Miller blows up Louisville politicians, U of L and especially JCPS

J. Bruce Miller in the C-J, with some rough words for Louisville's leaders, U of L, and especially JCPS...

I'm surprised the C-J published this. I didn't know they would promote negative views of the government schools, especially when it was connected to JCPS' over-arching racial goals.

Good for them!

Instead of pro-active leadership, for years Louisville politicians (with precious few exceptions) have chosen to govern based upon a series of myths that are readily accepted by a city long ago described as "a city that wishes to let well enough, alone." At this critical juncture, Louisville would have become far more competitive had it demanded for the last several decades that its political leadership publicly accept reality's "brutal facts" of our shortcoming and take active measures to do something about them, rather than wallowing in the "fruity myth" that things are just fine because such a political posture allows a politician to be Mayor for Life of a place that is content to "let well enough, alone."

The "myth list"' is long. Near the top is the "myth" that we have an exceptional local public school system....The "brutal fact" about Louisville's public education system is that for the last 35 years (or two whole generations of public school children) our political leaders have encouraged an experiment in "racial diversity" at the expense of the "neighborhood school." While the diversity goal was originally laudable, over the years the result, academically, has proven to be an abysmal failure....

There's another [myth]...A significant number of the University of Louisville's student body matriculates from this abysmal Jefferson County public school system. For the last decade, the U.S. News & World Report's annual university ranking places that university's undergraduate academic program as a third-tier American university somewhere between 125th and 175th in the nation.

Its specialized academic programs don't fare any better. Its locally vaunted medical school isn't ranked, nor is its engineering or business school. It's law school stands at 98th out of 100 American law schools, and its School of Education is 71st (before its dean was recently indicted on charges of thieving public funds)....

For 35 years, we've been graduating students from a bottom-feeding public school system and sending them, by droves, to the local university whose academic programs offer bottom-feeding students little, if any, challenge.

And we wonder why no major corporation has moved to this city in the last half century, or why over the same time period we've lost a host of corporate headquarters with thousands of high-paying corporate jobs...

UPDATE: A few days later, Jim Chen, Dean of U of L's School of Law, corrects an error in a letter to the editor of the C-J...U of L is 98th out of 184, not out of 100.