I am not writing to commend the Kansas City School District for closing down almost half of its schools or laying off hundreds of staff. I will, however, commend it for being willing to make hard decisions, and these must have been incredibly hard.

I don’t think there is anything more difficult in current public policy debates than the issue of education in big cities. Even the school choice measures I believe in strongly, like charter schools and vouchers, are by no means magic bullets. That being said, the Kansas City School District has changed dramatically during recent decades, and it needed to shrink in order to reflect those changes and efficiently operate itself. The last thing the school district, or any government agency, should do is linger on indefinitely as a jobs program for government workers, whether they are needed or not.