And right now, the top story on education on most international media's radar isn't yesterday's 5-4 vote to close 29 of the 61 schools currently in the Kansas City (Mo.) School District #30. It's a Mississippi high school's decision to cancel their prom, potentially in response to a request from a student to bring their lesbian girlfriend to the dance and show up in a tuxedo. In fact, the BBC, Daily Telegraph, as well as Canada's Globe and Mail and Toronto Star have yet to post a story about the situation in KCMSD.
Meanwhile, two major British papers have carried the story. The Guardian featured a commentary from liberal think-tank fellow Sasha Abramsky of New York, where he describes the situation in KC as the event schools in California want to avoid. He writes: “Kansas City might well represent a glimpse of a depressing American future: one in which those with resources opt out, en masse, from any and all public services, leaving the public sector to stumble drunkenly from one crisis to the next, a miserable-looking shadow of once-great glories.”
The Murdoch-owned Times published a straight-forward brief from their Washington correspondent.
If you find any articles in international press (even if it's a rehash of wire copy), please feel free to comment with a link to it.
Posts
Check out Therun2016.com
11 years ago
I'll be honest: I found this story more shocking than the KC news. The district has had problems for years - when it lost its accreditation, it was widely expected that a mass exodus of students would result. I was attending a school in the North Kansas City School District at the time, and we guessed we'd see floods of families moving across the river in order to switch districts.
ReplyDeleteIf you have half-empty buildings, obviously you have to consolidate. The actual closing of the schools is not what people should be focusing on. That the district remains unaccredited and has had declining enrollment for the past 12 years is what should be the big deal. This is simply the latest domino to fall in a series of equally significant events.