Examining Louisville's managed-choice middle schools

(Vol. 2, No. 2 - Summer/Fall 1998)

Managing to Learn

What's more important to student success in Louisville's "managed choice" middle schools: Where you are, or who you are?

by John Norton

From time to time, from somewhere inside the well-oiled machine of the Jefferson County Public Schools' "managed-choice" system, you can hear a screech.

Some say it's the sound of the district's often-voiced commitment to integrated, equitable public education, rubbing up against the realities of a school system that sorts and shuffles students at a level unparalleled in most urban school districts across America.

School superintendent Stephen Daeschner hears the screeching, but he doesn't believe there's anything wrong with the machine. He is convinced that the district's "managed-choice" system is configured in a way that can serve all students equally well, provided they show up for school and make a reasonable effort to learn. He doesn't deny that the current system needs adjustment and fine-tuning-which he believes is happening-but the managed-choice approach to education, he says, is fundamentally sound.

Daeschner is supported by others in the community, some of whom believe Jefferson County's long-standing commitment to integrated schools is, as student assignment director Pat Todd says, "one reason we don't have some of the problems of our urban counterparts." The system has made it possible "to hold on to that suburban middle class element and keep them involved in the public schools"-a middle class element, she notes, that increasingly includes black families who have the resources "to shop around" among public, private and Catholic schools.

JCPS school board member Beverly Moore harks back to the early days of the district's integration efforts, remembering that the district's busing/choice program was about "more than achievement. It's also about the need for learning to live with each other in a pluralistic society."

But there are others-and they include not only advocates for low-achieving youth but some JCPS central office staff-who aren't so sure the managed-choice system, as it exists today, makes much sense anymore.

The JCPS insiders agree that the school system has made great strides recently in its efforts to undergird the managed-choice system with a web of challenging academic standards, reinforced by highly focused teacher training and more support for the non-academic needs of what some call the "have-not" students. But they question how successful the district's reform plan will be in a school system that pours so much of its time, energy and resources into sorting and busing tens of thousands of kids.

Some outsiders, including the plaintiffs in a current lawsuit against the district, suspect that all the sorting is pointless and perhaps detrimental to many black and white kids who don't enjoy middle class status. They speculate that kids from low-income neighborhoods-many of whom are currently bused to suburban areas to maintain a "racial balance"-would be better served in neighborhood schools, provided they had a fair share of financial and academic resources.

They echo the sentiments of a former JCPS principal who says, "I've watched these kids who are bused out to suburban schools from in-town. They come to school angry, many of them. They look at the neighborhood as they are bused in, and they realize they don't belong." Or the African-American JCPS administrator who has stood on the grounds of some satellite schools and "when the middle class kids get on the bus, it's 'Bye, Tommy, see you tomorrow.' But when a downtown kid says bye to the teacher, it's just 'Go ahead-get on the bus.' "

Board member Moore, whose district includes both Barret and Jefferson County Traditional middle schools, offers a more traditional busing proponent's point of view. Moore suspects that inner-city neighborhood schools would be less likely to serve low-achieving kids well than the current system and points to the poor academic record of Western Middle, a neighborhood school in the west end. Speaking of students from downtown, Moore says, "What you get when you move these kids out of here (to the suburban satellites) is they get to see how the rest of the world lives-that there are other ways to relate to people."

Does busing still make sense?

The debate over "managed choice" seems to boil down to this question: Does it still make sense to bus kids back and forth across the district every day-poor kids from downtown out to the satellite schools and more well-to-do kids to "magnet" schools in less prosperous areas of the county?

Put aside the social issue for the moment: Beverly Moore's notion that mixing students helps maintain and strengthen a pluralistic society. What about the education issue? Are kids any better off academically as a result of managed choice? And does the managed choice system have built-in inequities that assure some kids will be "second-class learners"?

To an outsider, Louisville's system of managed school choice is a baffling, bureaucratic labyrinth.* There are magnet schools, traditional schools, satellite schools, schools with Advance Programs, honors programs, "regular" programs, and optional programs. Parents and students rely on a 48-page guide, "Pondering Your Next Move" (complete with "Pull-Out Application Inside!"), to help navigate the system-and some are better
"navigators" than others.

Well-educated parents who are good at analyzing the system's complexities have a distinct advantage, veterans of the system say. In the last two years or so, the district has spent more time and money helping less-advantaged parents and students understand how the system works. Still, it seems likely, as one long-time JCPS official says, that "folks with middle-class skills will always have the upper hand."

