Amid calls in the Republican-controlled legislature to deconsolidate Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, a new study found that some states that have proposed splitting up large urban districts ultimately did not put those changes into law.
The Office of Education Accountability, an agency that researches education for the legislature, studied school governance models across the country and presented its findings to Kentucky lawmakers on the Education Assessment and Accountability Review Subcommittee Tuesday morning. Other findings in the report included that consolidating school districts can result in long-term saving costs but local communities often oppose it.
Co-chair of the subcommittee, Sen. Stephen West (R-Paris), asked OEA presenters if consolidation had a positive impact on student performance. OEA Research Division Manager Deborah Nelson said the research on the effects of consolidation were inconclusive.
Rep. Tina Bojanowski (D-Louisville), asked if deconsolidation has an effect on student performance. Bojanowski teaches at a JCPS elementary school.
“If you took a large urban school district and split it up, is there any evidence that you would have improved academic outcomes?” she asked. Nelson said there has not been a state deconsolidation of large districts, so it cannot be studied. Some small districts have succeeded from a larger district, but there have not been studies on student achievement in those cases.
According to the OEA study, Nevada’s legislature considered dividing the Clark County School District in Las Vegas in 1997 but no legislation to that effect was approved. In New Mexico, legislation in 2017 included a provision to deconsolidate districts with more than 40,000 students but it did not pass. In Nebraska, legislation was passed in 2006 to deconsolidate Omaha Public Schools, but the legislation was later repealed.
“We have no data we can point to for deconsolidation,” West said in a subsequent comment. “In the case of JCPS, for us as a state, we don’t have a lot to go on, really, is what you’re telling us.”
Last year, a group of Republican lawmakers called for exploring legislative changes to JCPS after a bus-scheduling debacle delayed the start of the school year. Among policies they wanted to tackle was creating a commission to evaluate splitting up JCPS, the state’s largest school system.
During the 2024 legislative session, the General Assembly approved a task force to review governance of the school system. That group has met during the legislative interim and any recommendations it will make must be submitted to the Legislative Research Commission by Dec. 1.
Louisville residents expressed concerns about deconsolidation during two task force meetings held at local schools. A co-chair of the task force, Sen. Michael Names (R-Shepherdsville) told reporters after the first local meeting that he suspected no legislation could come from the task force next legislative session because of the amount of information the task force wants to review.
On other issues, OEA’s report found that Kentucky’s school governance laws for state and local boards of education were similar to most states in the U.S. and that state takeover of school districts can often lead to some improvements for districts’ fiscal health but “on average, does not lead to improvements in student achievement.”
The report did study authorization models for charter schools and noted that while Kentucky law does have a governance framework for charter schools, none are currently operating in the state. States with charter schools have varying authorizers.
In Kentucky, authorizers can be the local school board in the district where the charter school would be located or a group of local school boards formed to make a regional charter school. There are also two local government authorizer options: the mayor of a consolidated local government or the chief executive office of an urban-county government.
Louisville has a consolidated local government plan. Lexington operates under an urban-county government model.
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Written by McKenna Horsley. Cross-posted from the Kentucky Lantern.
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