Louisville features in Supreme Court decision

Louisville made the news today when the Supreme Court ruled that the Jefferson County Public Schools busing system was unconstitutional. I have to admit, I was bewildered by busing from the day I moved to Louisville. To me, busing was something that was done prior to Brown v Board of Ed to maintain segregation. I couldn't understand how busing a kid for 3 hours in the name of maintaining racial diversity could possibly help that child succeed as an individual student. Sacrificing individual achievement to bolster group color dynamics doesn't seem appropriate on an educational basis, let alone the fact that it arguably doesn't do much for racial diversity either.

Today, the C-J has an online package that tells a lot about the history of busing and segregation in Louisville schools. That might be helpful in case you, too, are as befuddled by busing as I am. I do see that it's a tough situation. On the one hand, why should poorer students suffer a worse education because they live in a worse neighborhood? (Of course, ideally, I don't see why the education a school provides should depend on where it the building is situated within the school district.) On the other, why should select students have to suffer a pretty significant individual time and distance burden to satisfy a quota?

I've been playing with this post for a while, and I have at least three additional paragraphs that I could put here, but I don't think I will. I don't know that I have enough authority to say anything truly meaningful that will add to the debate, and even if I just stick to my own experiences, well, the bottom line is that while I really like Louisville for a lot of reasons, I am just reminded over and over again how different it is here from the places I'm used to. In so many ways, large and small. Or maybe it's just that I was on Southwest last night because they opened up booking through January 2008 and I saw that Thanksgiving fares have already been completely sold out, realized that I don't even know if I can go anywhere for Thanksgiving, and got depressed about the fact that we live so far away from everyone.