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DOE, already top-heavy with bloated unclassified payroll, to submit layoff plan to Civil Service Commission on Monday

Posted in BESE, Budget, Charters, Civil Service, Education, Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, Layoffs, Recovery School District, RSD on April 28, 2013 | 9 Comments »

The announcement has already gone out in the Department of Education (DOE) and on Monday, an official layoff plan will be presented to the Louisiana Civil Service Commission.

We hope the commissioners will consider the fate of affected employees who have families to support and mortgages, tuition, and car notes to pay before approving the plan in the same routine manner as with recent layoff plans.

That, after all, is the most damning aspect of this entire administration: the fact that human lives are affected adversely in the name of greed, power and ego. They are people who have names and faces. They have human emotions just like the rest of us. They go to work, come home and mow the lawn. They fish on weekends and perhaps coach their kids in softball, baseball and soccer. They sit beside us at church and in the movie theater.

They grew up believing that if they studied hard in school, made good grades, acted as responsible citizens and worked hard at their jobs, they would realize the American dream of a home, a family, and the opportunity for their children to do better than they.

That may be the way it’s turning out for some, but for the most part, state workers today are living with the same fears of insecurity as the rest of us. The administration of Bobby Jindal is doing everything in its power, through a compliant and pitifully weak legislature, to thin the herd, as it were, of the most vulnerable state employees—those with no one to speak on their behalf—by firing thousands of decent, hard-working employees and gutting the retirement of those who remain.

And what about the private citizen, those who do not work for the state? Yes, you have a dog in this hunt, too, whether you know it or not, whether or not you are willing to pull yourself away from Duck Dynasty or American Idol long enough to get involved.

It is your children whose public education is being destroyed before your very eyes. It is their tuition costs that are soaring because Gov. Bobby Jindal, perhaps the weakest—and at the same time, most power hungry and ambitious—governor this state has seen for at least 100 years insists on keeping taxes low for his constituents and corporate entities who contribute heavily to his campaigns. Altogether, tax breaks, exemptions and incentives have been handed to these supporters on a silver platter to the tune of some $5 billion a year in breaks.

It is the state that suffers at Jindal’s bumbling, self-righteous refusals to accept federal Medicaid funds, broadband internet funds, federal funds for a passenger rail line between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and federal funds for early childhood development.

His reason? He doesn’t like to accept federal funds with the strings that are attached. Well, he certainly accepts massive federal funding to pay for hundreds of contracts awarded by DOE when it fits his agenda. He has no problem accepting billions in federal highway funding dollars. And despite his protestations to the contrary, he had no problem accepting federal stimulus money to dole out to local governments at Protestant churches during his first term of office.

By the way, does anyone happen to know the number of churches he has visited since his re-election?

None.

Zero.

Nil.

Nada.

Zilch.

Yea, not one.

He also has had no problem with accepting hurricane relief funds. Of course, he probably would have been ridden out of the state on a rail had he declined those funds at a time they were so desperately needed. But the Road Home Program, run by his appointees, has a less than stellar record in administering hundreds of millions of federal funds as evidenced by a recent audit that found that more than $100 million may have been misspent.

So now we’re looking at a significant layoff at DOE. The notice went out to DOE employees on Friday (that’s when news releases that cast the administration in a bad light are most likely to be issued).

Early word is some three dozen employees will get the axe, to become effective on May 30.

“This layoff is being proposed due to a reduction of state funds of $3.4 million in the Operating Budget for fiscal year 2013-2014.

But wait. They’re trying to save $3.4 million?

A printout of DOE employees reveals a list of fairly hefty salaries of unclassified (appointed) employees in both DOE and the Recovery School District (RSD).

There are 54 employees of DOE and RSD who earn $100,000 or more per year for a total payroll of $6.7 million.

The breakdown shows there are 32 RSD unclassified employees earning a total of $3.66 million and 22 DOE unclassified employees earning $100,000 or more with a total payroll of another $3 million.

And that is just those making more than $100,000. There are 86 who make $90,000 or more in both DOE and RSD and only six of those are classified employees—all in DOE.

Let’s take a look at some of the individuals, their job titles and salaries.

