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.

Jefferson County school busing flunks test

An education law professor and national expert on school busing plans has tarred and feathered the nonsense in Jefferson County.

The Courier-Journal quotes busing expert Gary Orfield, “The current plan isn’t working.”

Orfield says that his final recommended changes were far greater than he originally thought would be needed. In the end, the existing elementary school busing plan needs massive overhaul to cut travel times.

Orfield also saw right through Jefferson County’s “magnet” school nonsense, which turns the concept of true magnet schools on its ear. Per Orfield, the programs “Aren’t very magnetic.”

Orfield really gets one favorite Bluegrass Institute position:

“Students should pick schools,” he said, “not the other way around.”

Not everyone was impressed by the Orfield proposals. Teddy Gordon, the lawyer who won a 2007 US Supreme Court decision that threw out an earlier Jefferson County busing scheme certainly wasn’t buying this latest attempt to rework busing. Gordon asked, “How much more is JCPS going to rearrange the deck chairs on this Titanic?"

Most importantly, Gordon pointed out that busing “does not work in improving the education for any child in Louisville.”

Given the school system’s well-below average performance, including having five of the lowest scoring high schools in the recently announced ACT testing program, that is a pretty obvious conclusion to reach.

And, 40 years of busing has failed to fix the school district’s gruesome performance record.

Jefferson County busing plan hits court

(Updated with graph 7 Aug 10)

With the count of parents who have joined the lawsuit against the incredibly bad busing plan in Louisville now up to 13, the case is finally in court.


Per the Courier-Journal, the court discussion gravitated towards a discussion of the performance of Jefferson County schools and why parents are unhappy. One example listed was a comparison of the Dunn and King Elementary Schools.

The news report says that parent attorney J. Bruce Miller “insinuated” that King Elementary is inferior, citing as an example numerous spelling and grammar mistakes available for public view in the school’s web site.

Well, there’s no need to insinuate. The performance in these two schools is dramatically different, as the most recent proficiency rates in the five Kentucky Core Content Test subjects in this graph show (I assembled the graph from data in each school’s Interim Performance Report for 2009, available with the menus presented here).


Very simply, the performance gaps in proficiency rates in these two schools are quite dramatic.

The 2009 No Child Left Behind results for the two schools are also dramatically different. Dunn’s 2009 NCLB Adequate Yearly Progress Report shows it met all nine of its targets and thus met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). King’s report shows it only met 8 of 12 targets, a rather low performance of only 66.7 percent. King failed to make AYP in 2009. It also failed to make AYP in 2008. Find each school's 2009 NCLB report with the menus provided here.

However, King is not in NCLB Tier status due to a serious loophole that the Jefferson County busing plan has exposed. When the enrollment in a school changes by 20 percent or more, that school’s NCLB “counter” gets reset to zero. So, instead of King being in Tier 1 status for failing to make AYP two years in a row, it isn’t in any NCLB trouble.



I’ve written about how busing has shredded NCLB in Jefferson County before, but I would not be surprised if the lawyer for the school district or its superintendent tries to fool the public by claiming the district has reduced the schools in NCLB Tier status. I suspect it has, but that is only because of this loophole that busing can seriously exploit.

There was more nonsense in the Courier’s report, and you can click the “Read more” link below to learn about that.

Read more »

Jefferson County busing plan “BUS-ted” NCLB again!

It’s no surprise. The Jefferson County Public School District’s chaotic busing plan – supposedly justified by needs for diversity – thoroughly trashed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability for the district’s elementary schools. Is this the real reason educators in Jefferson County continue to defend this child- and parent-hostile mess?

Here are some of the gruesome statistics for the district’s 89 standard configuration (Primary to Grade 5) elementary schools:

• THEN: In 2008 a total of 21 Jefferson County elementary schools were in NCLB improvement categories ranging from Tier 1 to Tier 5. Another five schools lacked enough high needs students to be considered federal Title 1 schools, so they were not held accountable. However, these five schools also failed to make the NCLB targets.

