[quote=CA renter]And could Preuss get the same outcomes from students with low IQs, SES, etc. if they threw all this money and all of these resources at them? No, they could not. They’ve tried that already and failed.[/quote]Proof? I thought SES + demographic backgrounds are highly correlated to IQ? I’m getting lost trying to follow your contradiction.[/quote]
Again, not exactly sure about what you’re asking for here, but if you’re questioning the experiment with throwing money at poor schools, read this:
With that money, the district built 15 new schools and renovated 54 others. Included were nearly five dozen magnet schools, which concentrated on such things as computer science, foreign languages, environmental science, and classical Greek athletics. Those schools featured such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge’s chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability.
To entice white students to come to Kansas City, the district had set aside $900,000 for advertising, including TV ads, brochures, and videocassettes. If a suburban student needed a ride, Kansas City had a special $6.4 million transportation budget for busing. If the student didn’t live on a bus route, the district would send a taxi. Once the students got to Kansas City, they could take courses in garment design, ceramics, and Suzuki violin. The computer magnet at Central High had 900 interconnected computers, one for every student in the school. In the performing arts school, students studied ballet, drama, and theater production. They absorbed their physics from Russian-born teachers, and elementary grade students learned French from native speakers recruited from Quebec, Belgium, and Cameroon.(17)
For students in the classical Greek athletic program, there were weight rooms, racquetball courts, and a six-lane indoor running track better than those found in many colleges. The high school fencing team, coached by the former Soviet Olympic fencing coach, took field trips to Senegal and Mexico.(18)
The ratio of students to instructional staff was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.(19) There was $25,000 worth of beads, blocks, cubes, weights, balls, flags, and other manipulatives in every Montessori-style elementary school classroom. Younger children took midday naps listening to everything from chamber music to “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” For working parents the district provided all-day kindergarten for youngsters and before- and after-school programs for older students…
…The Kansas City plan did have some successes. The district had perhaps the best facilities in the country. The equipment was state of the art. One former student won a Rhodes scholarship. Some of the students got an opportunity to visit other parts of this country or Europe. David Armor, an educational consultant and sociologist who testified in Clark’s court on educational achievement in January 1997, found that the desegregation plan did integrate the system “as far as was possible,” given the conditions that existed in Kansas City. “But educationally,” he noted, “it hasn’t changed any of the measurable outcomes.”(96) Scores on standardized tests didn’t go up at all. And the average three-grade-level black-white achievement gap was as big as it always had been.
In perhaps the biggest surprise, Armor’s studies found that black elementary students who go to magnet schools (which have the highest percentages of whites) score no better on standardized tests than do blacks who go to all-black nonmagnet schools.(97) In short, Armor found that, contrary to the notion on which the whole desegregation plan was founded–that going to school with middle-class whites would increase blacks’ achievement–the Kansas City experiment showed that “integration has no effect.”(98)