Many parents and others in the Louisville community believe that school placement is perhaps the primary factor in determining a student's academic fate. Admission into a "math-science" or "traditional" magnet school is much-coveted-especially at the middle-school level-and some system-savvy parents go to extreme lengths to get their children in. Although the admission crunch eased a bit this year with the addition of a new math-science magnet, the demand still stretches beyond the supply, especially at traditional schools where one principal says, "Parents would literally fight one another to get in if you'd set up a (boxing) ring."

Many advocates for poor and low-achieving students see the magnet programs-and the district's Advance Program, a special track for high academic performers-as something like "gated communities," special enclaves that have the effect, if not the intent, of separating the poor, and black, and academically-behind students from the rest-establishing, they say, a rather rigid class structure within the public school system.

The historical data seems to support that point of view. Black enrollment in middle school Advance Programs has hovered between 9 and 11 percent for years, with some schools having as little as 4 or 5 percent, while the overall middle grades population is over 30 percent black. Black magnet school enrollments have been closer to the 30 percent figure (most falling between 25-28 percent last year) but socio-economic data suggest that both traditional and math/science magnet schools have had a disproportionately middle-class enrollment.

The reasons given for these phenomena vary: The red tape involved in gaining admission; the smaller pool of black and poor students who can meet the AP program's academic requirements; the temptation in some magnet schools to screen out "have-not" kids by creating an unwelcoming environment. "Many low-income parents are afraid of putting their children in situations where they're afraid they won't be accepted," says one community activist.

Two years ago, Supt. Daeschner asked veteran JCPS administrator Pat Todd to become director of a newly constituted Department of Student Assignment, Health and Safety. With the superintendent's blessing, Todd has made equity issues a top K-12 priority in her office-beginning, she says, with magnet school admissions.

Under Todd's leadership, the district has monitored magnet programs "in ways we've never really monitored them before" to make sure issues of race and socio-economic status are considered in admissions. Todd's office is also gathering data on "exits" as a means of making sure that magnet programs do not remove disproportionate numbers of "have-not" kids once they gain admission. This school year, Todd will turn more of her office's attention to the district's Advance Program and its admission policies, again looking for ways to strengthen its equity component.

But Todd argues-as do some other thoughtful district leaders-that achieving complete equity in admissions to the district's special programs is somewhat beside the point in the discussion about raising academic standards-and achievement-for all students in the system.

"Getting all our kids to meet higher academic standards is not a magnet school issue," she says. "It's an issue that every one of our schools faces, because we don't have a neighborhood school system. Every one of our schools has all kinds of children from different backgrounds because of the way we assign kids."

Todd isn't arguing for a neighborhood school system, simply pointing out that wherever the district's "have-not" children attend school, they bring the same set of teaching-and-learning issues with them.

It may be true, as some of their advocates argue, that "have-not" students have an extra disadvantage when they attend schools where most students are middle-class and where middle-class parents have the clout and savvy to assure that their children have first priority in the teaching and learning process. But do Southern (p. 8), or Western, or Frost middle schools-all low-performing "neighborhood" schools" with large percentages of low-income children-provide evidence that neighborhood schools are an inherently better solution to the problems of low achievement?

Some supporters of-and educators in-these schools argue that their best students are "skimmed off" into magnet and AP programs at other schools-leaving something less than a true "neighborhood school." And Western and Southern, in particular, have become "dumping grounds" (in the words of one middle school principal) for some of the district's worst behavior problems. But while the skimming (and dumping) may help explain these schools' rock-bottom rankings, it does little to explain the poor performance of the "regular" neighborhood students who remain.

Western Middle School principal Dean Hite says the skimming arguments are "a crutch" for faculties who won't accept responsibility for ensuring that all students succeed. "We've got 750 other kids in this building who deserve the best teachers and the best we can give them. The question is: what are we going to do about them?"

It's all about teacher attitudes and skills

"The truth is, everybody can find a crutch in the managed-choice system," says a central office administrator when told of Hite's comment. "If you're at Western, they're taking all your smart kids. If you're at some school in the East End, they're sending you all the dumb kids.

If you went to Meyzeek to be a 'magnet' teacher, now they're asking you to teach algebra to kids from Smoketown. There are plenty of crutches to go around." Hite has it right, this administrator says: "Wherever we've got them, what are we going to do about them?"

Ironically, given all the debate over the effects of the "managed choice" system on a student's potential academic success, the hard numbers suggest that-for middle schools, at least-where your child goes to school is much less important to his or her eventual academic success than your child's racial and socio-economic background. JCPS data indicates, in fact, that most low-income students outside of the Advance Program are just about as likely to fall into the lower two rungs of the KIRIS testing program (novice/apprentice) at a Meyzeek or a Kammerer as they are at a Frost or a Western.

What this suggests is that whether the district chooses to maintain the current managed-choice system or move toward more neighborhood schools, the solution to low achievement remains the same: improve teaching.

