Jefferson County busing review – What’s wrong with this picture
The current Jefferson County Board of Education seems adamant – they are going to continue busing for integration no matter what. But the consequences from this bull-headedness are getting awfully extensive, as a recent, very serious bus accident just re-emphasized.
From the adverse impact on learning, to the increased accident potential, to the nearly 9,000-a-year incidents of misbehavior on the district’s buses, the impacts of wildly excessive busing for integration in Louisville get more and more disturbing every year.
And, the lack of imagination on how to creatively deal with those long bus rides – if the city must have them – is becoming equally apparent.
In a district that buses an incredible 70,000 students out of an enrollment of 100,000, the latest move – spending $2 million to install spy cameras on the buses – exposes more of a prison rather than education oriented thinking.
To learn more about how Louisville’s crazy busing program is not getting the education job done, click the “Read more” link.
The Impact on Learning
As we showed in our short paper, “Blacks Falling Through Gaps,” the black-white achievement gaps across Jefferson County’s schools is a continuing challenge.
The vast majority of Jefferson County’s 133 schools with test results have unacceptable white versus African-American performance gaps in math and reading of at least 10 percentage points – 106 schools in reading and 115 in math.
Even worse, around half of the schools have larger gaps exceeding 20 percentage points, and some schools have gaps as large as 50 percentage points!
Even more unsettling is the finding in Blacks Falling Through Gaps that schools with the biggest black versus white math achievement gaps tend to be found in the upscale East Side of Louisville. For example, East Side’s Dunn Elementary School has an absolutely enormous math gap exceeding 55 percentage points!
As the report points out:
“Black kids in some East Side schools like Dunn actually have much lower proficiency rates than black kids achieve in West Side schools.For example, Dunn’s blacks scored only 38.89 percent proficient in math, while in West End schools like Young Elementary and Atkinson Elementary, blacks scored much higher at 51.26 and 59.34 percent, respectively.”
When you bus kids a long way from home on rides running up to an hour one way or more for the entire school year, after a while those kids are going to arrive at school bored, tired and less than happy about the whole education “thing” in general.
By the way, based on anecdotal reports we are hearing, the reason for these big performance gaps on the East Side is that while the school may look integrated as kids walk in the door, if you could look inside those school walls, you would find black kids in one classroom learning to a lower standard and whites in another with a much richer curriculum.
In fact, at least in some schools, busing in Louisville may actually be an expensive cover for continued segregation.
The Accident Potential
Trying to defuse the furor generated by the recent, serious school bus accident, the chair of the Jefferson County Board of Education said something that just does not add up.
WDRB radio says School Board Chair Diane Porter told them that “busing students across town does not put them at higher risk for traffic accidents.”
That’s nonsense. The fundamental truth is that as the amount of travel increases, there generally will be more transportation accidents.
Sometimes, when a really good accident rate is established in a transportation sector, say commercial aviation, the total numbers will be lower, but historical evidence repeatedly confirms that increased travel will always raise the number of accidents. It’s a simple matter of increased exposure to risk.
A number of readers’ comments to the WDRB article show they understand this principal very well. That is why I find it disturbing that someone directly responsible for travel decisions in Jefferson County is so ignorant of such very basic transportation industry facts. This says that the increased risks created by exorbitant busing isn’t even a consideration by those responsible for the excessive emphasis Jefferson County places on busing for integration regardless of the cost on education outcomes – or maybe even on student safety.
The Jefferson County School Board could claim that the benefits of busing for integration outweigh the risks, but denying that there are risks is unacceptable.
By the way, the kids hurt in the bus crash were on one of the longer transportation routes. Some of those kids ride the school bus for nearly 40 minutes, one way.
Traffic accidents are not the only hazard children face on the bus
When you coop kids up for nearly an hour going to and from school on a cramped and uncomfortable bus, behavior issues are inevitable. On bus behavior is clearly becoming a major problem because Jefferson County Schools just announced they are going to spent $2 million to install security cameras on their school buses. Can you say, “Spy Cams?”
The Courier-Journal reports that this is needed to “cut down on the nearly 9,000 incidents of bullying, fights and other unruliness reported annually during bus trips” (emphasis added)!The Courier tells us more. Out of an enrollment of around 100,000 students, the district is busing an incredible 70,000 to school every day. This in a urban district where many kids live within walking distance of a neighborhood school they often are not allowed to attend.
That’s a lot of exposure for a lot of kids who don’t need to be forced into such extensive busing.
How does busing kids to East Side schools fix the West Side schools?
Obviously, busing kids all over the place has not done much to fix chronic low performance in the schools on the West Side of Louisville. A significant proportion of all the state’s Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (soon, in another unnecessary terminology confusion, to be renamed “Priority Schools”) are found in Louisville’s West Side. Some of the most dismal scores in Kentucky on the ACT college entrance test come from West Side high schools.
Do a little higher order thinking about this: Busing for integration has been under way in Louisville for 40 years. If this social experiment were ever going to work, it already has had far more than adequate time to prove it. Still, Louisville remains strongly segregated by geography and education despite decades upon decades of busing.
I cannot help but wonder how the outcome might have been different if the millions upon millions that have been spent on buses, drivers, and a “kazillion” gallons of diesel had been spent on things that would directly improve the classrooms. Sadly, those dollars have been largely wasted, many literally going up in smoke out tailpipes, instead.
In fact, here’s an interesting thought. What if instead of buying video spy cams – if Louisville is bound and determined to keep on busing – how about putting WiFi on those buses, instead. Our friends at the Eminence Independent School District did this for the bus that takes their dual credit students on a 40-minute one way ride to their college courses at Bellarmine University.
You would be amazed at the number of children who have personal electronic devices that could interface with a WiFi-equipped bus.
Or, as an alterative for kids who cannot afford the electronics, why not install video display systems that can be loaded with educational enrichment programs for students.
Do imaginative things like this, and suddenly, the school bus turns into a powerful study tool. Do what Louisville is currently doing – adding spy cams – and all you have is some sort of rolling detention pen.
By the way, Hardin County School teachers create their own digital learning instructional units.
I’ll bet Louisville has plenty of educator resources that can create something similar, custom tailored for the “rolling classroom.” There could be a great instructional opportunity here and a much better use of student time. Spy cams are not the way to tap that.
Maybe the busing situation in Louisville will change after the school board elections are over. After all, the US Supreme Court removed the federal busing mandate years ago.
Now, it’s just Louisville doing it to itself – and its kids.