Recovery School District:

• Neeta Boddapati—Administrator, Other Pupil: $95,000;

• Clara Bradford—Clerical Other Special Programs: $95,000;

• Ronald Bordelon—Administrator, Chief Officers: $150,000;

• Edwin Compass—Director: $125,000;

• Nicole Diamantes—Administrator, Other Special Programs: $105,000;

• Patrick Dobard—RSD Superintendent: $225,000;

• Gabriela Fighetti—Administrator, Regular Programs: $117,000;

• James Ford—Administrative Superintendent: $145,000;

• Lona Hankins—Director: $131,000;

• Helen Molpus—Administrative Chief, Officers: $115,000;

• Dana Peterson—Administrative Superintendent: $125,000;

Bear in mind that even with all the high salaries and impressive sounding titles that go with them, the RSD has an abysmal record:

• All 15 direct-run RSD schools were assigned a letter grade of “D” or “F.” compared to only one of the five (20 percent) Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) direct-run schools.

• Of the 42 charter RSD schools, 33 (79 percent) received a “D” or “F” compared to none of the 11 charter schools run by the OPSB.

• Of the 5422 students attending direct-run RSD schools, 100 percent received a “D” or “F.”

• Of the RSD students attending charter schools, 15,040 (76 percent) attend schools with grades of “D” or “F.”

DOE—State Activities:

• Erin Bendily—Deputy Superintendent: $140,000;

• Nicholas Bolt—Fellow: $105,000;

• James Bowman—Director: $148,000;

• Kenneth Bradford—Director: $110,000;

• Hannah Dietsch—Assistant Superintendent: $130,000;

• Howard Drake—Liaison Officer: $160,000;

• Joan Hunt—Executive Counsel: $125,000;

• Gary Jones—Executive Officer: $145,000;

• Kerry Laster—Executive Officer: $155,000;

• David “Lefty” Lefkowith—Director: $146,000;

• Kunjan Narechania—Chief of Staff: $145,000;

• Stephen Osborn—Assistant Superintendent: $125,000;

• Elizabeth Scioneaux—Deputy Superintendent: $132,800;

• Jill Slack—Director: $124,000;

• Gayle Sloan—Liaison Officer: $160,000;

• Melissa Stilley—Liaison Officer: $135,000;

• Francis Touchet—Liaison Officer: $130,000;

• John White—Superintendent: $275,000;

• Heather Cope—Director: $125,000.

If John White sincerely wished to save $3.4 million, he could probably do with fewer liaison officers, directors and “fellows,” whatever that is.

White has deliberately brought in a bevy of highly-paid, appointees whose credentials, like those of Lefkowith, might have little to do with education and more to do with political loyalty.

But then, White was himself brought in by Jindal to do the governor’s bidding—even before his official appointment.

Jindal’s first attempt at installing White was rejected by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and he was not officially appointed superintendent until after a new board took office in January of 2012. But that did not stop White—and Jindal—from moving forward with their agenda.

In December of 2011, with Ollie Tyler ostensibly serving as acting superintendent, personnel changes were in the offing in the department when White announced to the staff members involved in the proposed changes, “Nothing gets done until I say so.”

That’s confidence.

That’s arrogance.

That’s the way things are done in this administration. Disregard of the law has become the order of the day.

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Guest column: Metairie attorney dissects the post-Katrina, ALEC-inspired politicalization of Louisiana public education

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, BESE, Budget, Education on April 26, 2013 | 28 Comments »

EDITOR’S NOTE: LouisianaVoice traditionally addresses state political events as they occur. Our posts generally run between 1,000 and 1,500 words in length. Recently, however, attorney Nancy Picard, a Metairie law firm partner, submitted the following 4,000-word essay that examines the complicated, confusing and controversial odyssey of Louisiana public education policy since Hurricane Katrina. We found her research to be so thorough and the topic so timely, that we felt it imperative that we run her essay, despite its length, with only minimal editing.

Following is her guest column:

Louisiana’s Great Education Giveaway
By NANCY PICARD

A writer recently hailed federal and state education reform as a new civil rights movement. But the word reform, which means “the improvement . . . of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory,” can hardly be applied to the recent changes in educational law. Most of these changes are not for the better. Instead, they create a separate and wholly unequal educational system masquerading as choice, which serves to destabilize and discredit public schools in the name of improvement and to make state funds accessible to a wide range of individuals and corporations with little or no oversight.

This article examines recent legislation that dramatically expanded state takeover of schools after Hurricane Katrina, shows how the changes are contrary to educational research on effective schools, and points to some examples of schools and programs gone awry under this new regime.

The First Steps: The State Changes the Educational Landscape

Before Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Legislature adopted the No Child Left Behind testing regimen and statutes allowing for the establishment of charter schools. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires states to develop and assess basic skills of all students at select grade levels in order for those school districts to receive federal funding.

