Busing in Louisville: Another failed education experiment

Why do liberals think they can repeat the same experiment time and again and somehow, finally, come up with a better, different answer?


A great case in point is the busing situation in Jefferson County. Busing for integration has been going on there for about four decades.

But,

· Busing isn’t doing much to improve the deplorable performance of schools on the West side of town,

· Busing isn’t making a notable dent in the Black to White performance gaps,

· Mostly, busing just makes it almost impossible for parents to be involved with their children’s schools and

· Busing probably makes kids stuck on buses for hours a day angry with the whole education system (I’d love to see a news team do a survey on that).

Still, to hear Kentucky Senator Tim Shaughnessy (D) of Louisville tell it, proposed legislation to temper the busing experiments by allowing parents to chose to send their kids to the closest school is a bad idea.

Somehow, Sen. Shaughnessy has convinced himself that sending kids to the closest school will cost more money than the current situation where kids are bused as far as 28 miles away from their homes.

Senator, it’s actually insulting that you think we are dumb enough to believe that. With neighborhood schools, more kids would be able to walk to school and busing, when necessary, would cover much shorter distances.

Most importantly, Senator, how did you possibly convince yourself that Louisville’s four-decades of busing for integration is improving schools?

Consider the white minus black proficiency rates in Jefferson County in 2005 and 2010.

According to the 2006 NCLB report for the school district, in 2005 the white minus black proficiency rate gap for reading was 24.69 points. According to the 2010 NCLB report for the district, it hardly improved, dropping to 23.6 points, a drop of only 1.09 points in five years. At that rate of improvement, the gap won’t be eliminated in the next century.

For math, in 2005 the white minus black proficiency rate gap was 28.7 percent. It scarcely budged to 28.33 percent by 2010. In five years, the district closed the gap by a miserable 0.37 point, an average rate of improvement of only 0.074 points per year.

At this rate, over the next century the current white-black math gap of 28.33 points will only be closed by another 7.4 points. It will still be over 20 points different. It would take 382 years to reduce the white minus black math gap in Louisville to zero.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s quite good enough, Senator Shaughnessy.

And, since the Jefferson County Board of Education recently announced that they are getting rid of busing fanatic Sheldon Berman so they can refocus the district on academic improvement, I suspect a lot of other, more sensibly thinking people in Louisville also are starting to realize that the dismal gap improvement isn’t good enough, either.