Jefferson County school busing: Not as bad as last year is supposed to be good?

The ACT score release had me tied up last week, but searching through the Courier-Journal’s web site today, this very short article popped up.

It says, “Last JCPS student off bus at 6:15 p.m. Thursday.”

The article goes on to say the last student got home on the first day of school about an hour later (it was 7:13 p.m., per another Courier article).

School gets out in Jefferson County at 3:45 PM. So, on day one of school, some poor kid was stuck somewhere between school and home at the end of the school day for 3-1/2 hours. It only got reduced to 2-1/2 hours in this transportation maze on Thursday for another kid (maybe the same one?). As one astute Courier reader pointed out, you can drive to Cincinnati in that amount of time.

If the district keeps this up, it may not take until spring for stories to start appearing about the violence on the buses.

After all, the kids already have had a year of ‘bus boredom education’ to get them ready.

JCPS school board admits disappointment in superintendent evaluation

The Bluegrass Institute recently submitted a records request to obtain the most recent (2009-2010) performance evaluation for former Jefferson County Public Schools superintendent Sheldon Berman. You can read/ download this evaluation here. This was a follow up to a previous request that was a part of the investigative report, "Rewarding Failure".

In that report we criticized the school board for providing a glowing review for Berman's performance while failing to even MENTION the incredible number of underperforming schools in the district. This time around it was at least mentioned...

Considering very few school boards across the state even mention student performance in superintendent evaluations, the fact that disappointment was expressed by the JCPS school board is a significant step forward. Granted, it is just a couple of sentences from a multi-page document but it does represent a willingness to bring this discussion into the open and an awareness that the superintendent is the CEO of the school district.

Poorest performing schools in Jefferson County get lots of rookie teachers

Probably too many rookie teachers

Management of the turn-around of Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in Jefferson County looks awfully shaky.

The Courier-Journal reports that 60 of the 135 teachers brought in to the second group of the district’s schools to be tagged as Persistently Low-Achieving are first-year teachers with absolutely no prior experience. They are going to face a demanding task: working in some of the district’s most challenged schools with some of the district’s most under-served students.

In addition, 20 more teachers coming into these Persistently Low-Achieving Schools are just transfers from one of the other Persistently Low-Achieving Schools that were identified this year. That might just be moving problems around.

Clearly, not everyone is happy about this, including the new Associate Commissioner for the ‘District 180’ program, Dewey Hensley. Hensley – who has a great reputation for school turn-around in the Atkinson Elementary School in Jefferson County – said he is not sure the district has gone far enough in its efforts to fix problems in these low-performing schools.

Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday is also unhappy. He questions whether this large group of inexperienced teachers can raise performance fast enough to meet federal and state requirements.

I wonder if these new hire teachers are going to get the kind of mentoring they badly need as they start their classroom careers. With so many brand new teachers, it seems unlikely there are going to be enough experienced teachers in the school with the interest and time to do the job. After all, even experienced teachers in these schools will be facing some of the district’s toughest education challenges.

Swirling around on the periphery of all of this is the fact that at least some factors in the teacher restaffing action in Jefferson County may not be in compliance with House Bill 176 from the 2010 Regular Legislative Session. That bill established the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools program.

Among other things, HB 176 said union contracts could not interfere with the placement of teachers in these troubled schools. However, a report from the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability (OEA) indicates a Memorandum of Agreement between the union and the school district could indeed be interfering in ways the bill does not permit. Check out the OEA’s comments on page 40 of the report.

One thing seems pretty certain: we are going to be spending a lot of extra money in these schools, about half a million dollars a year per school, to turn them around. Somehow, it seems like more money by itself won’t be nearly enough.

Open Records: Jefferson County Schools, Berman performance evaluation

An open records request was sent today to obtain the most recent performance evaluation for outgoing Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) superintendent Sheldon Berman.

JCPS and Berman were part of the investigative report "Rewarding Failure" which shed light on the broken process of evaluating the performance of school district leaders. With this records request, the Bluegrass Institute is following up to see if there has been any progress!

You can track the request progress here!

Bluegrass Institute interviewed about JCPS superintendent search

Yesterday, The Bluegrass Institute's own Jim Waters was interviewed by WHAS about the superintendent search in Jefferson County. Waters was quoted as saying:

"The system has a lot of issues that need to be addressed.  Superintendents need to have the flexibility to put the most experienced teachers in low performing schools"

Read the full article here.

A reminder of the situation in Jefferson County

With the search for a new superintendent in full swing in Jefferson County Public Schools, here is a reminder of what the situation looks like in one of Kentucky's most troubled school districts...

