[rcraft]

This is an entirely misleading garbage statistic.

This statistic only relates to the rather small Kansas City Missouri public school district which only contains an estimated 17,500 students.

The author is misleading readers to believe that this statistic relates to all the schools in a relatively large US City named "Kansas City."

Per wikipedia:

In fact, there are portions of Kansas City, Missouri, where children attend 14 other "suburban" districts. In other words, the Kansas City District comprises the oldest parts of the city and is not contiguous with the boundaries of the city of Kansas City, Missouri.

So if we look up the total demographic of students that live in that same small geographic footprint I'd wager to say its not much higher than 9% white. (although that information is proving much more difficult to find)

As bachmeier comments - there is much more to the story.

[pash]

I mostly agree, but there are far more white people living within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public School District than you realize. It's difficult to find numbers, but I guesstimate that at least 30% and probably more like 40–50% of residents there are white.

(To see this, look at the number of black people in Kansas City, Missouri, who live within the boundaries of the Hickman Mills, Center, Grandview, Raytown, and Independence school districts.)

If that's true, then the Kansas City Public School District really is very segregated, even considering only the very narrow context of the population living within the district's boundaries. How it got that way is well documented; it is less well recognized that a major reason the district remains so segregated is that the black political establishment has adamantly opposed every recent effort to make the district more attractive to its white residents, many of whom are wealthy enough to pursue better options. One current example is Académie Lafayette's stymied effort to establish a high school in partnership with the district.

[tzs]

> I mostly agree, but there are far more white people living within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public School District than you realize. It's difficult to find numbers, but I guesstimate that at least 30% and probably more like 40–50% of residents there are white.

That guesstimate looks high, based on what I could find of the boundaries of the district and the racial data from this map: http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/

[pash]

Here [0] are the numbers from the most recent five-year estimates of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, aggregated over the census tracts within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public School District:

    Total population: 192,692
    Race:
      White only: 87,765 (46%)
      Black only: 80,627 (41%)

So my guesstimate was pretty much spot on.

0. http://proximityone.com/sd11dp1.htm