As the new reforms were embraced, educational opportunities and outcomes were both on the decline. Poverty was becoming more concentrated in urban districts even as desegregation plans were abandoned. After years of gains, starting in 1990, black students began losing ground to whites on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only national exam that tracked student achievement over time.
Norfolk, Virginia, returned to neighborhood schools. Researchers examining the district several years after the case found that the white student population, which rose slightly in the last years of the busing program, dropped after the program was ended, from 42 percent to 37 percent.39 On tests, black achievement declined in the first year after busing ended, and the gap with whites widened. In later years, test scores at most of the black schools worsened.
V
The Lawsuit
Chapter 17
After losing three jobs to school closings, Carman Weathers finally found a permanent home at Buechel Metropolitan High School in Louisville. There was little chance the district would close this school. In the mid-1970s, just as busing began, the school board had opened Buechel to serve students who needed “behavior modification.”1 The school was the only one in the district exempt from racial limits, and the vast majority of its students were black. In the mid-1990s, Buechel was split into two schools, a middle and high school.2 Another alternative high school that accommodated mostly black students, named Liberty, opened in 1997.3 The former school board chair had been widely condemned as racist in 1981 when he called for separate schools for the “students we don’t know what the hell to do with,” so the system “could have some shot at teaching them,” but the alternative school idea fit his description quite well.4
At Buechel, Carman could do the work he loved with the students he cared most about. But he wasn’t content. He was angry. He looked around him and he saw betrayal: The black people at the top of the pecking order decided that the best way for them to get where they needed to be was to be around white people, he thought. They were willing to sacrifice black people to integration, no matter what the consequences were. That was what had happened to the castaways at Buechel, and that was what he feared could eventually happen to Central if the white school officials and black civil rights activists who wanted to keep the school integrated got their way. He believed that their single-minded focus on racial balance was Central’s greatest threat. Carman had already lost three schools to desegregation. He was determined not to lose his alma mater as the fourth.
On December 17, 1991, the Courier-Journal published an op-ed Carman had written: “Our inclination has been to focus on the issue of busing; but the issue now, as it always has been, is the educational attainment of African-American children,” Carman wrote. “The facts are that this creative social mutation called busing has not worked for the majority of African-American students over the last 16 years. . . . If we had consciously set out to design a system to encourage failure, the result would bear striking similarity to what we now have. Now is the time for change to come.”5
The passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act, or KERA, as the law was known, and the changes it was bringing about in the Louisville schools thrilled Carman. Here was an opportunity to finally bury busing and focus on what mattered: improving education for black children by improving the schools in their communities.
In 1989, Kentucky’s Supreme Court issued a shocking ruling in a case brought on behalf of poor Appalachian school districts, declaring that Kentucky’s “entire public school system” was unconstitutional. After a contentious political battle, legislation to change nearly every facet of Kentucky’s education system passed in the spring of 1990.6 The most notable piece of the legislation—and the one most imitated by school systems elsewhere—was the requirement that schools be tested to see if their students were making progress, and that the results be widely published. Schools that did well were rewarded financially; those that did not were sanctioned.7
The accountability measures and financial incentives were controversial and had mixed results. Kentucky’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress improved.8 Yet one study found that while teachers did indeed change their teaching methods in response to bad test outcomes, they often did so by focusing more intently on test-taking skills and the relatively narrow set of knowledge and content covered by the test.9
In Louisville, another part of the law was just as contentious. KERA called for grades one through three to be merged into one group of students in a system similar to the Montessori model.10 Elementary students would learn together before they joined age-based cohorts in fourth grade and started taking high-stakes standardized tests. In Louisville, this piece of the legislation had the potential to be a logistical nightmare.11 Students often moved around to different schools during their elementary years because of busing. They might attend first grade in one place, then move to a new school for second and third grade before returning to the original school. School officials reasoned that it would be unfair to hold schools accountable in fourth grade for students they hadn’t taught. Superintendent Ingwerson jumped into action, and by the fall, he made a proposal.
In elementary school, students would no longer be bused.12 Instead, students could volunteer to attend schools where they were in the racial minority. Ingwerson offered a “scholarship” program to motivate parents: $500 for every year a student spent away from his or her neighborhood school. To maintain integrated elementary schools, around three thousand students would have to volunteer. There was one problem: The school system didn’t yet have the money for the incentive program.
That September, most of Louisville’s elementary schools maintained ratios of black students between 25 and 40 percent. If the plan were adopted, it was estimated that a dozen elementary schools would immediately have student bodies between 77 and 99 percent black, while twenty-nine would have black populations of less than 5 percent. The KERA testing problem wouldn’t affect middle and high schools—students stayed put during those years—but Ingwerson wanted to relax the racial limits in the upper grade spans as well. At first, he seemed to have wide support.
