MISSOURI WATCH: WRONG ANSWERS, RIGHT PROBLEM

"The worst calamity for the urban Afro-American population of Missouri was the solution devised by the federal courts to resolve the constitutionally mandated school segregation disgrace."

This statement was made not by the Imperial Idiot of the Missouri Ku Klux Klan but by a respected leader of the state's black community, who has devoted the better part of his life to the improvement of his race. Recently we spent the better part of a day talking politics, education, public policy and the plight of my friend's neighbors. After both of us agreed that much of the multibillion-dollar expenditure by the state to correct a century of segregated schools had been wasted, we sought mutual agreement on how Missouri should approach the problem in the future.

As my friend noted several times during our discussion, the "solutions" found by federal judges in St. Louis and Kansas City were diametrically opposed. Federal judges in St. Louis, where the experiment began, decided that segregated, i.e., inferior, schools should be abandoned in favor of selective busing to white neighborhood schools in St. Louis County. When desegregation lawsuits were filed in behalf of black students in Kansas City, the judiciary said the answer was improving existing facilities within the students' own neighborhoods.

We both agreed that legally speaking, at least, the solutions ordered by courts in both cities made sense, conforming to the Brown v. Topeka decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But court decisions, like many other imperfect processes devised by man, come from human beings subjected to all the imperfect wisdom of political appointees. As others have demonstrated from time to time, decisions even from the most erudite judges can over time be less than correct, sometimes even dead wrong.

If judicial wisdom had been closer to the needs of black neighborhoods in St. Louis, it would have recognized the fact that busing students for two and even three hours every day from black neighborhoods to suburban St. Louis schools would have caused a number of problems, not all of which have yet to be recognized. But those dilemmas that are presently visible include the lowering of sense of community in existing black neighborhoods, the decimation of respected institutions within the areas, a feeling of strangeness if not inferiority by students who were often treated less than hospitably by their white peers in county schools, and the overall reluctance of faculty to accept students whose traditions they neither knew nor had any incentive to appreciate.

Even among those students and faculty who approached desegregation with eagerness and determination to succeed, there were bound to be problems. The new students, an alarming proportion of which were coming from one-parent families, were energized not by an overwhelming desire for knowledge but the need to adjust to new surroundings, new teachers and new peers. This is a difficult task for mature adults, and asking young 6-year-olds to adjust while they were learning basic educational skills was asking far more than could be reasonably expected.

The only acceptable solutions to the St. Louis desegregation problem were, first and foremost, the creation of improved facilities within the neighborhoods that constituted home for black children. Instead of reinforcing the importance of these communities, federal court orders denigrated their role, virtually to the point of extinction. The result of this thoughtless policy has been the rapid deterioration of many black residential areas in St. Louis, and the result of this causative disruption has been vastly accelerated crime rates in nearly all neighborhoods within the city itself.

Maintaining well staffed and equipped schools would have reinforced the affected neighborhoods, restoring a sense of community to the areas, and a sense of importance that every citizen has the right to expect from his government. Federal court solutions said, in effect, that schools within black neighborhoods were not worth saving, were markedly inferior and that the educational needs of black children could only be met by giving them advantages already offered elsewhere.

If legally acceptable, the solution offered in St. Louis has created markedly worse neighborhoods, educational advantages and sense of well-being among the targeted minority.

In Kansas City, which by the time federal judges were asked to intervene, city schools had become a basket case, not primarily because of educational separation, but due to civic Balkanization. Urban flight began in Kansas City long before its movement was detected in its sister city across the state. One of the reasons for this flight was financial, but another important reason was educational. Kansas City schools were a mess, poorly administered and poorly supported by residents, many of them urban newcomers.

As more and more attractive neighborhoods were developed across the state line in Kansas, many Kansas Citians deserted the city to which they had little allegiance and where their children were only guaranteed inferior educations. The flight was less racial than cultural, but it produced a declining tax base on which to fund public education. Even those who remained on the Missouri side sought out private schools in an effort to provide their children with advantages they could not get through local government. The absence of taxpayer support for local schools has been evidenced time and again in voter rejection of adequate levies to support schools.

Its impossible to stem urban flight, once its logic seems obvious, and so federal judges now order taxpayers across our state to resolve a problem that is less racial than historical. Missouri can build first-class buildings, but it cannot mandate first-class support for education, nor can it reverse patterns that are self-protecting and logical. Schools will improve only when urban vitality is restored, and no court, regardless of its power, can change this progression.

We would all have been better off if the two federal courts had reversed their desegregation "solutions." St. Louis required the decision handed down in the Kansas City case, while busing would have provided educational opportunities for those students now being denied them in Jackson County.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.