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A few days ago, U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II made a legal ruling supporting the incredibly poorly thought out Jefferson County school busing plan that we have discussed before.

So, I thought it would be interesting to look at the academic performance of one school where a child will be forced to bus something like 20 miles, one way, each day.

The school is Jefferson County’s Shelby Elementary School. It is in No Child Left Behind Tier 3 status, which means it failed during four separate school terms to meet the requirements of NCLB.

You can find the school’s NCLB report for 2008 by negotiating some menus from this page.

Here is a list from that report on the areas where this low performing school failed NCLB goals in 2008.

First of all, notice that the school didn’t fail white kids. It didn’t fail because of kids with learning disabilities, either, simply because the school had too few of them under Kentucky’s ridiculously high minimum enrollment requirements to get a score in that area (signified by the n/a designation).

This school primarily failed because of one racial group, African-Americans, which actually comprise the dominant racial group at Shelby Elementary.

If Jefferson county can dilute the number of low-scoring students in this school by busing in kids from better-off parts of the school district, it possibly will boost scores in the school, at least for a little while, without having to make any real changes in educational performance.

The real irony here is that because this school is an NCLB Tier 3 school, parents of students already attending Shelby Elementary get the right to request a transfer out of this school to a better performing one at the same time that the east end students sued to avoid being bused IN to this low performing elementary school.

Go figure!

And, then ask how a judge could miss what is going on here. How could a judge uphold a plan that requires a five-year old to make three bus changes, ranging all across town, to travel all across Jefferson County to school? What kind of educational mindset is that going to create?

Of course, aside from other things, Judge Heyburn doesn’t have a terribly good track record on school busing issues. According to the Daily News in Bowling Green, “Heyburn upheld a school assignment plan in 2004 – a decision struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote in 2007.”

So, stand by for more on this explosive issue that goes to the heart of parent rights to insure their children get a good education. In the case of the two parents who got trampled by the school district, and then the courts, they pulled their kids out of the public school system all together. If they now win their suit on what looks like certain appeal, the damages to us taxpayers will mount that much more.

And, all the while, Shelby Elementary will go on conducting business as usual, which is to say, probably not very well. In fact, if there is a large enough change in the school’s student enrollment thanks to all the busing, that could restart its NCLB “clock.,” giving the school’s staff a “bye” for several more years while education in the school continues to wallow.

The late Milton Friedman’s doctrine of capitalism may not be a perfect system. But no one has come up with anything better.

Click here to read the entire column.

The Bluegrass Institute and the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice recently conducted an opinion poll to find out what Kentucky voters – our readers – think about the state’s education system.

I showed you what you think about the schools overall a couple of days ago.

A solid majority of you, 59 percent, think the schools are doing only a poor to fair job, at best.

Now, let’s look at what you told us about school funding.

As you can see, an overwhelming portion of you either think we spend enough now (26%) or we spend too much (44%). Less than one in three of you think we need to spend more.

Since you also don’t think the schools are doing very well, I have to conclude that you don’t think the schools are using the dollars they get in effective ways.

This is something our school bureaucracy, which constantly has its hand out for more dollars, simply must come to grips with. Our school “folk” need to figure out how to do their job more efficiently rather than just continuing to plan on getting a lot more money so they can continue as they have in the past.

The poll indicates you don’t think the past performance of Kentucky’s schools is very good, but you also don’t think more money is the answer.

Even though Washington has approved the cap-and-trade climate legislation, Kathy Gornik, president of Lexington-based THIEL Loudspeakers and Bluegrass Institute chairman, points out why Americans have not done the same.

Click here to read Gornik’s article in Business Lexington on the disastrous legislation.

The cap-and-trade plan allows for a carbon emission trade market where if one company doesn’t use up all of its emissions, they can sell those emissions credits to a company on the verge of running out of allowances.

The National Black Chamber of Commerce found that this legislation would reduce the GDP by $350 billion, not to mention cut net employment by 2.5 million jobs.

Now is not the time to create yet another complicated and costly law that will harm businesses and taxpayers. Even environmentalists are disappointed with the 85 percent giveaway of carbon credits. So much for limited carbon emissions and “green” energy investments!

By Tabitha Waggoner, intern for the Bluegrass Institute

What? Here we go again. A new report accuses the state pension system of very questionable practices that led to the purchase of a 1.9-acre property for $752,000 in 2006 from a local veterinarian that had paid only $450,000 for it just three months earlier. Huh? The property was sold this year to the Kentucky State Police for $325,000. Wow!