Quote of the Day: Outside educator sees big problems in Louisville’s schools

“Reviewing your student achievement gap, I’m very concerned.”

Christine Johns-Haines, superintendent of Utica Community Schools in Michigan and candidate for superintendent in Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky

Quote of the day: Louisville Tea Party and JCPS superintendent finalists

“It's time to get involved and find out what these candidates are going to do about our failing schools. We have high dropout rates, the most failing schools of any county in KY, and KY is ranked as one of the worst states in the Nation for public education. If we're ever going to change the future and have a more knowledgeable, engaged society, we have to get involved in our children's futures TODAY." --Wendy Caswell, Louisville Tea Party

Jefferson County school bus director clueless about increase in incidents

I guess the violence on Jefferson County school buses will finally stop – after school shuts down.

Meanwhile, the Courier-Journal reports that the director of transportation, Rick Caple, says he didn’t know that there had been a sharp rise in reported bus incidents in the last two years.

Yeah, Right!

Someone in Jefferson County must have learning disabilities, and they are running this crazy system.

It’s time to split this monster school district up and return to a neighborhood schools system. We need to do that so proper focus can finally be directed to those schools where staff doesn’t perform.

Right now, Jefferson County is just hiding problems by moving kids all over the place while a superintendent with too many schools to watch inevitably winds up missing some really big problems. Problems like the fact that the majority of the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in Kentucky are found in this one district.

It’s clearly time for the state to move in, as Jefferson County seems incapable of learning the obvious lessons here, and thousands of kids are suffering for that ignorance.

BIPPS in Louisville Business First: The experience gap in Jefferson County schools

There are many gaps contributing to the poor performance of the Jefferson County Public Schools, including the well-publicized academic achievement gap between whites and minorities and the common-sense gaps which are unmistakable in the district's busing and student-assignment policies.

However, the most serious gap might be "the experience gap."
I write about it in today's Louisville Business First.

Dick Innes offers additional analysis of the JCPS teacher-experience gap in this recent blog entry.

Lots of kids get left behind after graduation in Jefferson County

WAVE-3 TV reports that thousands of Jefferson County students are graduated from high school in 2010 and headed on to other life pursuits such as higher education or the workforce.

What WAVE-3 missed is the fact that new data from the Kentucky Department of Education shows that a chunk of last year’s Jefferson County graduates reported they didn’t head anywhere after high school – not to college, not to the military, not to tech school, not to the workforce.

And, we don’t know for sure what happened to additional thousands of Jefferson County students who simply dropped out before getting a high school diploma, but it’s a good bet most of them are in even more dire straights.

Read more »

Teachers unions turning on their own

The Jefferson County Teachers Association spent $203,000 in last November’s election to defeat Speaker Pro Tem Larry Clark, D-Louisville.

JCTA president Brent McKim claims the group was trying to defeat Clark because the longtime legislator “ignored us.”

If a local teachers union would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat a legislator they had previously supported for many years – and who often sides with them on issues – imagine what they will try and do to lawmakers who support merit pay for teachers, getting rid of School-Based Decision-Making Councils and charter schools.

The JCTA’s efforts failed with Clark. Hopefully, it’s just the beginning of a long losing streak for an entity that tries to suppress every attempt at genuine reform in the Jefferson County Public Schools, Kentucky’s largest school district.

Courier’s opinions on ‘Fixing schools’ uninformed

A recent Courier-Journal editorial warrants an informed challenge. Putting it politely, the editor is seriously uninformed.

The major thrust of the editorial is that Jefferson County Public Schools are getting too much sniping from Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday and his staff. Per the Courier, the local school folk in Jefferson County are all great souls, all interested in doing the right thing for kids.

The editorial claims:

“There is no evidence at all that any party dealing with the problem of low-achieving schools in Jefferson County — JCPS, state or union — is exhibiting ‘no regard’ for students.”

Please!

Fact: In December, 2010, the Kentucky Office of Education Accountability (OEA) reported to the Kentucky Legislature’s Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee that the Jefferson County Teachers Association and the Jefferson County School District entered into a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) on how restaffing in the district’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools would be conducted.

However, the OEA says on page 40 of its report “Analysis of Collective Bargaining Agreements in Kentucky Districts” (read the draft version approved by the EAARS in December – the final has not been posted):

“While the statute clearly stipulates that ‘professionally negotiated contracts by a local board of education shall not take precedence over the requirements’ associated with the option selected, JCPS and JCTA entered into an MOA as to how the restaffing would take place.”

