“Educational Genocide” in Louisville: The parent blame game

Since Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday unleashed a Tsunami with his recent remarks that performance in Jefferson County’s lowest-performing schools amounted to “educational genocide,” uncomfortable facts about Louisville’s long-term, Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (PLAs) are finally getting attention.

Sadly, the Jefferson County school board quickly started their all-to-familiar denial dance, trying to downplay the fact that we’ve already put up with a trail of tears of over 22 years of failed promises in these schools since KERA’s enactment way back in 1990. Included, as usual, in that denial dance is the often-heard charge that parents of students in the low-performing schools don’t care.

Really? Well, here’s a big surprise: data from Kentucky’s new Unbridled Learning education accountability program show that, on average, PLAs high school parents attended more parent/teacher conferences in the 2011-12 school year than did parents from the other high schools in Louisville.

That goes counter to a major drumbeat from the Jefferson County denial dance.

Don’t believe it? Click the read more link to see the details.

The table below summarizes several pieces of data from an Excel spreadsheet titled "Students/Teachers" that was issued with the Unbridled Learning accountability results in November, 2012.

The table lists the PLAs status of each of Jefferson County’s primary high schools, grouping the PLAs schools at the top.

The table also includes the total enrollment in each school. Additional data extracted from the Unbridled Learning report show counts for the number of parent/teacher conferences (PT conferences) and the number of volunteer hours recorded in each school.

Parent Involvement Indicators in JeffCo High Schools

The two ratio columns in the table need some explanation.

To begin, notice that the average enrollment in the PLAs high schools is a lot lower than the enrollment in the other high schools in Jefferson County. That large difference means enrollment must be considered when we are presented with the number of parents who attended a PT conference and the number of volunteer hours. I do that by dividing both the numbers of parents who attended a conference and the numbers of volunteer hours by the enrollment in each school. The resulting ratios are captured in the columns titled “Ratio of Parent Conferences/Enrollment” and “Ratio of Volunteer Hours to Enrollment.”

Now, here is the big surprise: on average, parents of PLAs students showed up for their children’s PT conferences at a slightly higher rate (ratio of 0.70) than the parents of the other high schools (ratio of 0.68).

Did you get that? Parents in Louisville’s lowest performing schools, on average, showed up for more parent/teacher conferences than did parents from the other high schools.

To be sure, a few of the PLAs schools like The Academy @ Shawnee and Western High experienced terrible parent attendance at PT conferences, but that is more than offset by very high participation in the other PLAs.

In fact, top PLAs for PT conference attendance have far better participation rates than even Louisville’s select magnet high schools. Wow!

By the way, Butler Traditional High, Ballard High and – most shockingly – Louisville Male High are not exactly topping the parent interest list based on PT conference attendance, either.

In the interest of full disclosure, the data on volunteer hours in these schools does show a lot more parent involvement using this metric at the non-PLAs schools, as shown in the rightmost column in the table.

However, I think the conflicting picture in the data needs some careful consideration. A number of factors make it much more unlikely that modest income parents, who predominate in the PLAs, will have much free time to devote to schools.

For one thing, rampant busing for integration in Louisville creates situations where many parents of modest means simply cannot frequently travel the sometimes extended distances between where they live and where the Louisville bureaucracy decrees their child will attend school.

Furthermore, I suspect notable numbers of parents of modest means must hold two jobs just to make ends meet. That leaves little extra time to devote to schools, especially during weekday working hours.

Sadly, many modest income parents are also single parents, further reducing their ability to provide volunteer service at the school.

Never-the-less, the usually-in-the-evening parent conferences provide an opportunity for lower-income parents to have some interaction in their schools. And, the data show the PLAs parents in Jefferson County take advantage of that important opportunity at a slightly greater rate than their wealthier counterparts in other Louisville area schools do.

So, it looks like PLAs parent interest is there, but facts of economic life make it hard for educators to see lots of parent interaction inside the school walls.

Find the Excel spreadsheet I used for source data under the "Students/Teachers" link listed under the "Learning Environment" section of this web page from the Kentucky Department of Education.