A new group of black leaders had become influential in the city during the 1980s. They had risen up as discontent over the state of the inner city and the burden of busing spread, and the new ideas about standards and outcomes took hold. Their views clashed with those of the old guard of civil rights leaders. They did not accept desegregation as a sacred goal, and some saw it the way Carman did—as a hindrance to black achievement and empowerment. These new leaders, including ministers, school board members, and even the president of Louisville’s NAACP, approved of Ingwerson’s plan.
Laken Cosby, the school board’s only black member and a close associate of Ingwerson, was vocally supportive.13 Cosby, once an avid civil rights activist, was disillusioned with desegregation.14 In the 1960s, he had moved his family to the mostly white East End to put his belief in integration into action. But in the predominantly white schools, his children had struggled, and eventually Cosby lost faith. “We cannot say that because schools are predominantly black that they are inferior to other schools. That’s not true,” he told the newspaper after Ingwerson’s plan to dismantle elementary school desegregation was announced.15 Rather, he wanted to change the way blacks viewed education. High expectations for black students and higher standards would close the achievement gap, he argued, not sitting next to white children.
Other districts were beginning their retreat from desegregation in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City and DeKalb County Supreme Court cases. To many in Louisville, it looked like their city, which had some of the most racially integrated schools in the nation, would join soon them. Jean Ruffra, the Shively mother who had helped Joyce Spond in forming Save Our Community Schools, which had long since disbanded, was amazed at the news: “What goes around comes around, and it’s 16 years later, and here we are right at square one.”16
The p
eace didn’t last long. On a Tuesday morning, a few days after the plan was announced, Kevin Cosby, the thirty-two-year-old son of Laken Cosby, the school board member, hosted a gathering of about a dozen black ministers and leaders who approved of Ingwerson’s plan at the church in the California neighborhood where he was pastor.17 Cosby was a dapper young man, with a neat mustache and serious eyes behind his large round glasses.18 He had become an avid fan of Malcolm X after spending his teenage years trying and failing to fit in at the all-white, upper-middle-class Ballard High School in the East End, where his father had moved the family. His dissertation at the United Theological Seminary in Ohio was entitled, “The Development of an Afrocentric Lifestyle Ministry,” and he had what some called a cult-like following at his growing church, where he preached African American self-determination. At a press conference, he said it was “time for blacks to take control of their own destiny.”19 Reporters took notes and then the small group disbanded.
That night, after the Reverend Cosby’s press conference, the old guard of the civil rights movement mobilized, gathering three hundred people, mostly black, for a rousing meeting in a downtown church. Lyman Johnson, then eighty-five, needed strong arms to help him climb up to the podium. In speech after speech, the activists excoriated Ingwerson. Lyman, a member of the school board that had recruited Ingwerson from California a decade earlier, made one of the most pointed attacks. “I helped to bring him here and by God, I hope to help him pack his bags,” he said, to a standing ovation.20 Compared to Cosby’s sparsely attended press conference, the old guard seemed energized and powerful. But appearances were deceptive.
The two sides of the black community were about to face off once again to ask the questions that had stumped their predecessors for more than a century: Was desegregation important for its own sake? Was racism so infused in the system that without forced busing, black children could never get their due? Was desegregation working because it helped dilute poverty? Or was it a failure because it inhibited black self-sufficiency and self-respect? Did busing teach black students that they were inferior, and to assume they couldn’t succeed without the proximity of whites? Did it drain African Americans of their culture, pride, and community ties, which had helped them survive the brutalities of racism for three hundred years in America?
In the weeks that followed Ingwerson’s announcement, the battle lines became more entrenched.21 The Reverend Cosby called another meeting to rally support for dismantling busing; this time, five hundred people showed up. One supporter compared Cosby to Joshua, the apprentice of Moses who led the Israelites when Moses died. “Moses is dead. Done a good job and you can’t take that from him. But [he’s] dead and we’re still in the wilderness,” the man said.22
The school board hired Barbara Sizemore, a consultant from the University of Pittsburgh, paying her $1,000 to spend the day talking to city leaders about Ingwerson’s proposal.23 She told Cosby’s rally that her city’s all-black schools were doing just fine. When the young preacher himself got up at the end of the night, he shouted to his followers, “Why does integration also happen at the expense of black institutions?”24 The crowd cheered.
Lyman Johnson attended Cosby’s meeting. Afterward, he vowed to live another fifteen years, to age one hundred, to fight against “resegregation” of the city’s schools. On his side of the fight, a group led by Georgia Powers, Kentucky’s first black and first female state senator, and also a close friend of Martin Luther King, created a new organization, Quality Education for All Students (or QUEST), to monitor the school system’s moves on the desegregation plan.25 The group, which included NAACP members, ministers, and a white Republican lawyer named Steve Porter, gathered business leaders in the city to their side, and met with public officials, including Ingwerson, in an effort to pressure them to reconsider the plan.