• NOW: In 2010, only 10 elementary schools face consequences in the latest NCLB report. That is true even though NCLB standards got tougher during the past two years. In the new report, the non-Title 1 schools can also face state-level sanctions, but few did in Jefferson County.

Thus, in 2008 there were 26 Jefferson County elementary schools that would face sanctions, then in 2010, with the standards raised, only 10 schools faced sanctions?

Does that sound credible?

Consider this:

• In 2010 out of the 89 standard configuration elementary schools in Jefferson County, 67 (that’s 3 out of 4) were “reconfigured” and got excused from all NCLB accountability thanks to busing.

• Of the 67 reconfigured Jefferson County elementary schools in 2010, 56 (that’s 84 percent) actually failed to make overall adequate yearly performance in reading for at least two years in a row. WITHOUT BUSING, THEY SHOULD HAVE FACED CONSEQUENCES.

• Many of the same 56 schools that failed in reading also failed in mathematics.

• Out of the remaining 22 schools that were not reconfigured, 10 faced NLCB consequences. Thus, for those few elementary schools in Jefferson County that were held accountable, nearly half (45 percent) failed to escape NCLB sanctions in 2010.

Any way you slice this, a lot of schools that should be held accountable, were not.

Read more »

More insight into the Jefferson County Schools busing plan

A few days ago, U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II made a legal ruling supporting the incredibly poorly thought out Jefferson County school busing plan that we have discussed before.

So, I thought it would be interesting to look at the academic performance of one school where a child will be forced to bus something like 20 miles, one way, each day.

The school is Jefferson County’s Shelby Elementary School. It is in No Child Left Behind Tier 3 status, which means it failed during four separate school terms to meet the requirements of NCLB.

You can find the school’s NCLB report for 2008 by negotiating some menus from this page.

Here is a list from that report on the areas where this low performing school failed NCLB goals in 2008.


First of all, notice that the school didn’t fail white kids. It didn’t fail because of kids with learning disabilities, either, simply because the school had too few of them under Kentucky’s ridiculously high minimum enrollment requirements to get a score in that area (signified by the n/a designation).

This school primarily failed because of one racial group, African-Americans, which actually comprise the dominant racial group at Shelby Elementary.

If Jefferson county can dilute the number of low-scoring students in this school by busing in kids from better-off parts of the school district, it possibly will boost scores in the school, at least for a little while, without having to make any real changes in educational performance.

The real irony here is that because this school is an NCLB Tier 3 school, parents of students already attending Shelby Elementary get the right to request a transfer out of this school to a better performing one at the same time that the east end students sued to avoid being bused IN to this low performing elementary school.

Go figure!

And, then ask how a judge could miss what is going on here. How could a judge uphold a plan that requires a five-year old to make three bus changes, ranging all across town, to travel all across Jefferson County to school? What kind of educational mindset is that going to create?

Of course, aside from other things, Judge Heyburn doesn’t have a terribly good track record on school busing issues. According to the Daily News in Bowling Green, “Heyburn upheld a school assignment plan in 2004 - a decision struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote in 2007.”

So, stand by for more on this explosive issue that goes to the heart of parent rights to insure their children get a good education. In the case of the two parents who got trampled by the school district, and then the courts, they pulled their kids out of the public school system all together. If they now win their suit on what looks like certain appeal, the damages to us taxpayers will mount that much more.

And, all the while, Shelby Elementary will go on conducting business as usual, which is to say, probably not very well. In fact, if there is a large enough change in the school’s student enrollment thanks to all the busing, that could restart its NCLB “clock.,” giving the school’s staff a “bye” for several more years while education in the school continues to wallow.

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?

New ACT results expose dramatic differences in Kentucky high schools

New results from ACT testing of all Kentucky’s 11th grade students expose enormous gaps in performance in Kentucky’s high schools.

The two tables below were developed from an Excel file from the Kentucky Department of Education.

