wars that plague our schools. The world is changing faster than our current system, and we have a moral responsibility to the next generation. Our children cannot wait, and neither can this great country.

I wondered whether the court and the lawyers in the Kansas City desegregation case or the school administration forgot about the people. The support of teachers, students and families is vital to ensuring educational success.

Susan Tave Zelman is a former Missouri deputy commissioner of education and the author of “The Buying and Selling of American Education: Reimagining a System of Schools for All Children.”