Divided we Fail (17 page)

Ingwerson was tall, with light blue eyes and a year-round tan. He “exuded confidence, poise and an aura of command,” one
Courier-Journal
reporter wrote.
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But he had little experience with the racial conflicts that had roiled the South for the past three decades. He was born in the tiny town of Pawnee City in eastern Nebraska.
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He met his wife in Kansas, and the couple spent their early years together in small-town Kansas and Denver, Colorado. His wife performed in local television commercials and wanted to be a serious actress, so the couple moved to Southern California, where they lived for more than a decade.

Orange County was vastly different than Louisville. The county was a loose network of wealthy suburbs without an urban center. It was politically conservative, but there was also religious diversity and a laid-back beach vibe. Evangelical Christians, along with a large contingent of Mormons and Buddhists, thrived there.
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In Louisville, Democrats reigned, pulling votes from the black community downtown, the liberal upper-middle class of the East End, and the union members in the south. Religion was mainstream: most people identified as Baptist, Jewish, or Catholic. The culture was Southern, friendly but reserved. Most significant, a quarter of students
in the Jefferson County schools were black, while Orange County was less than 2 percent black. (A third of the population was Asian or Hispanic.)
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No doubt the school board members hoped Ingwerson would bring some of the easy confidence of Southern California culture to Louisville as he took over the city's chaotic school system. For his part, Ingwerson was looking for a challenge. Louisville, one of the largest districts in the country after its merger between the city and suburbs, seemed an ideal place to test his mettle. Although he had been brought in to deal with the variety of scandals left behind by his predecessor, one of his first orders of business was to reexamine the school's busing system.

The schools had changed dramatically in five years. Despite the upheaval over busing and problems with the superintendent, test scores for black students were up.
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Violence was down.
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The dropout rate—which some black teachers worried would spike for black students shipped out to suburban schools—had stayed level.
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One of the local newspapers reported a new sense of camaraderie that had replaced the hostility of 1975. There were still flare-ups of overt racism, but the reporters also found empathy and understanding among students. As one senior at Shawnee High School in the West End put it, “Whites found out that not all blacks walked around with rakes in their hair and .38s in their back pockets. And blacks found out that not all whites walk around with pencils behind their ears.”
¹⁵

The district still had problems, of course. The suspension rate for blacks was down, but still disproportionately high in comparison to their numbers in the system.
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The recently inaugurated Advance Program, for “gifted and talented” children, was disproportionately white.
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(Other school districts around the nation were also implementing gifted and talented programs at around the same time, which tended to attract mostly white, advantaged students.)
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A teacher survey by the school district's Division of Community and Human Relations found that 90 percent of teachers believed poor families valued education less than wealthy families. “If we believe that, then we will make it come true,” said Sara Jo Hooper, who directed the survey. She had hoped to run programs to counter these prejudices. But her office was dismantled before she could do so.
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Many white parents fled to private schools, which had been losing enrollment before busing, but saw an increase of more than a thousand students after 1975.
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Others fled to the small towns on the other side of the Jefferson County line. Those who stayed were less involved, just as Joyce
Spond had predicted. Parent-Teacher Association membership dropped by fifteen thousand members.
²¹

White parents weren't the only ones who were unhappy. A May 1981 article in the
Courier-Journal
surveyed several disgruntled black parents and leaders who complained that the busing system was unfair.
²²
Black schools in the West End had been closed to facilitate desegregation, and the black community was beginning to worry that Central might be next.
²³
Under the 1975 assignment plan, Central's white students had to stay at the school for only two years. But many whites didn't even want to come for that long. In 1983, nearly one in five white students selected for busing requested and received medical transfers, compared to 2 percent of blacks.
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Ballard High School, which served the wealthy East End, was overcrowded thanks to students who claimed that asthma or other ailments prevented them from venturing downtown. Even as many white students shirked busing, most black students were still bused for the majority of their school career.

In newspaper articles, black parents voiced frustration about difficulties visiting their children's distant schools for meetings, and about a loss of community ties without neighborhood schools. One parent mourned the death of the old, majority-black city school system, where black children had experienced “a personal touch.”
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Not everyone was unhappy. Carolyn, a fifth grader, told the newspaper that she thought the adults should just “bug off for a while.” “It's not the kids who are disagreeing. It's the adults,” she said.
²⁶
Maria, a white student at Valley High School in a white working-class neighborhood near the army base, said, “It's like when you tear something down, you gotta give it time to build back up. And I think that's what we did—or whoever did—whenever busing started. We tore down the school and tried to rearrange it so it would be better. And it is getting better, I think—gradually.”
²⁷

“Gradually” was not a time frame that was generally acceptable in public education reform, however. During his first year in Louisville, Ingwerson went on a listening tour to churches, PTA meetings, and living rooms, both black and white, to get his bearings and hear from people on the ground. Although polls had shown that Louisvillians mostly accepted desegregation as a work in progress, despite its shortcomings, Ingwerson came away with one conclusion: Louisville's busing system was broken.
²⁸

In early 1983, he appointed a committee of citizens to come up with a way to fix it.
²⁹
Ingwerson wanted to reduce the amount of busing for all students
and to shore up Central's ailing enrollment numbers. His preference was to revive the magnet school idea from the 1960s and turn the school into a “flagship” for the district, rather than trying to force white students to attend there against their will.
³⁰
Above all, he told parents, his goal was to steer the district away from the numbers game of busing, and change the focus to quality and results.