The tables show the ACT math performance for the 20 best and 20 worst high schools in the state. Each table shows the percentage of students in each school that reached the ACT Benchmark score of 22 in math. That score indicates students are likely to get passing grades in a credit bearing freshman college algebra course.


In the top 20 listing, note that school size isn’t a terribly important indicator of performance. That goes against ideology that was heavily pushed in some quarters that smaller schools are better. For example, both the very large Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and the tiny Paintsville High had virtually identical success in preparing their students for college level math work.

On a very disappointing note, observe that only a handful of schools in the state prepare more than half of their students for college math. That’s lousy performance any way you look at it.

At the other end of the spectrum, some of Kentucky’s high schools do an absolutely deplorable job in teaching math to all students. In some cases, none of the students in these schools are being adequately prepared for this key college subject. This means all of those schools’ graduates are locked out of the critical Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics career fields. That’s not just bad for the students – it is also bad for Kentucky’s economy.

Notice as well that school size doesn’t seem to have much relationship to the way math is instructed in these bottom-performing schools, either. Tiny schools are interspersed with much larger enrollment schools, just as happens with the list of the top performers.


There are some lessons here.

First, it is painfully evident that where a child goes to school can have an enormous impact on learning.

Second, it is also evident that nearly two decades after the start of KERA, the promise of high performance for all our children is woefully not being kept. When students are trapped in schools where not even a single child is being adequately prepared for college, something is terribly wrong, and parents badly need more options on where they can have their children educated.

Third, the ACT results provide compelling evidence that Louisville’s school busing plans have been a failure. Louisville schools are liberally located in both the top 20 and bottom 20 lists above. If busing worked, the performance of schools in Louisville would be roughly equal. It most definitely isn’t.

The courts looking at Louisville need to come to grips with the very evident truth in the new ACT data. Busing will not fix bad schools. Busing just perpetuates the existence of those bad schools while they continue to mess up student lives. The only difference is that with busing, a slightly different, bused in group of children suffers. But, the education failure continues.

Jefferson County busing mess: Are we getting the whole story?

Part 2

I posted Part 1 of this blog thread several days ago, and I think it would be worthwhile to summarize some things we’ve heard, so far, from reader comments and other discussions.

• Informants indicate busing problems extend beyond the three schools elementary schools that the Jefferson County Public School System officially identified. For example, we have received specific comments about problems in Cochran Elementary and the Jefferson County Traditional Middle School.

• In addition to children getting home late, there are reports of problems with the morning pickups. One problem: Students are arriving at school late.

• In some cases, it is reported to us that after the first day, buses didn’t even stop at a morning pickup site. Kids missed school completely for days without any follow-up.

• The management of after-school waits for bus pickups is sometimes terrible. Kids reportedly have been forced to sit (no lying down!) on hard gym floors for hours without water or food.

• To make the busing look successful, an informant says some schools actually dismissed EARLY! How does that improve education?

• There are rumors of even worse conditions in the bus transfer yards.

So, Louisville, how is week two going? Is everything fixed, or are kids still spending hours a day trapped in the busing madness?

FOX-41 shows videos of school bus violence in Jefferson County

We’ve written a lot about the crazy school busing situation in Jefferson County’s public school system. Kids are routinely uprooted from their neighborhoods and bused all the way across town in rides that can exceed an hour in length, one way.

With inadequate supervision, it was inevitable that problems would occur. The only surprising thing is how many problems are occurring, and how nothing very effective is being done to fix the situation.

The latest insight into the conditions on the school system’s buses came in a FOX-41 expose which ran on May 9, 2011.

Some interesting points:

• The school system has 930 buses, but only 40 security cameras.

• There are only 25 bus monitors. In all other cases, the bus driver is the only adult on board.
• The Transportation Director admits, “Every day we have a fight on a bus, or two buses, or three buses."

• Noses are getting broken; a kid’s hair is set on fire; kids are getting concussions; kids’ arms are getting broken.

• There are more than 100 pages of felony case filings for this school year alone.

• Jefferson County busing managers say they know only a few kids cause problems, but they do nothing effective to deal with those students.

