LOUISVILLE – When someone who’s in charge of overseeing a system says it is engaging in “genocide,” one would think others would take the problem more seriously.
    
But alas, the problems plaguing Jefferson County Public Schools have existed for years and local administrators and politicians have done everything to block reform and school choice.
    
Via The Courier-Journal:

 

Nearly all of Jefferson County’s persistently low-achieving public schools are failing to improve, a situation so dire that Kentucky’s education commissioner called it “academic genocide” and warned that the state may be forced to intercede.

A new analysis by the Kentucky Department of Education found that 16 of the 18 Jefferson County schools that underwent overhauls in the past three years because of chronically poor academics are showing little or no progress, despite receiving millions of dollars worth of resources to boost student achievement.

Moreover, state officials say several schools failed to follow the detailed improvement plans they agreed to as a condition of their overhaul — and Jefferson County Public Schools officials failed to exercise the oversight needed to make sure the plans were being followed.

Education Commissioner Terry Holliday said the state may need to take over direct oversight of some schools’ turnaround efforts, as it has done in several other districts. He said that could happen at “schools performing at the lowest levels for the longest periods of time — schools such as Valley, Shawnee, Frost, Doss and Iroquois.”

“This is going to take much more than a school district effort; this is a communitywide problem,” Holliday said in a phone interview with The Courier-Journal on Friday. “This is about poverty, this is about kids who are not coming to school, this is about lack of parental engagement and, frankly, it’s academic genocide. What hope do these children have?”

He acknowledged that the state is partly to blame for failing to make sure that JCPS was following the improvement plans, but he said the district must also take responsibility.