The divide cut across generational, class, and neighborhood lines. “I want mine at my home school,” a black mother of two children—a daughter who attended school in the West End and a son who was bused to the suburbs—told the newspaper after a meeting hosted by the school board.26 In contrast, another mother, who sent her children to the same two schools, said she didn’t want busing to end: “The teachers won’t teach the black kids as good, if the white kids aren’t with them.” Two polls conducted that fall found that the vast majority of parents agreed with her. One poll found that 70 percent of black parents were opposed to Ingwerson’s plan, while another a few weeks later found 85 percent opposed.27 Only 58 percent believed their children were benefiting from busing, however.28
Less than a month after he announced his plan, Ingwerson appeared to back down and put off a school board vote indefinitely.29 But he hadn’t given up. He believed that eventually, parents and community leaders would come around to his proposal to limit desegregation once they understood the plan better. He still believed busing wasn’t the answer to closing the achievement gap: “If you wanted to close the gap on achievement scores, then the plan has accomplished a certain amount of that. If you wanted more, then it probably has failed,” he told the newspaper.30 In December, he put forward a new plan, which the school board voted on and approved immediately.31
Ingwerson’s new idea was not as drastic a change. Elementary schools would be grouped into clusters that included several suburban schools and one downtown school. Together, schools in each cluster would work to maintain a racial balance by sharing students among themselves. Black students at each school would have to comprise 15 to 50 percent of each school’s population, rather than the 0 to 60 that Ingwerson had originally proposed. Each cluster was given $150,000 to create new programs to entice students away from their neighborhood schools and into schools where they would boost diversity. If schools failed to draw enough volunteers, children would be forcibly bused to meet the required percentages. Ingwerson promised to appoint another citizens’ committee to monitor the progress of the new system he dubbed “Project Renaissance.”32
In February, the Jefferson County school district phone lines were clogged with anxious parents wondering where their children would attend school the following year.33 The same month, Ingwerson won a national award for superintendent of the year, despite a letter-writing campaign by his critics.34 By the end of the school year, all of the city’s elementary schools had managed to attract enough transfers to meet the new standards, mainly by putting new magnets into place, including Advance classes and traditional programs modeled on discipline- and values-focused schools started in the 1970s.35
The superintendent’s monitoring committee was meant to keep tabs on the new student assignment plan in order to tamp down frustration in the community. It included both integration supporters, including members of QUEST, and activists trying to end busing.36 But it quickly began adding fuel to the fire.
On the committee were Carman Weathers and a University of Louisville education professor, Joseph McMillan. McMillan had graduated from Central in 1946, the same year as Fran Thomas.37 In high school, when he was editor of the Central newspaper, he had campaigned to have the word colored removed from the school’s name. McMillan had spent much of his teaching career in Michigan, but in the 1970s he returned to Louisville, where he launched a conference on the state of minority families. He straddled divergent poles of the civil rights movement. He had met Malcolm X in Michigan, and believed he was the most brilliant black mind of the century, but he also served on the NAACP and worked on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. Saving Central from the tyranny of the school district’s racial quotas was, to him, the next step forward in the movement.
Weathers and McMillan created a group called Saving African-American Values and Economy, or SAVE. Joining them on the monitoring committee was Carman’s old high school friend, Robert Douglas, who represented parents of public school children.
Another spot went to Anne Braden’s group, the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. The organization named its new director, a recent transplant from th
e South End to the West End: Fran Thomas. Fran had become active with the Alliance the previous year, when her daughter had been deployed to Iraq. She had spent most of her life as an army wife in the majority-white South End, where she had fought a realtor’s racism to buy her house. Her career had been as a nurse at the local Veteran Administrations hospital. But at heart she was an activist. As a college student in the 1950s, she had worked on a black voting campaign. As a nurse, she became involved with the government workers’ union. Her daughter’s deployment reawoke the rebellious spirit in her. Fran didn’t believe in President Bush’s Gulf War. It seemed like a senseless waste of resources and possibly her daughter’s life. She started marching in antiwar protests and moved on to demonstrations against police brutality and promoting educational equality. She convinced her husband to move back to the West End, where her activism wouldn’t draw nasty comments from the neighbors. She got along well with Carman Weathers and Robert Douglas on the monitoring committee.
Just as the committee was getting to work, Ingwerson suddenly announced his resignation.38 The school board begged him to stay, but by the end of the school year in 1993, he had packed his bags and was headed back to California. “I’ve had two difficult years—one was 1984 and one is this past year,” he said. “And both of them deal with equity and quality issues. We didn’t shirk from either one of them. Was it something I enjoyed? Heavens no. Was it something I wanted to wake up and keep going at year after year? No. But is it something that is necessary? Yes.”39
The committee made little progress in the wake of his departure. Its members rarely agreed on anything as they rehashed the old arguments for and against busing. But it was a platform of relative power, and the members used it to push their separate agendas. They were able to peruse reams of data about the racial makeup of each school in the district, suspension and dropout rates, and academic achievement. No matter where they stood on issue of busing, they were displeased with what they found. QUEST activists put together a report in early 1993 showing that the city’s schools were at their most segregated levels since 1974, and that within the schools, classrooms were often divided by race.40
Divided we Fail Page 15
