WAVE-3 just interviewed the major mayoral candidates in Louisville about the city’s insane busing plan.
Even the most wishy-washy response made it clear that none of the candidates favors trapping kids on buses for two hours a day. All seem open to the need for changes.
Sometimes, the right choice is so obvious that it even crosses all the political lines. Two hours on a bus every day is too long.
So, why is it that such universally held opinions still escape the education crowd?
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
No mayoral candidate in Louisville will defend the city’s school busing plan
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8 comments:
Because if we went back to local schools and did away with all of the busing hoohaa the number of personnel required to "manage", the district would also be reduced! Job security is your answer!
T. Foley speaks with great wisdom!
Why should the mayoral candidates address that issue? The city doesn't run the school system. That's a matter for the school board members.
You can debate the pros and cons of busing all you want. Don't forget that Jefferson County also has magnate school programs open to any student anywhere in the District. What's wrong with that kind of busing?
If you object to race-based busing why don't you say so? You could point out that in Louisville proper, the white population is no longer a majority. It's 49% of the city.
Hempy, we love your comments!
First of all, it's "magnet," not "magnate" (you really need to get a dictionary).
Magnets attract, which is what the supposed special programs in these schools are supposed to do – attract students with really good programs.
In the case of Louisville, however, the so-called magnet schools too often are not great at all and attract no-one (e.g. Shawnee High, listed as a magnet school but actually one of the worst performers in the entire state).
However, your malapropism actually works here. Magnates are persons of rank, power and influence. The magnates of Jefferson County’s school system try to fool everyone into thinking the schools are real magnets even though the some of those schools’ performance is very poor.
So, you are right, in a way. They are not magnets, but they are "Magnate schools."
Let’s get back to the parent choice issue I mentioned above. I object to local school magnates trumping parental rights to chose where they live and where their kids go to school. If the schools on the West side of Louisville were as good as those on the East side, Louisville wouldn’t have these problems. But, those unions you love won’t let that happen.
And, busing over 40 years hasn’t solved the problem, either. It just creates a smoke screen of confusion while West End schools continue to under-perform year after year after year.
As far as busing goes, I also have a common-sense objection. I don’t think little elementary school kids as young as five should be routinely subjected to hour-plus long bus rides in loosely supervised situations that include cattle-herding-like transfer stations that don’t even have restroom facilities.
I just heard today about a little kid messing herself while waiting for a bus pickup. She was not allowed to go to the restroom, for goodness sakes. I’ll bet that experience really improved her readiness to learn and love of schooling a whole lot.
We treat prisoners better.
I’ll bet a lot of Jefferson County kids, both black and white, are being taught to hate school as a consequence of abusive busing. How does that benefit anyone?
Hempy, what do you think?
Interesting Richard that you failed to mention Manual as a magnet school. Perhaps that's because its success rate ranks high in the US.
There's also the International Baccalaureate programs in Jefferson County. They're quite good too.
What's missing in the school system though is vocational-technical schools. Consequently, we're not adequately preparing students for the job market of the 21st century.
Busing is a government attempt to deal with economic inequality without Congress having to do so, which could be accomplished by reforming the tax system. It ought to be based on a proportional rate system on the movement of money as advocated by the father of capitalism, Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper 12.
You know everyone can pick out some schools that make their point. That's the reason no progress is made in closing the gaps. It's easier to argue over numbers and examples than it is to focus on a mutually agreed troubled school and fix it.
RE: Reddog's Comment SEp 4 at 2:34 PM
Busing for integration has a 40-year history of diverting attention from the main problem, not fixing individual problem schools, just as Reddog points out.
Separate and unequal was essentially an economic problem from the git-go.
That included inadequate wages, and the inability to qualify for jobs due to inadequate education.
Working people were discriminated against because they lacked the financial means to pay for more expensive schools. Schools in more affluent neighborhoods got better facilities and services than those in working and lower class neighborhoods. The labor union movement helped redress that imbalance in the late 1940s and early 50s by getting some decent wages for working people for a change.
Since then, the tax laws have been so gerrymandered that it now amounts to redistributive socialism of taking from the many to benefit the few.
This is Republican economics since the era of the robber barons and hasn't changed one iota. The attack on public schools is just another effort to exacerbate this imbalance and to take from the many for the benefit of the few.
That’s why charter schools don’t want anything to do with special education, homeless or migrant children. To do so would expose them for the fraud that they are.
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