Busing Worked in Louisville. So Why Are Its Schools Becoming More Segregated?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/us/busing-louisville-student-segregation.html

Version 0 of 1.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — When she saw the news images of angry white mobs pelting school buses with rocks and bottles, Sherlonda Lewis was glad that she was not among the black students being bused to a school in a white neighborhood.

It was 1975, and Louisville had initiated a court-ordered effort to integrate its public schools by busing students out of their racially segregated communities. As a high school senior that year, Ms. Lewis was exempt from being bused from her predominantly black neighborhood of Smoketown in central Louisville. Having seen the violent resistance, she considered herself lucky.

“I didn’t think it would last,” Ms. Lewis, 60, said of the busing plan.

Little did she know, that same integration program would go on to be widely embraced by members of the community, educating three generations of her family.

While some desegregation plans faltered in the face of white resistance, Louisville’s has proved remarkably resilient. It has survived riots and court rulings, skeptical superintendents and conservative lawmakers, making Jefferson County Public Schools, which includes Louisville, one of the nation’s most racially integrated districts.

But if Louisville is proof that busing can work when there is the political will to have an integrated school system, its community is now grappling with what happens when that political will starts to dry up.

These tensions — coming at a time when the nation is once again battling over the effectiveness of school integration — are the latest development in a series of changes that, in recent decades, have steadily chipped away at Louisville’s original integration plan.

A recent survey commissioned by the district showed dwindling support for the plan and a decreased interest in diversity among parents. Struggling schools and a yawning achievement gap between black and white students are drawing more attention these days than the benefits of maintaining racially integrated classrooms.

As the district’s schools slowly become more segregated, officials are considering more reforms that will almost certainly increase segregation.

The state’s Department of Education proposed taking over the district last year after finding myriad problems, from financial mismanagement to flaws in the desegregation program, known as the student assignment plan. State officials agreed to give district leaders until next year to carry out reforms.

“Right now, we’re doing our best to fight back Jim Crow and Jane Crow Jr.,” said Delquan Dorsey, Ms. Lewis’s son, who works as the district’s community engagement coordinator. “We know separate but equal doesn’t work.”

There are dozens of school districts across the country like Louisville that continue to follow desegregation plans, whether court ordered or not, with supporters often pointing to research that suggests the black-white achievement gap narrows where integration is fully accepted. And yet opposition has never been very far behind.

In the past two decades, dozens of affluent, mostly white communities have tried to secede from diverse school districts to form their own. A conservative law firm filed a lawsuit last year to challenge a decades-old system that helped desegregate public schools in Hartford. A current lawsuit in Minnesota argues that the state’s school system is unconstitutionally segregated.

Louisville’s integration program has existed since the 1975 court order merged city schools with suburban ones. The year before, a similar plan in Detroit was struck down by the United States Supreme Court.

Both Louisville and Detroit were about 20 percent black and equally racially segregated at the time, according to a report by Myron Orfield Jr., the director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota. But in the decades that followed, Detroit’s schools became overwhelmingly black and underperforming as white residents fled for suburban enclaves.

Louisville is now part of a countywide school system of roughly 100,000 students that is 42 percent white, 37 percent black and 12 percent Hispanic. About half of its black students, and two-thirds of all students, attend integrated schools, according to Will Stancil, a research fellow at the institute who defined integrated as having a population between 20 percent and 60 percent nonwhite.

By 2011, black students in Louisville were twice as likely to score “proficient” on math and reading tests as those in Detroit, Mr. Orfield found.

Janet Pinkston, who is white, was bused to duPont Manual High School, which performed better academically than the school she otherwise would have attended. It was her first meaningful exposure to black people.

“The people who went through it, like I did, saw that it has some value,” said Ms. Pinkston, 57, a freelance writer. “They saw that it has a halo effect. It does change your life.”

Critics say an integrated learning environment is not enough, especially when black students continue to lag behind their white peers, and often shoulder a greater burden in desegregation, with longer bus rides.

Ricky Owens was about 9 when busing started. He ended up at a high school several miles from his home, where he said he suffered academically because he often felt isolated as the lone black student in his honors classes.

“In high school, I laid my head down and didn’t do any work,” he said. “I never felt comfortable. I never felt like I wanted to be there.”

Decades later, his daughter, Jade, also found herself as one of the few black students in honors classes at her high school in Jefferson County. While the experience presented challenges, she said it taught her how to fight bigotry, and to empathize with black students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

“I think Louisville, compared to a lot of other places in Kentucky, is just more open-minded,” said Ms. Owens, 20. “Over all, we’re a diverse city, and we are proud of that.”

Black residents in Louisville have complained over the years that schools in their communities have received inadequate investment. In some cases, black students are forced to go to faraway schools because they fail to win slots in coveted, nearby magnet schools.

In the late 1990s, several black families sued the district to allow their children to go to a predominantly black high school in their neighborhood. That led a federal judge to lift the desegregation order in 2000.

In 2007, the plan faced another major setback after the United States Supreme Court officially struck it down in response to a lawsuit by a white parent. The court ruled that race could not be the sole factor in assigning students to schools. So district officials created a new system that used a family’s economic status, education and race to assign students, and it maintained a variety of magnet school options.

District officials are now considering additional changes that would allow more black students to attend schools closer to home — a move that many argue would further segregation.

“I believe the goal of wanting to achieve diversity and have rich, diverse experiences for kids is a great goal,” said Wayne D. Lewis Jr., the Kentucky commissioner of education who recommended the state takeover. “I think there needs to be much greater attention to ensuring that low-income kids and kids of color have access to great educational experience.”

Dr. Lewis’s opponents say that the achievement gap would be much larger had Louisville area schools not fought to maintain an integrated system.

In the recent survey, only half of parents said they believed enrollment guidelines should ensure that students learn with classmates of different races and backgrounds, down from 89 percent in a different 2011 survey that posed a similar question.

Still, integration remains a priority for district officials and parents who have been willing to alter the program over the years but have refused to scrap it. In 2012, a slate of school board candidates ran on ending the plan and going to a system of neighborhood schools. They all lost to candidates who vowed to keep the student assignment plan in place.

“Having the political will is really important, and sometimes you don’t always see that in places where there aren’t court orders,” said Erica Frankenberg, a professor of education at Penn State University who has studied desegregation in Louisville and other communities. “It’s really something that some districts have taken on as part of their identity.”

Mr. Dorsey, the district’s community engagement coordinator, said he did not realize he was poor until he started taking a bus to Atherton High School in 1988. His mother, Ms. Lewis, was scared for his safety, being bused to a predominantly white area in the East End.

There, Mr. Dorsey said, someone called him a racial slur for the first time. There were also racially charged scuffles at the school, about 20 minutes from Mr. Dorsey’s public housing complex in Smoketown.

But the integrated environment helped him to see that he was just as smart as white students, and prepared him to work in spaces where not many people looked like him, said Mr. Dorsey, 44.

When his son, D.J. Dorsey, started in the district more than a decade ago, Mr. Dorsey worried not about safety, but whether his son would be treated fairly in the classroom.

D.J. is now entering his senior year at duPont Manual, one of the state’s top-performing schools. Mr. Dorsey, who said he had no white friends growing up, has marveled at his son’s relationships across racial lines.

“When people of various backgrounds are culturally aware of others and have a willingness to learn, then we can make education work,” Mr. Dorsey said. “That is education.”