The really sad thing is that if busing for integration worked, with 40 years of busing now history in Jefferson County, there wouldn’t be any more need for the long rides. Minorities would have moved up into the middle class by now, and into the more prosperous neighborhoods, as well.

Instead, after two decades of KERA, West End schools in Louisville continue to seriously under-perform. And, instead of focusing on academic improvement – and spending money to make that happen – the district’s school leaders are just throwing dollars away on thousands of gallons of diesel fuel for buses that probably contribute more to student anxiety and dislike of school than to good student development.

It’s time for good people in Louisville to start putting real pressure on their teachers union controlled school board to take action. No business on the plant would continue pushing a failed experiment for forty years, and it’s time for citizens to demand something better from their school leaders.

If you know more stories about problems in Jefferson County’s buses, we’d like to hear them. You can submit these anonymously with the comment feature in this blog.

Jefferson County spinning bus ride times?

A Courier-Journal article about the school busing mess in Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) proclaims, “JCPS bus ride times drop for second straight year, district says.” The article amplifies, “The average ride time this school year has actually been reduced to just over 29 minutes each way.”

Really?

A graphic accompanies the Courier’s article. I analyzed the data in that graphic and this table shows what I found.


The average ride time may be down from 2008-09 (I don’t have enough data to check that claim), but the facts are that – unless the Courier has an error in its graphic – the percentage of students with ride times under 30 minutes DROPPED between 2009-10 and 2010-11 from 55.8 percent to 55.6 percent. That means MORE kids, NOT FEWER, are riding longer than 30 minutes, one-way, this year compared to last year – as you can see from the bottom row in my table.

Also, while the district has reduced the number of students with grossly excessive rides of over an hour, one-way, there still remain more than 1,000 students who face one-way rides of 61 to 75 minutes. That equates to round-trip daily bus rides for those 1,067 children of over two hours to perhaps as long as 2-1/2 hours. That’s just not acceptable when schools can be found much closer to these students’ homes.

Finally, notice that nearly 2,000 more kids are stuck in the busing system this year compared to last. This monster is still growing.

When you consider all of this, some possible minor improvements in some of the busing numbers don’t outweigh the gruesome reality that the JCPS is still subjecting over ten thousand kids to daily round-trip bus rides that run over an hour, round-trip, and that over 5,500 truly unlucky children have to suffer through round trip busing times of more than 1-1/2 hours every single day.

In closing, we’d love to hear from any of you who know of JCPS bus rides that still exceed 75 minutes, one way, which the school district now claims is the maximum. Ever since the JCPS turned the interpretation of Kentucky Core Content Test reading scores on its ear with its Every1Reads program, I have had a little trouble with their numbers.

Jefferson County busing plan rolling right over parents and kids

School system denies 70 percent of parent requests to avoid onerous busing plan

The Jefferson County school bus juggernaut continues rolling – right over the best interests of students and parents.

Now, the Courier-Journal reports that 70 percent of parent requests for transfers out of the busing chaos, about 1,200 of them, have been turned down.

Instead, Kindergarten and first grade students will be forced to ride buses up to an hour each way to school, sometimes having to negotiate a bus transfer in the process.

And, parents with legitimate hardship situations are really upset.

For example, Brandy Schad doesn’t think she got treated fairly. Schad’s husband has Crohn’s disease and Schad tried to get her son assigned to a school where the family could get help when her husband was hospitalized, which apparently happens frequently and without warning.

Now Schad is interested in joining the growing lawsuit against the busing plan. As of July 12th, a total of five parents were interested in joining the suit. Now, the Courier reports the count of parents seeking to join the suit is up to eight.

The really sad part of all of this is that just throwing different kids into a low-achieving school isn’t likely to improve education in that facility. It’s just going to wreck the lives of different children. If Jefferson County schools would get serious about improving the performance of its schools, then the pressure to bus would pretty much go away.