Basically, OEA says the MOA violated provisions in House Bill 176 from the 2010 Regular Legislative Session. That legislation created implemented the accountability program that led to the identification of the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools.

The OEA report also identifies a high level of inexperience in the teaching staff following restaffing in the Persistently Low-Achieving Schools. That was not the intention under HB-176.

The OEA report further says:

“As recognized in the Greater Louisville Education Report, ‘staffing provisions in the teacher union‘s contract need to be altered to insure the distribution of quality teachers can be more equitably spread across high and low risk schools’ (p. 7). Since this report was published in 2009, it appears little progress has been made to address the distribution of teachers in the district. JCPS‘ draft version of the 2011 Comprehensive District Improvement Plan does not include any policies or programs related to teacher distribution or transfer provisions.”

Imagine that! Louisville’s own education report called for staffing changes two years ago, yet the union continues resisting these badly needed improvements over two years later. How is that in the interests of students?

So, it is clear the Courier’s editor is far off base in claiming there is no evidence that parties in Louisville are not interested in students. When obviously needed changes go unmade for years, and laws apparently are being violated in the process, it looks like the education crowd in Louisville – not Kentucky’s education commissioner – is the problem.

And, the commissioner is right on target in getting firmer about the chronic lack of progress in Kentucky’s largest school system.

And, maybe, the education challenges in Louisville extend to the editor at the Courier, who apparently didn’t do his or her homework with the OEA report, or even his hometown created Greater Louisville report, either. As long as the editor runs cover for those who stand in the way of kids getting the experienced teachers they need, he becomes part of the problem, too.

Jefferson County Schools getting more criticism for staffing in failing schools

The Courier-Journal ran a large article today about how Kentucky’s Education Commissioner Terry Holliday is getting more and more critical of the way Jefferson County Public Schools restaffed teachers in their Persistently Low-Achieving Schools.

The Courier points out that some of these schools wound up with large numbers of first-year teachers after the restaffing took place.

That was not the intent of House Bill 176 from the 2010 Regular Legislative Session.

The Courier also notes that an Office of Education Accountability Report, which the Bluegrass Institute put on line several months ago, has data on the large number of inexperienced teachers that wound up in Jefferson County’s lowest performing schools. You can see the number of new teachers by school on Page 38 of the OEA report.

Not mentioned in the Courier article is even more damaging commentary in the OEA report, which also says on page 40 that the school district’s Memorandum of Agreement with the teachers’ union in the school district violated House Bill 176 provisions.

“While the statute clearly stipulates that ‘professionally negotiated contracts by a local board of education shall not take precedence over the requirements’ associated with the option selected, JCPS and JCTA entered into an MOA as to how the restaffing would take place.”

Maybe the Courier is saving that important comment for another article.

Jefferson County schools think because they are bigger, they can be ‘badder’

It’s becoming a typical pattern for Jefferson County Public Schools – dispute every number that shows you are doing poorly instead of digging in to make changes that improve things.

Fox41 reports Jefferson County tops the state for the most problems in a new report on school safety.

Fox also says Jack Jacobs, a spokesperson for Jefferson County Public Schools, claims that comparing the district to other districts in the state is unfair because Jefferson County is so large.

Now, hold on a minute. The new school safety report isn’t based on student counts; it’s based on percentages. Jefferson County isn’t at a disadvantage with that approach.

Besides, while most of the state’s school systems saw a reduction in school safety incidents, the trend went the other way in Jefferson County. That isn’t defensible.

I guess Jefferson County school folks think it’s OK to be bad if you are bigger.

It’s interesting to read some of the comments to this Fox article and ones in the Courier-Journal's coverage.

The district’s crazy busing plan gets mentioned more than once.


Could the busing plan be adding to violence issues? Certainly, recent reports highlighted in this blog show that the buses in Jefferson County are far from peaceful.

Sorry Mr. Jefferson County Superintendent: It just isn’t so!

Jefferson County Superintendent talking mush about turning around low-performing schools

Fantasy:

“I just don't think the transformation model is effective in producing immediate, dramatic change. It may have some long term benefits, but they are really long term.”

Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Sheldon Berman, quoted March 29, 2011 by the Louisville Courier-Journal

Fact:

As I discussed in this blog back on March 2, 2011, we now have early evidence from the recently released PLAN and EXPLORE scores for the first group of 10 schools to be designated as Persistently Low-Achieving Schools. Trend arrows on the far right of the table below (click on table to enlarge) show the Composite Score trend in each school between 2009-10 and the 2011-12 school years (PLAN and EXPLORE are given early in each school year).