Based on existing data, no JCPS middle school has yet demonstrated that it can raise the achievement of low-performing kids in anything approaching dramatic fashion. It would be easy enough to blame this on the kids themselves, or their families-and that's what schools and communities most often do. But a growing body of research is beginning to belie the assumption that teachers can't do much with kids who start behind.

There are examples of high-poverty, high-achieving schools across America. A recent study in Texas, for example, found more than 400 schools that should have been failing, based on the kinds of kids who attended their schools. But they weren't. Their common characteristics? Strong principal leadership focused on improving teaching. A united faculty committed to a deep study of why students achieved or failed in their school. And a willingness to

ask hard questions about how the faculty could change school and teaching practices so that the total focus of the school was on the academic and social achievement of each individual child. Most often, these schools relied on clear academic standards (and assessments based on those standards) to guide them.

Fortunately for Louisville, the school system's standards- based reform initiative is built upon the results of this kind of research. It assumes that while there are teachers scattered throughout the system who are effective in teaching low-achieving kids at a "high level," most teachers have never had the opportunity to develop the special set of skills and knowledge it takes to break their teaching down in ways that meet each child's needs. And because many teachers have never had much success with the so-called "low-end" kids, they may not believe it's possible.

School board member Beverly Moore, a former teacher and teacher trainer, sees teacher skills and attitudes as the major factor in whether students succeed-whichever school they find themselves. "If you have the right attitude, you will keep looking for the (student's) skills. Changing attitude is difficult, and the best way is for teachers to actually see children succeed. Once teachers come to believe that 'I have the skills to teach these children and they can do they work,' then things start to change."

The JCPS reform initiative expects each school, ultimately, to find its own solutions to the problems of low achievement, while the district provides money, expertise, professional development time, and a clear set of academic expectations that include performance standards in each subject and for each grade. It assumes that the program will not succeed without highly prepared principals who not only understand what effective, performance-based teaching looks like but how teachers can learn to teach that way within the context of their own schools.

The district has chosen to build its reforms on the foundation of the existing managed-choice system. Politically, it may be the JCPS leadership's only viable choice at the moment. "You will die in this district trying to undo the traditional program or the magnet programs-any of that," says one central office leader. "Any superintendent that tried to do that would be chewed up and spit out."

A lingering question

But a significant question lingers. Can schools where two-thirds of the kids are middle class and where Advance and magnet programs create a cachet of privilege for some students (and teachers) turn their attention to the other third who arrive each day from other parts of town, with more needs and fewer advocates in the local community?

And the same question applies to middle schools in less affluent parts of town, who use magnets to attract the middle class. Because the facts seem to be that it is not so much the location of a school as its critical mass of middle and upper-middle class parents that creates the "tracking" dynamic and keep pressure on principals and teachers to make sure-above all-that the kids whose parents have influence are served first.

The questions take on added urgency for two reasons. The first is the current lawsuit against the district which has focused on the black enrollment cap at Central High School, but which could expand, perhaps, to explore the academic justification for managed choice. A second factor emerges from the recent revisions to the Kentucky Education Reform Act. The new law will eventually allow students in low-performing schools the right to transfer to a "higher-performing" school. No one in JCPS can say at this point how such a provision might impact on the managed-choice system, but it could quickly become "unmanageable."

The surest way to prepare for any of these eventualities is, as one JCPS administrator puts it, "to work hard to make sure every school, whatever its mix of kids, is a high-performer for all kids." Part of that work will be to convince middle-class parents who may be suspicious of the proposed reforms that they may well be the best long-term insurance against a break-up of the county's carefully crafted system of integrated education.

One tool that may help in that effort is a new project of the Prichard Committee, Kentucky's statewide citizen-based school reform group. With support from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which is investing nearly a million dollars in JCPS middle school reform over the next two years, Prichard is organizing a group of 50 community leaders who will agree to monitor the district's progress in serving all students and work to inform and engage the community in the reform effort.

Prichard has selected Lynn Rippy, a long-time advocate for inner-city youth and a former director of the city's youth programs, to organize the effort. "We're going to be looking at all the data, especially around the success of middle school kids, asking questions about the reform process and what the community can do to be a part of helping the schools and sharing responsibility for students achievement," Rippy says. "We're going to be critical friends in the best sense."

"Many parents want all the right things for all children until it affects their child," says one JCPS central office leader, who sympathizes with principals and teachers who are gun-shy about tinkering with the status quo. "It's not easy to stand up for equitable treatment when middle class parents are pressing to insure, from their perspective at least, that their children are getting the best possible treatment."

"Schools have to be ready to fight and say this is what we value and this is what we're going to have to do to help all children achieve. And you know, the real truth is that these reforms, if they work, will mean better teaching and learning for everybody's kids."

#