And, I just can’t see any caring parent of any race getting excited about their child being forced to spend two hours on a school bus every single day. Whether that bus is headed to Louisville’s upscale Eastern end or its urban Western section, after an hour ride the kids are going to arrive at the school door already tired, bored, and not in much of a mood for learning.

More NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Cards”

I wrote earlier today about how the court-directed busing program in Louisville acted to destroy No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability in several of that district’s schools. Now, I’m going to discuss how a rather closely related event, changes in school zones, can have the same disastrous impact on NCLB accountability.

Kentucky Administrative Regulation 703 KAR 5:020 says, “If as a result of a change in service area boundaries or local board of education policies affecting student population served by a school, less than eighty (80) percent of a school's student population at its accountability grades is stable, the school shall be considered a reconfigured school.”

The Jefferson County example fits under the “local board of education policies” provision. The local board chose to do the busing plan as a way to comply with the court decision.

Now, let’s look at a school where zoning changes apparently led to an NCLB “Get Out of Jail Free Card.” You will see the situation is almost identical to the one for Maupin Elementary School in Louisville, but there is actually a different reason.

First, here is the Carlisle NCLB status table from last year. Note that the school consistently failed in reading over time (just like Maupin) and was in NCLB Tier 5 status when the 2008-09 school term started.


Now, here is the new report for Carlisle. Just like at Maupin, the school has been totally removed from NCLB Tier status, and its previous history has been erased. It is starting all over again.


However, John G. Carlisle didn’t get its “Get Out of Jail Free Card” because of court-ordered busing. This school’s student body changed because another elementary school in Covington, the very poor performing Thomas Edison Elementary School, was closed, not due to education issues, but due to declining enrollment in the district. This “Get Out of Jail Card” could have happened (and has happened) in any district where zoning changes impacted more than 20 percent of a school’s students from the previous year. It can happen anywhere in Kentucky. A federal busing lawsuit isn’t required to trigger this.

A few more notes are in order. First, just like at Maupin, notice that after the zoning change, John G. Carlisle Elementary continued to fail in both reading and math.

Also, I checked, and the principal at the school was there last year, as well. So, at least this key staff position was not changed. I don’t know how other staff slots at the school were impacted by the shutdown at Edison, but the district probably awarded slots this year on a seniority basis rather than a merit basis. For sure, neither Carlisle or Edison was doing well, so allowing a merged school staff to totally restart their NCLB “clock” isn’t in the best interests of students.

There is another problem here. Due to the non-academically earned end to Tier status in all the schools I have been discussing, students are losing important benefits like school transfer rights and, perhaps more importantly in the case of both Maupin and Carlisle, the right to get school board financed supplemental education services like extra tutoring. That’s a real shame.

There is one more “Get Out of Jail” card yet to play. Stay tuned.

Jefferson County busing mess: Are we getting the whole story?

It looks like a hot meeting is on the way tomorrow night at the Jefferson County Board of Education’s Vanhoose Education Center.

Fox 41 reported several days ago that parents are “Still heated over busing issues.”

But, the real news attached to that article may be a reader comment from Ms. Kerry Seelye.

Seelye isn’t a web mirage. She exists, I talked to her and she stands behind her comments.

And, Seelye’s comments hint that Jefferson County’s problems may be much more extensive than the popular media is reporting.

Seelye’s two grandchildren don’t go to any of the three schools – Lincoln, Chancey and King Elementary Schools – where all the problems supposedly occurred.

Seelye’s grandchildren go to Cochran Elementary School.

However, per Seelye, her grandchildren didn’t get home on day one of the new school year until 6:30 PM. Then, the next morning pickup bus was over an hour late, so the kids naturally arrived late to school. The evening of day two, the kids didn’t get home until 6:15 PM. Things didn’t run much better the following day; Seelye’s grandchildren still didn’t get home until 5:45 PM.

School lets out at 3:45, so those children from Cochran were trapped in a clearly dysfunctional busing operation for two hours after school let out even on day three.

Seelye tells me that on Friday, the kids didn’t make it to the drop-off until 5:30 PM. To put this in perspective, last year, Seelye says her grandchildren were dropped off by 4:05 PM.