Ingwerson was not alone in this goal. Around the same time Louisville welcomed the new superintendent from Southern California, a commission appointed by the Reagan administration published a scathing report in April 1983 about the status of the schools nationwide. Entitled
A Nation at Risk
, the report scandalized the country. SATs scores had dropped as much as fifty points since the 1960s, the report said. Two in five minority youths were “functionally illiterate.” Although the commission acknowledged that the average American citizen was better educated than earlier generations, it nevertheless made the contrasting claim that for the first time in American history, “the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents.” Americans shouldn't have been surprised by these statistics, the report argued, “given the multitude of often conflicting demands we have placed on our Nation's schools and colleges.” The implication was that while the United States had been dilly-dallying with “social” issues in schools, such as civil rights and busing, other countries had surged ahead in educating their youth.
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The report tapped into what the public already felt: a deep sense that the public schools were deteriorating fast. A 1981 Gallup poll had found that the public's faith in the schools had been shaken during the 1970s, the era of busing. The culprits behind the failing schools were, according to the people who were surveyed, a lack of discipline, an increase in drug use, poor standards, lack of money and, for 11 percent of all parents (and 18 percent of private school parents), integration.
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President Reagan trumpeted the report's findings. He had been on a mission to dismantle the Department of Education, and in
A Nation at Risk
he found support for his arguments. “I think you can make a case that it began to deteriorate when the federal government started interfering in education,” he said.
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It was a not-so-subtle signal to the white middle class that federal intervention in their schools—including court-ordered busing—was coming to an end. While this turned out to be a premature hope, the
Nation at Risk
report did mark a new philosophy in education reform
that would pick up steam over the next three decades. American public education had begun its seismic shift from a focus on providing equal opportunities to a focus on producing equal outcomes. Raising expectations and standards, not ensuring equity and sufficient resources through integration, was becoming the new mantra.

The
Nation at Risk
report ignored some major developments in American education, however. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, something fundamentally good happened in American schools. Despite panic about widespread functional illiteracy, reading scores for all students rose on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card.
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And, even more significantly, the black-white achievement gap had shrunk rapidly.

A Nation at Risk
studied high schools, not the young students who were entering school in the wake of busing. So the report missed out on the most significant gains for black students who had started school from 1978 until 1980. Black high school students had gone from scores that lagged fifty-three points behind those of whites in 1971 to a score gap of thirty-one in 1984 (over the next four years, the gap continued to close). In particular, black students in the South saw huge jumps in their performance. The increase was as much as it would have been if black students had attended school for an extra year and a half.
³⁵

Changes to the black family, including an increase in parental education levels, were only a small factor driving these huge leaps forward. Changes in the curriculum, such as more challenging requirements in math and reading, likewise only explained part of the story. School factors, like smaller class sizes and more funding, seemed to have played a bigger role. So did desegregation, along with social changes like affirmative action and the War on Poverty programs that accompanied it.
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But these outcomes were largely ignored. As the Reagan administration, politicians, education experts, and school districts around the country fretted about a rise in school violence and the need to improve standards and excellence, the historic leaps on the National Assessment of Educational Progress's tests were swept aside, as were the policies behind them.

For those in the black community who had always viewed busing with skepticism, the new focus on outcomes and standards was greeted with enthusiasm. Here was an idea they could embrace: judging progress by how
well black children performed in school, not by how many black children were seated next to white ones.

Chapter 14

Carman Weathers was born in 1935 and grew up in Beecher Terrace, a village of two-story housing projects built in the 1930s just west of downtown.
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His mother had died in childbirth, so his great-grandmother raised him. Her mother, Carman's great-great-grandmother, had been a slave on a plantation in Jefferson County. Her portrait hung on their apartment wall, and Carman's childhood was steeped in stories of her strength and stubbornness in the face of hardship. She had fought her master to keep her children from being sold “down the river” in the lead-up to the Civil War, when the slave trade was slowing and enslaved children in the United States were commanding a higher price. She also taught herself to read and believed deeply in education as the way up and out for her children. Carman lived in awe of her, and also of his great-grandmother, who inherited her mother's steely personality. They were self-made women who, despite their poverty and lack of resources, seemed dignified and powerful in Carman's eyes.

During the day, his great-grandmother served as a maid to the family of a Jewish lawyer and his wife who had emigrated from Germany. The rest of the time, she reigned over Beecher Terrace, settling disputes, giving out advice and dispatching Carman to do chores for the needy. He mowed grass on the weekends for elderly neighbors and each day carried the extra bottle of milk his great-grandmother always ordered for the single mother next door, with her six boys, or for another struggling family on the block. Even the white ladies she worked for called on her often for advice.

Carman's interaction with white people, however, was limited to the few times a year that he was invited to play with the two children of his great-grandmother's employers. It was more integration than most of his friends in the neighborhood ever experienced. They attended Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary School, named after a black English composer, in an old building near the projects. The school served whites when it opened in 1853 as the Tenth Ward School until the population in the West End shifted from white to black and the school was renamed. By the time white students returned to the school on buses, the old building had been torn down and replaced with more housing projects.