Middle Class Motivations and Maneuvers: School Choice and School Assignment in Louisville, Jefferson County, KY

JCPS divided their district into residential elementary zones in geographically contiguous areas around an elementary school. Then, each elementary school zone was classified as either an Area A reside, or an Area B reside based upon the data about its residents from the 2000 census. An Area A reside is an elementary school zone where the average household income is below $41,000, the average education levels are less than “a high school diploma with some college”, and the minority population is more than 48%. Minority students are defined as all students who are nonwhite. Area B resides are those elementary zones that do not meet all three of the criteria of an Area A reside. Area A has been formed to note areas of the city that are marginalized by both race and class. All students living in Area A are defined as Area A students, regardless of their family income, education level, or race. All students living in Area B are defined as Area B students regardless of their individual family income, education level, or race. The school district has set a guideline that no school in the district will have more than 50% or less than 15% of students who reside in Area A. The purpose of this guideline is to ensure that no school will be predominantly comprised of students from a low income, high minority area, and that all schools will have some students who are from low income, high minority areas. Students are bused across residential zones to elementary schools in other areas. Students from both Area A and Area B are bused in order to achieve integrated schools in all areas of the city.

Using the free market for public school was first advocated in a 1955 article by Milton Friedman entitled “The Role of Government in Public Education”. Since this publication, using markets for public schooling has been a part of the platform of the Republican party, first in the form of vouchers, and more recently through the establishment of charter schools. For a critique of using markets to improve schooling see Diane Ravitch’s The Death and the Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books 2010).

The first large urban school district to move away from a race-based assignment plan to an income-based assignment plan was Raleigh-Wake County, North Carolina in 1999. For a detailed look at Raleigh see Gerald Grant’s Hope and Despair in the American city: Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

The first desegregation of schools in Jefferson County occurred in 1954, when Brown v. Board, trumped the Day Law, a 1904 Kentucky state law, which prohibited whites and blacks from being educated in the same school (Carmichael and James 1957). When, in the early 1970s, schools became segregated again through housing shifts, The Kentucky Civil Liberties Union, Legal Aid Society and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed suit to gain the right to integrate schools (Courier Journal 2005). Ultimately, the 6th circuit court of appeals ruled that the district must desegregate by busing students across district lines. The Louisville City district was dissolved by action of the school board, and the default, outlying Jefferson County district took over the education of the residents of the city by establishing a metropolitan school system (K’Meyer 2009). The Jefferson County School District implemented a desegregation plan using busing that was mandated by order of the federal district court. Over the years, this plan was modified in various ways, but the central racial guidelines persisted; a target of 15–50% African American students in each school building.

Race-neutral and color-blind are contested terms in sociological literature. My analysis of this concept is informed by Eduardo Bonilla Silva’s, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2006), Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Brown et al. Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2003).