“This is the ground zero battleground for public education,” Chris Kolb tells me.
“This” is Louisville, Kentucky, where a looming state takeover of Jefferson County Public Schools, which merged with Louisville fifteen years ago, has the community in an uproar.
Interim State Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis has used the results of a state audit to declare that the district, the state’s largest with over 100,000 students, has “egregious” problems that warrant state takeover.
District officials and local citizens are fighting back. A local coalition of officials, educators, and parents, known as the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, has staged rallies in front of the district administration headquarters, calling the takeover “an attack on democracy” and “a war on public schools.”
The local backlash has caused the state to back off somewhat. As an alternative to full takeover, Lewis has proposed the state take “enhanced oversight and responsibility” for specific functions of the district, including special education, transportation, staffing, and student enrollment. But to many locals, that still “feels a lot like a state takeover” the editorial board of a local newspaper declares.
The story has national significance: across the nation, Americans are seeing an increased popularity of state takeovers of local schools. In his book Takeover: Race, Education and American Democracy, Domingo Morel finds that since the 1960s, when state takeovers started to become a significant trend, over 100 districts have been taken over and hundreds more have been threatened. His research finds that takeovers, more often than not, do not lead to markedly improved academic outcomes. What’s most often behind takeovers, he contends, are issues of race, politics, and economics.
Is that true in Louisville? (Disclosure: this report was made possible in part with financial support from the Network for Public Education.)
Local media outlets tend to describe the state takeover as beginning with an investigation by former state education commissioner Stephen Pruitt in 2017, when his office learned of incidents where students with disabilities had experienced undue restraint and seclusion. When the inquiry found thirty such incidents, Pruitt called for an audit.
Louisville's story has national significance: across the nation, Americans are seeing an increased popularity of state takeovers of local schools.
But reports in 2016 clearly tied the high incidence of seclusions and restraints to former Superintendent Donna Hargens whose leadership discouraged teachers from reporting such incidents. After a newly elected school board forced Hargens to resign in 2017, they replaced her with current Superintendent Marty Pollio who has overhauled district policies. Also, overuse of seclusions and restraints in schools is a statewide problem. So why target Jefferson County Public Schools?
“The problem with the overuse of restraints and seclusions is being addressed,” says Autumn Neagle. Neagle is a Jefferson County Public Schools parent of two students and the current president of the local PTA. “We're in the early stages, but already seeing progress,” she says.
Another oft-argued rationale for the takeover is to rescue the district’s black students from academic underperformance.
Disparities between Jefferson County Public Schools black students and their white peers on academic achievement tests have been a problem for years, with black students getting significantly lower marks in reading and math. But the achievement gap is worse statewide than it is in Jefferson County, and many districts have gaps wider than Jefferson County Public Schools.
In the most recent round of the National Assessment of Education Progress, often called “the nation’s report card,” Jefferson County Public Schools performance was flat in reading and math, but fourth-grade reading scores were no worse than the national average and actually higher than average scores of other large urban districts.
“Black kids haven't had a fair shake,” Neagle states, “but we elected this [current] board to address that.”
“Our new board is the first to acknowledge racial biases” in schools, Michael McCloud tells me. McCloud is a social worker who helps nonprofit organizations counsel and support black children in the county and surrounding area. He’s also involved with the local chapter of Black Lives Matter. He considers it a sign of progress that “before this board and this administration, we didn't have a racial equity plan. Now we have one.”
“There are underperforming schools based on state standardized tests, and the kids in these schools are predominantly black,” says Carla Robinson. “But it doesn’t mean the teachers and the schools are doing something wrong.”
A product of Jefferson County Public Schools herself, Robinson is a black parent of two young children in the district schools. She lives in the West End, the section of Louisville where schools are often labeled as “failures.” She criticizes the lack of money coming from the state to fund tutoring services, after school programs, parent education programs, and other supports as the main causes. Kentucky is among the states that have cut public education funding most deeply over the last decade, according to the Center on Budget Policy Priorities. The state funds education nearly 6 percent below what it did in 2008.
What’s also disingenuous about the state's intervention on behalf of black students is that Jefferson County Public Schools is often considered a model for racial integration.
“Louisville’s history is unique, in that it is one of the only districts that has maintained a staunch commitment to integration over the last fifty years,” states an analysis from The Century Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based policy shop. “Louisville-Jefferson County is one of the most integrated districts in the nation.”
The oft-spoken criticism that public schools “trap black kids” into schools tied to where they live is not an accurate description of Jefferson County Public Schools. “I got my choice,” says Robinson, who used the district's process to select the school her daughters attend.
“Jefferson County Public Schools is a district of choice, [and] parents can look for schools and not houses,” says Gay Adelmann, a white Jefferson County Public Schools parent with a student who graduated from The Academy at Shawnee, a magnet middle school and high school in the West End with a focus on aerospace. Shawnee has a student population that is 59 percent non-white and 79 percent on free and reduced price lunch, a typical measurement of poverty.
Adelmann helped form the grassroots group Dear Jefferson County Public Schools that pushed to elect the current school board. She recently ran for State Senate in the Democratic party primary, campaigning on a platform supporting Jefferson County Public Schools and opposing state takeover. She lost but managed to garner 44 percent of the vote as a first-time candidate with little funding.
