Hello Collin,
The reason for this behavior is because the ForeignKey builder does offer displaying the text associated with the number value as built-in functionality. Under the hood the column is bound to field that contains only numeric value. In order to show the text representation in your client template some custom logic should be written. I would give some guidelines on how to achieve this in case that this might be helpful for others who face same difficulty:
1. The value of the input element can be defined as function that accepts the actual field value as first parameter and the field name (static text) as second parameter.
2.. The Telerik MVC wrappers render the HTML and JavaScript needed to initialize a Kendo UI widget. Each foreign key column is simply array of key-value pairs stored in the columns.values.
3. Here is a function body with some comments that should help you to illustrate a simple idea of finding the text from the columns.values associated with a specific number (current field value) :
Regards,
Boyan Dimitrov
Telerik by Progress