Quote of the Day – Plus – Busing in Jefferson County Favored Whites
“The Courier Journal's review found the district's decisions, time and again, have tended to favor white and advantaged families at the expense of those in the West End — a pattern that continues today.”
(Quote from the Louisville Courier-Journal’s “Louisville’s desegregation myth: How a busing plan hurt Black communities it aimed to help” on February 3, 2021. Paywall free access version online here)
The Plus
First, a shout out to the Courier-Journal for pulling this very important series about busing in Louisville out from behind their paywall! This extensive series deserves a lot of attention, and not just in Louisville.
Regarding the quote above, this is another jaw-dropping admission, this time from the staff at the Courier-Journal who created this massive series, that the Jefferson County Public Schools’ (JCPS) busing plan just has not worked out for those it was most intended to help – the district’s Black families.
The article continues a few paragraphs later to say:
“In the 2000s and 2010s, Jefferson County continued to prioritize parent “choice,” assigning white and advantaged students to overcrowded East End schools rather than busing them west. The district also built four new schools — each of them in the far East End. Meanwhile, dozens of under-resourced and under-subscribed magnet programs in the west were left to flounder.”
The article then summarizes:
“Taken together, the district’s decisions effectively have squeezed the life out of public education in the West End — closing schools outright, turning them into hard-to-access magnets or leaving them hyper-segregated by race and class.”
Those are incredibly strong words. We didn’t write them. The Courier’s staff did. Louisville’s own hometown newspaper, which traditionally has seemed to favor busing in the past, has obviously come to a new revelation.
This provides still more amplification for concerns we’ve been voicing since we started our Blacks Falling Through Gaps report series back in 2012. Read the latest update, “FALLING BEHIND, Blacks Falling Through Gaps in Louisville’s Schools, A 2020 Update, here. As we summarized in our 2020 report:
“Clearly, if busing were going to work, it should have happened by now. The data in this update show that current performance remains seriously unacceptable, and it’s time for serious changes.”
It is finally becoming obvious that folks in Jefferson County are starting to figure this out. Our previous quote of the day from JCPS superintendent Marty Pollio and now these separate comments written by the Courier’s staff show folks in Louisville are finally figuring out that the district’s Black students have been paying the price for a long time for an intransigent defense of busing policies that clearly were not working.
It’s time for Louisville and the entire state to make this up to our largest city’s Black citizens and other disadvantaged students all across Kentucky. The right way to do this is to open up a lot more real school choice options for Black students, options that they can actually use and that are controlled by parents, not education bureaucrats. That includes creating charter schools and establishing Opportunity Scholarships so Blacks are no longer captivated by an education system that has been poorly serving their interests for decades.