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Good intentions, wrong decision

By Jim Waters

“Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold – but so does a hard-boiled egg.” – Anonymous

The Christian County Board of Education likely meant well when it made the decision to deny school choice to the parents of newly enrolled elementary school children.

Its district leaders made the move after hundreds of local parents embraced the opportunity to send their children to new schools without regard to district zoning rules. As parental preferences tipped the scales in favor of a few choice schools, district officials lamented a new racial imbalance among students in several schools.

According to the Kentucky New Era, so many choosy Christian County families took advantage of the school-choice policy that “it had disrupted the Board of Education’s policy, which prohibits each school’s minority and non-minority students from deviating more than 15 percent away from the percentage in the district.”

Superintendent Bob Lovingood termed the imbalance created by school choice “a growing problem.”

Lovingood is right to say a problem exists. However, the dilemma is not that parents have been allowed to pick a better school. It is because the policy attaches an inordinate amount of importance to the District’s arbitrary racial quota. The board’s action also demonstrates a gaping disconnect between the school system’s bureaucracy and the needs and wishes of parents, whose tax dollars support their schools.

The words and deeds of the Christian County School District reveal a preference toward maintaining a racial quota among schools over improving the quality of education offered within the system.

Lovingood defended the school board’s move by pointing to the racial “imbalance” of three schools in his system – Belmont, Crofton and Lacy elementary schools. But why was Lovingood’s attention focused on the racial makeup of the schools rather than actual performance?

For example, the racial makeup of Belmont Elementary School should not prove nearly as troubling to school officials as the abhorrent achievement gap between the school’s black and white students.

A 35-point gap exists between black and white students’ proficiency in reading, according to new No Child Left Behind (NCLB) measures. Nearly 73 percent of Belmont’s white students have achieved reading proficiency compared to only 38 percent of the school’s African-American students.

This gap is not just a problem at Belmont. Just 4 percent of black students at Highland Elementary – where 56 percent of the students are African-Americans – are proficient in mathematics, compared to 46 percent of whites. That’s an unacceptable 42-percent gap.

Closing this chasm of achievement should command the attention of school officials. Instead, school and district leaders opt to nitpick over the fact that minority students, including blacks, Asians and Hispanics, comprise 58 percent of this school’s population, which is about 2 percent over the district guidelines.

And it’s not just the schools that have a large minority population that require the district’s attention. For example, 83 percent of the children attending Crofton Elementary School are white yet only 18 percent of those white students achieve proficiency in grade-level mathematics, according to the Kentucky Department of Education’s Spring 2005 performance report.

At Lacy Elementary, 82 percent of the children are white. However, just 38 percent of the school’s white students rank proficient in mathematics.

In addition, the academic performance of the entire Christian County district deserves serious attention. One official said the district is in the “progressing” category right now, which indicates a less-than-stellar academic performance in light of the NCLB expectation of 100-percent proficiency by 2014.

The math and reading under-performance of children in Christian County schools indicates that the racial makeup of individual schools should certainly be deemed a lesser priority for the district’s administrators.

Allowing parents more – not fewer – choices provides a clearer avenue for the school system to enhance its mediocre system while at the same time advancing its integration.

Education researcher Jay Greene suggests it’s a myth that parents will not send their children to some schools because they oppose integration.

In his new book “Education Myths,” Greene writes that the bulk of several studies examining the effect of school choice on integration “find that parental choice in education contributes to racial integration rather than promoting segregation.” He adds that the few studies arriving at different conclusions have serious “research design problems.”

Members of the Christian County School Board should rethink their move to slam the door of school choice in the face of parents whose children are entering its school system. The Board’s intentions were right…but their decision is wrong…for parents, the community and the kids.

– Jim Waters is director of policy and communication for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank.

The Bluegrass Institute is an independent research and educational institution offering free-market solutions to Kentucky's most pressing problems.

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