Also, parents who could not get straight answers about when the bus would make the drop-off have been waiting outside in the hot weather, every day, starting at 4 PM.

Seelye’s comments about the herding (sorry, there is no kind way to describe it) the kids endured during their after school wait for the bus are also unsettling. The children were assembled in the gym and forced to sit on the hard floor, with no snacks or water allowed. Her grandchildren were expected to endure that abusive situation for an hour and a half until the bus finally showed up around 5:15.

If you are aware of similar busing issues in Jefferson County for other schools, let us know with a comment below. Post anonymously if you feel threatened, but posts with real names will carry more weight with our readers.

And, if you are a Louisville parent with children who have been treated like Ms. Seelye’s and you don’t show up at the board meeting tomorrow or at least send them a formal, written complaint, shame on you.

JCPS bus driver assaulted: BUT, WHY?

The Courier-Journal ran an article on March 2, 2011 about two women – or as it later turned out, a woman and a 12-year old child – who dragged a school bus driver off of her bus on March 1, 2011 and then beat her. That assault left 19 other students on the bus – without any adult on board – with the engine running.

Clearly – if the Courier has it right – the behavior of these unidentified women is outrageous.

But, don’t be too quick to judge only these two women.

The Courier also says that JCPS transportation director Rick Caple admits this bus route had disciplinary problems and that some parents were upset with the driver last week over bullying on the bus.

That raises some questions:

• Did the bullying continue after parents complained?

• Did the assailants file the complaint, or were they aware of a complaint already filed?

More information came out today in WHAS’ web site.

The fight broke out as the 12-year old tried to get on the bus to find a younger brother. WHAS’ report indicates there is a dispute about what happened after that.

The school district says everything was caught on a school bus security camera. Since that tape could be crucial to either the prosecution or the defense of the mother involved, it remains to be seen if this video is released or subpoenaed.

The Courier’s first article does provide enough information to tell that this bus route runs from Stopher Elementary School, way out on the East side of the school district, outside of the I-265 loop, to the downtown intersection of West Broadway and South 24th Street, where the assault allegedly occurred. Mapquest plots a route between those points that is 21 miles long, which would make this bus route one of the longer runs in the district’s crazy busing plan.

So far unreported: what was actually happening to the young son of the woman involved? Was he being bullied? Did it stop after parents complained? Was the mother one of those who complained?

So, maybe some other folks need to be in the dock when the 12-year old and her mom face the consequences of their actions.

Co-defendants might include:

• Those in the school system who hear complaints about bullying and do nothing (which also violates existing law and definitely is a problem that was extensively discussed last week in the House Education Committee meeting).

• Those in the school system who think a single bus driver can safely navigate inner city Louisville streets all the while riding herd – completely alone – on a bunch of youngsters who are being bored to tears by excessively long bus rides.

By the way, some of the buses in Louisville seat a lot of kids, maybe 50 kids plus. No teacher in this state is willing to take on a group of kids that large, alone. Why would we expect bus drivers to do this?

Louisville’s out of control busing plan is so large that there probably is no way the school system can afford to put an extra adult on each bus as a monitor. But, without extra adult supervision, chaos on the buses, especially given the long rides being forced on these students, is inevitable – and it's happening.

So, the “rest of the story” here may be that the whimsy of forced busing for diversity has run into the reality of human nature of children and the fact that the busing for diversity plan simply cannot afford to provide adequate supervision of children trapped in such situations. That does not excuse the attacks that occurred, but it does raise the issue of whether those attacks were provoked when others didn’t do their jobs.

More woes for Jefferson County busing plan

The Jefferson County plan for busing students hither and yon has now collected a new set of complaints; this time it’s a 34 page report from the NAACP.

Some highlights:

• The NAACP is upset that some parents who objected to long bus rides for their children apparently were successful in getting their children reassigned.

• The organization alleges “…certain board members appear to be trying to dismantle the New Plan (sic).”

