What's A "Good" School?
Manual, Brown, Atherton, Male, Eastern, Ballard, Butler, Jeffersontown, Fern Creek, PRP, Shawnee, Central, Fairdale, Moore, Seneca, Southern, Waggener, Valley, Western, Doss, Iroquois.
Manual, Brown, Eastern. Ballard, Male, Atherton, Butler, Jeffersontown, PRP, Fern Creek, Fairdale, Southern, Waggener, Moore, Seneca, Valley, Western, Shawnee, Doss, Central, Iroquois.
The first paragraph is Louisville’s 21 main high schools in order of highest average ACT score per student. (Per 2019 data.) The second is Louisville’s 21 high schools in order of their percentage of students on free and reduced lunch, with Manual having the fewest and Iroquois the most.
The two lists are extremely similar—the first school, the first two schools, the first eight schools and the last school are exactly the same in both lists. The first eight are a combination of schools in higher-income areas of the city that basically admit any student who wants to attend (Atherton, Eastern, Ballard, Jeffersontown) and specialized schools that can choose who they admit (Manual, Brown, Male, Butler.)
There are two obvious potential explanations for this very strong correlation between income and test scores. One is that some schools educate kids much better than other kids, and Louisville’s upper-income parents know this and get their kids into those schools. So perhaps the Manual and Doss students both enter high school scoring an average of 13 on the ACT, but the education at Manual boosts their kids to 27 but at Doss only to 15. (Those are the real averages.)
An alternative explanation is that, even aside from what happens in the classroom, upper-income students are likely to score higher on tests than lower-income ones, so a school packed with upper-income kids is likely to have higher test scores than one with a lot of lower-income students.
I’m pretty sure the second explanation is the stronger one, at least here in Louisville. Why? First of all, virtually all data all over the country on every test shows that higher-income students as a group score higher than lower-income ones and that student test performance is correlated with income. Secondly, if you wanted to imply that some schools are educating their kids really well and some aren’t, you would want some clear outliers—-either schools with lots of upper-income kids with low average test scores or schools with lots of low-income students with very high average test scores. Louisville doesn’t really seem to have either of those—and neither do most communities.
Let me stop here and emphasize something really important—many lower-income individual students do well in school. Income is not destiny. In high school, I did better in classes and on tests than many of my fellow students who came from much wealthier families. There are some schools around the country where groups of lower-income students are doing as well or better than those with higher-income student bodies. Research in fact is really clear on one point—getting low-income families more money tends to be associated with their children doing better in school. Also, increased spending on education is also correlated with better outcomes. Teachers and principals can make a huge difference. In the Louisville context, it’s easy to imagine Doss improving its average student scores, hard to imagine Doss’ scores being higher than Manual’s.
But what’s happening in Louisville is pretty typical of what happens in America—schools with more higher-income students on average have better test scores than those with more lower-income students. That dynamic suggests that Louisville’s public school system isn’t doing anything particularly bad–but also that it’s not doing anything particularly good. It also suggests that a school like Manual’s defining feature may not be its performing arts or math and science programs but its exclusion—Manual has an admission process that allows it to reject many kids that apply. Similarly, Iroquois is a school where refugees and people new to this area often attend, in addition to not being in a wealthy area and being required to admit any student who wants to attend. It seems likely that if we kept the teachers, principals and other staff the same at all of the schools but reshuffled the students at random, the schools that ended up with more higher-income students would end up with higher average test scores.
There is a lot of discussion, both among parents and in the media, about schools in Louisville–and that happens in other communities too. People want to get their kids into “good” schools and not into “bad” ones. But as Louisville is in the midst of rethinking its school policies, it will be important to have a clear, candid conversation about what we are actually solving for.
My dream for Louisville (and America) would be to have lots of schools that are doing a good job teaching our kids math, science, English and other subjects. Some of that good education would hopefully show up in improved test scores and hopefully more and more students would be getting to some kind of general standard of learning that we have for our society.
My dream would be that we don’t have clear racial and class gaps in education outcomes. But the evidence suggests that those gaps start fairly early. So it’s more likely the case that equalizing parental income will reduce test score gaps than education alone will decrease them. In other words, if we have less racial and income inequality outside of our classrooms, we will probably have less inequality in the classrooms. We should seek to reduce inequality directly, not try to accrue more and more degrees to reduce inequality. (So wealth taxes, baby bonds and reparations and other such economic programs might be better policies to reduce racial and class gaps that show up in test scores than simply increased school funding.)
One of the results of the educating-ourselves-out-of-inequality approach that America has taken in the last few decades is a country with a massive student debt crisis that still has massive inequality along racial and class lines.
