What's Changing About Louisville's Schools--And What Isn't

I remember, in my early days at college 20 years ago, how often I had to explain and then re-explain my previous schooling. (I went to a college in the Northeast). The kids in my neighborhood (Shively), I explained, all went to different high schools. I got to school by riding two buses. One was full of kids from my neighborhood. Then, we went to a bus depot where I changed buses and got on one with kids from my school. The trip was about 40 minutes—pretty quick, my classmates thought, considering what they found to be a fairly-complicated process. My school itself (Male) was public, but a magnet, but it wasn’t a school you had to test into, like the magnet schools that my college classmates had heard of. Instead, the features of the magnet were that boys had to wear dress pants and belts, there were strict rules about the length of girls’ skirts and dresses and the school could kick out kids who didn’t follow its rules. None of my classmates had heard of this kind of public school before. 

I say all of this because Jefferson County Public Schools announced a major change yesterday, but it’s important to emphasize that much of our current, long-standing system still remains. (Louisville and Jefferson County are functionally one entity and I will use the terms interchangeably in this piece) The new policy of allowing some students in West Louisville and downtown who would previously have been required to attend schools in Eastern parts of the city to instead go to schools closer to their homes is in some ways the final step of ending “busing’ in Louisville. By busing I mean the court-mandated system that existed here and in communities across the country where white students who lived in mostly-white areas were required to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods, as were black students who lived in mostly black-areas, to reduce school segregation by race. 

This kind of busing, which reached its height in the 1970s and 80’s, was always controversial and has been in decline for decades both here and around the country. JCPS had long stopped requiring students from heavily-white Eastern Jefferson County to attend schools in areas far from their homes. What remained until last night was a requirement that about 6500 middle and high school students in heavily-black West Louisville attend schools in the Eastern part of the city for the purpose of racial balancing. (JCPS has about 96,000 total students.) This change will go into effect for the 2023-24 school year. 

But plenty of students in Louisville will continue to take buses to school voluntarily, as I did, and JCPS remains invested in supporting such bus use in part to ensure schools have a mix of students of different incomes and races. (65,000 students currently take the bus to school sometimes.) So Louisville will still have lots of busing, even if we don’t have “busing.” 

In many communities around the country, there is little school choice and not much of an attempt at diversity–you just go to the school in your neighborhood, the one closest to your house. Louisville’s school system will remain intentionally more complicated: magnet schools like Male that kids across the city can attend; “neighborhood” schools where district administrators blend together disparate areas within a geographic zone to ensure greater racial and economic diversity; choices for parents and kids at virtually every level. The students in West Louisville can still choose to go to a school in the Eastern part of the city and it’s likely many of them will. 

By all accounts, JCPS is still very committed to racial and economic diversity in its schools. In fact, one of the other changes that the school board agreed to was making it harder for schools like Male to push out students, as the exiting students are disproportionately black and lower-income. 

And on some level, diversity is now baked into the system anyway. A few decades ago, Louisville was more clearly divided into a Western part of the city that was poorer and more black and an Eastern part of the city that was heavily-white and richer. Those general dynamics are still true—but black residents are more dispersed across the city and more are in the middle class. Also, Louisville is a much more multi-racial city than before. About 40% percent of students in JCPS are white, 37% percent black, 13% Latino, 10% who are Asian or other ethnicity. (The city isn’t that diverse. Younger generations are more racially-diverse and the population of kids in private schools skews more whiter than the school-aged population overall.) 

Is The Change Good? 

Ultimately, many parents in West Louisville wanted their kids to go to a school closer to their homes. And requiring some black students to be bused but not a similar white cohort was unfair and hard for the district to defend. So I’m not surprised by the 7-0 vote of the school board in favor of the change. 

That said, this change is not one with universal acclaim. Some black activists and officials in the city, including school board chair Diane Porter, expressed some wariness. Many of them have long been supporters of desegregating schools in Louisville and any backsliding on that broader goal makes them nervous, even if they are supportive of parents having a school option close to their neighborhoods. 

I share this concern. This is complicated to study, but research suggests that black students who attend integrated schools usually have better outcomes than those who do not, in part because schools with more white students often have more resources (more funding from the district, richer parents, more investment from the community.) Also, I think our society would be better if it were more integrated. It’s not great that if a person tells me on the phone that they live in Norton Commons I can assume they are white and likely be correct, or if they live in the California neighborhood in Louisville that it’s likely that they are black. Race is not biological, but slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and other policies have put racial differences and divides into our communities that are difficult to unwind. 

That said, integration is no panacea. There is lots of evidence that black students are often ignored and their learning not prioritized in integrated schools in Louisville and around the country. Sometimes, schools are not integrated within the building. For example, Male was around 20 percent black when I was there, but the honors classes were significantly less so (about 10 percent.) 

There is evidence that black teachers often lost their jobs as schools integrated in the 60s and 70s. Finally, focusing a lot on integration can sometimes detract from creating strong black institutions. Louisville's churches are heavily-segregated, but I would not want St. Stephen and Bates Memorial to close just so their members could integrate heavily-white churches. I would not want Howard University in Washington, D.C. to close to increase the black populations at Georgetown, George Washington and American universities. 

In theory, a neighborhood school can be an anchor/meeting place for a community. You could imagine a world where a public school is the place you vote, get your covid-19 vaccine, attend a community meeting with your city council member and send your kids to school. That is not my impression of what happens in Louisville—there is a public school a few blocks from my house (Highland Middle) that I have only been inside twice. I don’t think it’s a community hub. (Perhaps I am wrong.) Perhaps these changes will strengthen the community role of West Louisville schools.

Looking forward, there are two big questions. How successful (in terms of community-building, education achievement and so on) are the schools in West Louisville after this change? And does this policy shift usher in other changes that weaken the racial diversity of Louisville’s public schools? 

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