‘Black kids haven't had a fair shake. But we elected this [current] board to address that.’
“My campaign was mostly based on my experience at Shawnee,” she tells me. She maintains her child is being taught by great teachers, even though the school is rated “low-performing” because of test scores. “My kid does well on high stakes tests,” she says. “But we need supports for all issues affecting scores.”
So what’s really behind the state’s case for takeover?
Certainly, the politics of education in the city is contentious. In the 2016 school board election, Kolb, a first-time candidate for the board, won an improbable upset victory against well-financed incumbent board chairman, David Jones Jr., the son of the co-founder of health insurance giant Humana. Kolb estimates he was outspent by up to fifteen-to-one, but he won because he and his volunteers knocked on over 13,000 doors.
Running as a one-term incumbent, current JCPS school board member Chris Brady was also targeted by big money for defeat, with over $350,000 from a local Super PAC that backed his opponent. He won anyway, he tells me, by “running on my record” of supporting the district and new leadership he helped put into place.
The state also has an outsized role, locals say, in the politics of the district. When Kentucky’s Republican Governor Matt Bevin came into office in 2015, he had a clear agenda to shake up the state’s public education system.
A transplant from Connecticut, Bevin swept into the governor’s job despite the fact he had never held political office anywhere, running on a Tea Party inspired campaign was mostly self-funded with earnings from hedge funds he operates.
Bevin has taken unprecedented actions to remake the Kentucky Board of Education, stocking it with critics of public schools and Jefferson County Public Schools in particular. One Bevin appointee, Gary Houchens, an associate professor at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, is listed as a “policy scholar” for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a rightwing think tank. Another pick, Kathy Gornik, has served as board chair for the organization.
The Bluegrass Institute was founded with money from two libertarian networks, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network, and has benefited from a pipeline of dark money.
One of Bluegrass’s top issues is “education reform,” which it defines as “charter schools, tax credits, and vouchers”—all forms of “school choice” that divert taxpayer money from public schools to private entrepreneurs. The Bluegrass Institute’s staff education analyst, Richard G. Innes, has been attacking Jefferson County Public Schools for years. After the announcement of recommended takeover, he penned an op-ed endorsing it.
Once Bevin restocked the state education board, his new appointees ousted former commissioner Pruitt to replace him with Lewis.
Originally from New Orleans, Lewis saw firsthand the state takeover of the schools in that city. He eventually made his way to North Carolina State University to earn a doctorate in education. In his dissertation on the “Evolution of Charter Schools in North Carolina,” he referred to public schools as the Big Learning Organizations Bureaucracy, or BLOB.
A resourceful Louisville parent has noted the close association Lewis has had with another Bevin’s appointee to the state board, Hal Heiner. Lewis and Heiner have been writing op-eds and holding forums to promote charters for years. Lewis worked on education policy at Bevin's Cabinet of Education and Workforce Development that Heiner headed.
When Bevin installed Heiner, Lewis made it clear to Heiner he wanted the commissioner job even before it was known publicly the new board would oust Pruitt. Recently, the state board voted Heiner to be its chairman.
But if the takeover of Jefferson County Public Schools is all about politics, it’s not a contest between “red vs. blue,” but whether democracy matters at all.
“When there’s backroom maneuvering and not a real democratic process, then it’s not conservative,” Tiffany Dunn tells me. Dunn is a lifelong Republican and ESL teacher in Jefferson County Public Schools. She has helped found and lead a number of grassroots teacher advocacy groups including Save Our Schools Kentucky. And despite her party affiliation, she’s disturbed at what Republican state leaders are doing to public education, accusing them of being driven not by “conservative values,” but by the desires of the Koch Brothers and ALEC to undermine public education.
But if the takeover of Jefferson County Public Schools is all about politics, it’s not a contest between “red vs. blue,” but whether democracy matters at all.
Louisville citizens on the other end of the political spectrum object to how the takeover has been orchestrated too. “Jefferson County Public Schools is not okay,” says Chanelle Helm, a black Louisville mom with children in Jefferson County Public Schools schools. Helm is a Black Lives Matter organizer and frequent speaker at events organized by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools. She opposes takeover because bringing on the new board and new district leadership has been “a community process,” she says, and takeover “would hurt this.”
In the takeover attempt, Jefferson County Public Schools is being made “victim of a dominant political establishment,” Ricky Jones tells me, “that is trying to keep control away from a rising electorate in the city intent on remaking schools.”
Jones, a professor and chair of the Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville, believes the election of a new board consisting of Kolb, Brady, and other like-minded members is resulting in new policies that will provide better resources for schools, recruit and retain a more diverse and well-supported teacher workforce, and revise curriculum, instruction, and discipline practices to address inequities in society and be more inclusive of diverse student needs and interests.
Indeed, Kolb and Brady tell me they and their fellow board members are determined to wrestle the district into this new vision.
Why would Bevin and his cronies want to stifle this?
Kolb says, “They’re afraid we’re going to succeed.”
This report was made possible in part with financial support from the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that supports schools that “are subject to democratic control by members of their community.”