Finally, my dream for Louisville and America would be for schools to be a central place for our society to integrate. I don’t mean integration in the way we think about it historically, as a way for black students to have access to better-resourced schools. (That’s important too of course and remains an important goal of school policies.) I mean integration as an education into itself. Meeting people across geographic, class and racial lines will help our kids as they move into adulthood. My career experience has been needing to build connections with and then write about poor people and rich people, black, white, Asian and Hispanic people, Democrats, Republicans and people who think both parties are stupid. My high school and college environments were quite “diverse” and I think that helped me along the way.
There’s a great book “The Sum of Us” by a public policy expert named Heather McGhee that has inspired some of my thinking here. (You can read more of her thoughts here and here. Read the book too, she’s a genius.) She argues that America increasingly has privatized schools, pools and basically everything else. That’s bad for lower-income people, who often can’t access these resources. That’s bad for middle-class people, who are often paying taxes for public resources they don’t use and also paying for private things. It’s bad for the rich, who are often missing some of that diversity that is educational and informative and integrates them into our broader society.
The School Board v. Kentucky Republicans
As this article from political scientist Domingo Morel explains, Republican-controlled state governments tend to strip power from city-based institutions when black people gain control of them. It’s worth thinking about that in the context of Louisville overall, but particularly the Jefferson County school board, where three of the seven members are black. The Kentucky statehouse Republicans’ attempt to limit how often the Louisville school board can meet seems needlessly cruel and petty, but that’s nothing new from them.
What I think is likely happening, perhaps unconsciously, is captured in Morel’s research. As Louisville’s schools get more coded as “black” and have leaders who are black and push black interests, we are likely to see the legislature hate them even more. That’s not because those Republican legislators are racist, in the sense of say, not wanting black people to live next door to them. They would all love Daniel Cameron to live next door to them! It means that Republican politicians are generally wary of black people’s involvement in politics, because about 90 percent of black people are Democrats. It would be nice if they respected black people’s involvement in politics despite those disagreements, but a decade of laws passed across the country designed to make it hard for black people to vote makes me confident that Republican politicians aren’t going to cede black people that respect and dignity.
Trumping for Cameron
Speaking of Cameron, the attorney general’s campaign put out a poll last week showing him at 46 percent in the Republican primary field, Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles at 9 percent, very-right-wing State Rep. Savannah Maddox at 7 percent, State Auditor Mike Harmon at 5 percent. The governor’s race is next year. Those three and Cameron are all declared candidates. Kelly Craft, who was the UN Ambassador under Donald Trump and is a big donor to the GOP, was at 3 percent. She has been considering a run but has not yet declared.
40 percent of Republicans said they are undecided, so Cameron does not have this campaign wrapped up, at all.
Candidates releasing their own polls is fraught—but they usually don’t release surveys far off from the results. I have no doubt that Cameron is leading. The poll hints at why. Kentucky Republicans may end up loving them, but right now, a big factor is that most Republicans don’t know much about the other candidates. 61 percent of Kentucky Republicans aren’t sure how they feel about Quarles for example, while only 30 percent say they have no feelings about Cameron.
What’s going on? Quarles may be in his second term as Ag commissioner, but I assume most Republicans have no idea who he is or what he has done. My guess is that the average Kentucky Republican knows two things about Cameron: he is black; and he wasn’t too hard on the officers who killed Breonna Taylor. Cameron being black and being involved in the fallout of Breonna Taylor’s killing no doubt increased his name ID ahead of most politicians in Kentucky not named Beshear, Paul or McConnell. But Harmon and Quarles would have to acknowledge that it’s something of a political failure on their part that many Republicans in the state don’t know much about them.
I suspect Cameron released the poll because he is trying to get the other GOP candidates to drop out and endorse him, or in the case of Craft, not run in the first place. But the poll seems to have had another effect: Donald Trump endorsed Cameron immediately afterward. That was likely coming anyway, but the poll may have accelerated it. Maddox is probably the most right-wing of the candidates in this race, Kraft has probably spent more time around the ex-president. But Cameron has met the president and impressed Trump. And let’s not ignore the obvious: Trump, constantly cast as racist, would love to have a hand in electing the first-ever black Republican governor in Kentucky.
A person who can make Republicans feel good about their racial politics, has the backing of Donald Trump and essentially took the police’s side over that of Black Lives Matter activists in 2020 is going to be a formidable candidate in a Republican primary. I expect Maddox to run to Cameron’s right and Quarles to run as the candidate of rural Republicans. That might work. But Cameron’s in a great spot right now to win the primary.
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