• In a comment that seems aimed at Jefferson County’s magnet schools, there are also charges that, “…decisions about which students can and cannot attend certain schools in the district are made within the walls of those select schools. The decision is not based on grades or other academic factors, but a unilateral decision made by a principal or assistant principal.”

Read more »

Busing Czar quits in Jefferson County Schools

What did she do to the environment?



The Courier-Journal reports that Pat Todd, the Jefferson County Public Schools director of student assignment – the czar of the district’s out of control busing plan – is leaving her job.

Todd leaves at a time, as the news article points out, “…when public objections over long bus rides are growing, legal challenges are continuing and a legislation that would unravel student assignment is pending before the approaching General Assembly.”

Pat O’Leary, a former Jefferson County School Board member, says, “We need someone with a little more open-mindedness to other solutions.” O’Leary favors neighborhood schools where parents, not a bureaucrat, get to select where their children are educated.

One point in the Courier’s article really caught my attention. It was Todd’s salary, which is $152,184 per year.

For some perspective, I checked the latest superintendent’s salary listing in the Kentucky Department of Education’s web site.

Out of the 172 districts that had superintendent salary information listed in 2009-10, only 11 districts paid their superintendents more than Ms. Todd received.

Somehow, that does not seem like a very good use of our tax dollars.


Tea Party, are you listening?


Test Question: What does Ms. Todd’s busing plan do to the environment?

Click the “Read more” link to see my estimate.

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Wow! Other Louisville media jumping on the Courier-Journal

Stirred by Courier’s inept editorializing about new school superintendent

Louisville’s only daily newspaper has a real knack for making enemies.

As an unabashed, ultra-liberal advocacy journalism house, the Courier-Journal’s biases invite opposition from a wide-ranging group of people who long for a little balance in the newspaper’s extreme editorializing.

A great case in point is the story about the recent selection of Donna Hargens to be the new superintendent in the Jefferson County Public School District.

The tale starts with the Courier offering astonishing evidence that its editors consider Louisville’s train wreck of busing for school integration to be much more important than improving dismal academic performance in many of the city’s schools.

While admitting some Jefferson County schools “have been labeled ‘failures’ by the state,” the editor claimed that busing was “the most significant issue facing our schools.”

That diatribe continued with the Courier’s editors trashing Hargens, claiming she was not a sound candidate.

Only days later, in what may be a hopeful sign that the Jefferson County Board of Education is finally starting to distance itself a bit from the Courier’s misguided busing first nonsense, Hargens was selected as the next superintendent in Louisville.

Somewhere along the way, 84 WHAS-AM’s morning talk show host Mandy Connell took flak from the paper about comments on the superintendent selection. Connell, true to form, is giving back better than she got, including lining up the Bluegrass Institute’s Jim Waters as a regular show guest to talk facts about education in Kentucky and Louisville (listen for Jim every other Monday between 9 and 12 AM, starting today).

Now, another shot has been fired at Louisville’s only daily paper. It comes from Business First, Louisville’s local edition of the Business Journal.

Business First writes to Hargens:

“You’ll be reassured to know that most Louisvillians aren’t as narrow-minded and judgmental as a certain daily newspaper that threw you under the proverbial school bus before you even were selected for the job.”

Great insight, BizFirst!

Get some balance, Courier-Journal.

Or, how about this suggestion, Courier editors? Start running point-counterpoints on your editorial page. You will wind up looking pretty silly, but you might start to swell your bottom line once the only daily in Louisville starts to offer some reason in at least some of its editorial page offerings.

After all, this point-counterpoint works for the Gannett Papers flagship, USA Today. Are egos too small in Louisville to stand the same sort of discussions?

I am sure the Bluegrass Institute would be happy to offer counterpoints for you, as would the Family Foundation of Kentucky. I’ll bet those Tea Party guys you like to trash can offer a little fact instead of fiction to offset your more outrageous offerings, too.

Don’t forget, it works for USA Today.

