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Sugar Creek Elementary is a French-immersion school. An integrated teaching staff of native French speakers recruited from France, Belgium, Canada, Haiti, Egypt and Cameroon keep the children speaking only French, from the Pledge of Allegiance ("Je declare fidelite au drapeau des Etats-Unis...") through recess to the end of the day. The kids even talk out of turn in French. "They're so eager to learn everything, they pick it up like a sponge," says kindergarten teacher Janet Lawrence.
A third of the students are white, and a third of those come from outside the district--transported by parents such as Virgil Adams. (The state stopped paying for transportation into the district this year.) Adams or his wife makes a 28-mile round-trip drive twice a day from Blue Springs, a suburb of tidy lawns and two-car garages, so that Sarah can go to second grade and William to third at Sugar Creek. They were drawn by the foreign-language instruction, but Adams, an fbi agent based in Kansas City, sees the social mix itself as an important advantage. "Somewhere on the news one night the word nigger was used," he recalls. "My son asked me what it meant. I thought that was great; if he'd been around my dad three or four days in a row, he'd have known. We didn't want to bring up our kids that way."
For all its moral appeal, however, the Kansas City plan's achievements appear modest when weighed against its enormous expense. The number of out-of-district white children enrolled at the magnet schools peaked at 1,476 last year. Standardized test scores have registered slight gains. White flight, while substantially slowed, has not been reversed: in 1985, the year before the magnet plan began, the district was 73.6% minority; this year it is 75.9% minority. If nothing else, horrible school facilities have been replaced with nice new ones, and for some that is justification enough. "I bet a lot of kids in Kansas City are enjoying their childhood more now that they don't have to go to schools that smell," says author Jonathan Kozol, a longtime chronicler of educational injustice. "A good society would consider that money well spent."
His is not the prevailing view in Missouri, where for the past decade candidates for just about any office have been running against what much of the electorate perceives as Judge Clark's liberal-from-hell spending spree. Attorney General Jay Nixon expresses outrage that the state has spent $2.6 billion on court-ordered school desegregation in metropolitan St. Louis and Kansas City. He is seeking "unitary status"--that is, an end to court supervision based on a judicial finding that the system is desegregated--in both cities. "I'm a Democrat, and I want to help kids' educations," he says. "But to see the fencing team in Kansas City sent to Hungary because it showed up good in the focus groups and the whites would think it's cool, is just ridiculous."