Upper level high school course access uneven for Jefferson County minorities

The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has a tool that allows examination of minority opportunity to participate in advanced high school courses.

You can select any school district, or even school, to examine.

Here is what turned up when I looked at Jefferson County’s course enrollment data.

The circle graph in the upper left shows the percentage of enrollment of the races in Jefferson County schools in 2009. The two dominant populations are whites at 55.6 percent of all students and blacks with 36.1 percent of the total enrollment.

The circle graph on the upper right shows the breakdown by race for enrollment in Calculus in Jefferson County in 2009. Whites dominate in this course. In sharp contrast, only a low percentage of the calculus class seats are filled by blacks. If blacks got an equitable share of the seats in this top level math course, they would comprise 36 percent of all the students in the class. In fact, only 13 percent of the calculus takers are black.

Asians are over-represented in Calculus, but take a look at the Asian percentage of seats in classes in chemistry and physics. These normally top-performing students are under-represented in those courses. That is a real shocker!

Blacks do somewhat better in chemistry and physics, but they are still under-represented in relationship to their overall enrollment in the Louisville school system.

Clearly, despite all the noise in Louisville about diversity and integration, it isn’t working out in the upper level STEM courses in the city’s high schools.