Louisville's airwaves filled with concerns about busing, teachers and education

On Friday’s edition of The Values Coalition USA radio broadcast on Louisville's WLLV-AM 1240, callers spoke out about busing:



about teachers:



and about teachers unions:



I co-host the program along with Midwest Church of Christ Pastor Jerry Stephenson, who also chairs the Kentucky Educational Restoration Alliance. The show airs 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. each Friday.

Tomorrow we will discuss the latest developments on the busing fiasco and the newly released ACT scores

If you're in the area, tune in and call in. Plans are being developed to stream the program live on the Web.

Survey says: Or, does it???

The headline of a Courier-Journal article about a survey on school diversity proclaims, “90 percent of JCPS parents favor diverse schools, survey says.”

You have to read down to the fourth paragraph before finding any hint that maybe the survey says quite a bit more. That’s the first time you learn that large percentages of the surveyed parents are concerned about the reliability of Jefferson County Public Schools' complex busing for integration plan.

Read father still, and you finally learn that the results of the survey were really contradictory.

Only at the 10th paragraph does the Courier finally admit of the survey:

“The results were sometimes contradictory — showing parents wanted access to neighborhood schools, diverse schools and school choice, which project associate Erica Frankenberg likened to parents wanting to ‘have their cake and eat it, too.’”

You must read all the way to paragraph 12 (pushed to page 2 in the on line version) to finally see this:

“For example, while many parents support diverse schools, almost 80 percent said children should be allowed to attend the closest school — even if it increases segregation.”

Most telling, the survey says of parent responses:

• 90 percent support family choice,

• 79 percent say their child should have the option to attend a neighborhood school, and

• Only 55 percent are willing to send their child outside the neighborhood just to increase diversity.

One thing you can find in this news article: evidence that Louisville is doing a great job of educating the next generation of its students in the art of denial that is so evident in some of the district’s adults.

In a summary of the survey findings, the Courier reports:

“Among high school juniors, 95 percent said they were prepared or very prepared to live and work in a diverse job setting.”

These kids are ignoring the sad message coming from the ACT PLAN test that they took in the 2009-10 school year as 10th graders. It shows very few of them achieved the Benchmark Scores that show the kids have received the educations they need for high levels of success in any sort of jobs, integrated or not.


That denial extends to the people who ran the survey, as well. Despite the fact cited above that 79 percent of the parents want the option to attend neighborhood schools, the consultant hired by the district summarized the results of this district-financed survey by indicating it would be a mistake to do major surgery on the busing plan.

Given the admitted contradictions in this survey, I’m not sure you can conclude much of anything with assurance, but when 79 percent of parents want neighborhood schools, you certainly can’t say this survey justifies that summary.

And, award a healthy portion of denial syndrome to the Courier editor who thinks the title on their article fairly summarizes what actually happened with the survey, or even what is written in the full article. Clearly, the Courier loves busing for diversity. It doesn’t seem much interested in what parents want or in the better educations students actually need.

Second mayoral candidate in Louisville jumps on school bus issue

Greg Fischer, the Democratic candidate for mayor of Louisville has joined the bandwagon of critics of the Jefferson County Public Schools’ insane school busing scheme.

Says Fischer, “We’ve got to fix the student-assignment plan.” He also has figured out, “If our kids are going to compete, they have to get a first-rate education.”

Thus, concerns about the busing mess are becoming bipartisan.

By the way, the Courier also reports that Jefferson County Schools Superintendent Sheldon Berman is upset that the busing issue has come up in the mayor’s race. Says Berman, “That is the provenance of the school board, and not the provenance of the mayor.”

Well, in other states, chronically under-performing city school systems have been taken over by the mayors of the cities involved. New York City immediately comes to mind.

Maybe, as we used to say in the fighter pilot world, Berman better “check his six” (meaning, watch out for someone who could be coming up behind your six o’clock position). If Jefferson County Schools continue on their low-performing, citizen (and yes, legislator) angering track, someone like a new mayor just might come gunning for Berman and his parent aggravating school board.