Louisville's Invisible Students

Hi all, I'm running for mayor in Louisville this year. I've written a set of Op-Eds, including this article below. Just posting here so that those interested might know that the discourse is happening. Thanks for reading 😄

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Every few months, we get news about JCPS. "Louisville's schools are failing." While the numbers we see are real, the repeated conclusion is just not supported by the facts.

Here is what the test scores leave out: Nearly one in four children in this city attends a private school, more than twice the state average. The Catholic Archdiocese alone enrolls roughly 19,000 students across Louisville. Add the other private schools, the evangelical academies, the classical programs, the Montessori and Waldorf schools, and homeschool families, and you are looking at roughly 27,000 children who live here, whose families pay taxes here, who will work and vote and raise their own children here, and who do not appear anywhere in the data used to declare our schools a failure. That is about 23% of all students, compared with 8% in Oldham and Shelby counties, and barely 3% in Bullitt.

Private school (of any stripe) attendance tends to suggest higher-income households, which research consistently shows to be among the strongest predictors of standardized test performance. When we exclude those students from the city's educational accounting, we have not measured Louisville's children as a whole. We have measured the effects of concentrated poverty and called it a school problem. If we assessed Louisville's children as a city, rather than only as a district, the picture would look materially different. The only viable conclusion from standardized testing is this: many Louisville students are living in conditions that standardized tests are very good at measuring and very bad at solving.

This matters because diagnoses drive prescriptions. If you believe JCPS is failing because teachers are failing, because the district is mismanaged, or because public schools are structurally incapable, then you reach for a familiar set of tools: vouchers, privatization, state takeover, and the slow withdrawal of public investment. I'm from Floyd Co KY, possibly the first district to have ever been placed in receivership by the state, and oddly enough they didn't change anything other than remove parents' rights and oversight. It didn't make things better. The state ended its takeover after a few years with no progress on its stated goals.

An honest diagnosis of our city's education problems is harder and less convenient, because it centers on address history. What zip code a child is born into, and what wealth that zip code has been allowed to accumulate, or has been systematically prevented from accumulating, over generations. The redlining maps of 1937 and the test score maps of today are basically identical. Urban health outcomes. Urban burn sites. Urban Renewal locations. They're all the same map.

The key insight here, first laid out I think by Grawermeyer Award in Education winner Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System, is that many of the strongest educational tools aren't even school board decisions. They're municipal priorities.

Affordable housing near strong schools expands access to ed.
Reliable transit expands opportunity.
Well-funded libraries support literacy, adult education, and workforce development.
Safe neighborhoods improve attendance.
Stable families improve learning.

We can even expand the Blessing in a Backpack program to send a mealkit for 4 home with every child, so that the question of "where's the next meal coming from" isn't an issue.

None of this excuses real problems inside JCPS. But these problems are downstream of concentrated poverty and decades of disinvestment, which the city must address.

Submitted May 14, 2026 at 11:16AM by hurtizme https://ift.tt/XutL2v8