The trend arrows show that three of the four NON-Jefferson County high schools made improvements in their performance after they adopted the “Transformation Model” for school turn-around.

In sharp contrast, the majority of the Jefferson County Schools, all of which choose the “Restaffing Option,” showed declines in scores.

Only one Jefferson County school using the “Restaffing Option” in this list showed improvement.

So, if we are talking about evidence of fast indications of progress, the data shows the Jefferson County superintendent does not have “the right stuff.”

Most would call the Lawrence County High School’s one-year Composite score jump “dramatic.” Many would also consider Leslie County High School’s one-year improvement notable, as well.

So, I’ll go with Commissioner Terry Holliday on this one. Holliday is also recommending the “Transformation Option,” which ties teacher evaluations and compensation to student performance. Keep in mind, the commissioner has been able to look at other during-the-term testing results that have not been released to the public in addition to the PLAN and EXPLORE data above.

By the way, I don’t care if the teachers union in Jefferson County doesn’t like the “Transformation Option.” It is time to do something for the kids instead of the adults in our schools. It seems to be happening in places like Lawrence County and Leslie County.

More Persistently Low-Achieving Schools identified in Kentucky

Feds: Kentucky Department of Education didn’t identify enough

Sending a clear message that the US Department of Education is fed up with schools that persistently perform poorly for students, the Kentucky Department of Education was recently directed to add more schools to the official Persistently Low-Achieving Schools list to comply with federal requirements. Apparently, the department had engaged in some of that ‘KERA math’ and didn’t correctly calculate the number of schools that had to be identified to meet the federally required percentage figures.

The two added low-achieving schools, Knight Middle School in the Jefferson County Public School District, and Newport High School in the Newport Independent School District, bring the state’s total number of low-achieving schools to 22. Here is the full list:








Jefferson County now has 13 of the 22 Persistently Low-Achieving Schools in the entire state, or 59 percent. The district has less than 20 percent of the students, however.

Check the Courier-Journal's coverage here.

Public weighs in on search for new Jefferson County school superintendent

Members of the public weighed in at a lightly attended meeting with the search firm that is helping the Jefferson County Board of Education in its search for a new school superintendent.

One of the key points is that the Jefferson County school system is complex, and it will have a steep learning curve for anyone who is not already familiar with the issues posed by a large school district.

Jefferson County citizens can do more to help themselves understand and interface in the hiring process.

Yesterday, the Bluegrass Institute released a ‘tip sheet’ for school boards hunting new superintendents. The sheet is based on our experience and observations in several hunts for education executives that proved highly problematic. While the tip sheet is of great value to school boards, it also provides ideas and search tools that public citizens can use to check out candidates. Check out our tip sheet, “Superintendent hiring: Advice to school boards.”

Meanwhile, WHAS reports student aimed BB gun at school bus

The school bus stories from Louisville are growing faster than burley in Kentucky summer.

The latest from WHAS-TV says a 10-year old pulled a BB gun and aimed it at his school bus just after getting off.

The student had been in an argument prior to disembarking.

The article doesn’t clearly say so, but the way the event is described makes it sound like the student had the BB gun in his school pack all day long.

Great security there!

Jefferson Co. School Bus Drivers Start Speaking Out

Jefferson Co. School Bus Drivers Start Speaking Out

Fox41 interviews a Jefferson County Public Schools bus driver and the director of the busing program in this interesting article, which also has a video.

A few points:

• One of the few school bus monitors (an adult riding ‘shotgun’) had her nose broken – by an elementary school student!

• Some bus routes have fights almost daily.

• Elementary school students are the biggest problem (which makes sense because only the elementary schools are currently subjected to the full busing for integration plan. Just wait until they add middle schools to the plan next year).

• Fighting breaks out more frequently on the Interstates (what a great opportunity for a high speed crash disaster).

• Jefferson County’s busing director says they only have 40 cameras installed in their fleet of 930 buses. Cameras cost $1,800 each to install (Wow!). That would make a $1.6 million price tag to equip the entire fleet.

• Busing monitors are limited due to prohibitive costs. The district’s busing director says it would cost another four to five million to put monitors on all buses.


When will Jefferson County figure out that this expensive program, which has to be turning a lot of children off to education, is unaffordable, unworkable, and child (and maybe bus driver) hostile?

Wouldn’t concentrating on improving education in the neighborhood schools do a whole lot more to create real integration by improving the economic standing of West End Louisvillians?