Schools must make adequate yearly progress in test scores or face serious consequences, including being publicly labeled a school “in need of improvement,” being required to replace school staff, being turned into a charter school, or being run by a private company or the state office of education.

The Louisiana Legislature had also established the Recovery School District (RSD) to take over five schools run by the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) based on their poor test scores. Immediately following Hurricane Katrina, before the RSD takeover of these schools could be evaluated, state officials pushed for much more sweeping changes.

The Great Takeover: The New Orleans Public Schools in Post-Katrina Louisiana

The 2005-06 school year had begun and 59,000 students were attending OPSB schools; it had an operating budget of $418 million and employed more than 7,000 employees. Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. On September 27, 2005, State School Superintendent Cecil Picard wrote to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) requesting federal policy waivers and federal funding for charter schools. Governor Blanco signed an Executive Order suspending provisions of Title 17 that would have prevented the rapid expansion of charter schools.

After Katrina, the OPSB located available teachers and planned to re-open 52 schools, but state officials did not support this plan. Instead, the Louisiana Legislature enacted Act 35, which provided for automatic transfer of failing schools to the RSD where the school was in a district deemed academically in crisis.

Academically in crisis was defined as any local system in which more than 30 schools are academically unacceptable or more than 50% of its students attend schools that are academically unacceptable. Whereas in August 2005, a School Performance Score (SPS) of 60 was designated passing, after Hurricane Katrina, the passing score increased to 87.5. What had been considered a passing score was now deemed unacceptable. As a result of Act 35, and the changing SPS standard, the RSD took over 102 of the 126 OPSB schools, bringing the RSD total from five before Katrina to 107 schools after. The SPS reverted to 60 again in 2010.

Despite available certified OPSB teachers, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) advertised nationally for teachers, and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) approved a contract with Teach For America (TFA) to train and place 125 TFA members in under-resourced public schools in Greater New Orleans and Southern Louisiana.

Although the state had represented to the DOE that it needed funds to pay salaries and benefits of out-of-work school employees, and received more than $500 million to do so, none of the money was used to pay OPSB teachers. Instead, the funds were diverted to the RSD, while the state actively recruited out-of-state employees, offering signing bonuses and housing allowances as high as $17,500.

By the end of that year, OPSB was operating only five schools and nine charters, and because the money follows the child, OPSB was without funds to pay teachers. All OPSB employees were notified that they would be terminated, and would not be allowed to transfer to the charters.

A Taste for Money and Power

The post-Katrina takeover of New Orleans schools gave the state a taste of funds formerly controlled by the OPSB and whetted its appetite for more. Since 2005, the RSD has continued to expand into low economic areas throughout the state. As of the 2011-12 school year, the RSD directly oversees schools in Orleans, East Baton Rouge, Caddo, St. Helena, and Pointe Coupe Parishes.

Especially disturbing is the St. Helena case where the RSD took over the middle school and refused to return it to local control despite failing to achieve the gains of St. Helena‘s locally-controlled elementary and high schools.14 Twenty more schools throughout the state are currently at risk of being taken over by the RSD.

The RSD, which started in part to keep underperforming schools from falling through the cracks in an overburdened school system, has now grown to a statewide school district with all the same challenges but without local input.

Moreover, in the last two years, the legislature has imposed more draconian requirements on public schools and teachers, while making more funding available to individuals and non-public schools without the same mandates or accountability standards. Rather than help public schools improve, the changes have the effect of discrediting them. For example, legislation changed the procedures for evaluating public school teachers, effective for 2012-13, requiring that 50 percent of a teacher‘s evaluation be based on evidence of growth in student achievement using a value added (VA) assessment model.

Then, on March 23, 2012, at the end of a grueling session, the Louisiana Legislature rushed the passage of two more bills—Acts 1 and 2—with little time allotted for examination or debate. Act 1 only grants tenure to teachers who attain a highly effective evaluation rating for five out of six years, and removes tenure already granted for any year that the teacher is evaluated as ineffective.

Act 1 substitutes a hearing before the local school board with a hearing before a panel comprised of a teacher, a principal and a superintendent designee that must take place within seven days, and after the formerly tenured teacher is terminated. Now, although the new evaluation procedure has never even been fully implemented, teachers may be terminated based on either low student test scores or a disgruntled principal‘s evaluation despite previous years of stellar performance or extenuating circumstances.

Act 2 imposed sweeping changes to education funding, the state‘s charter school system, and the responsibilities of BESE. The Act provided for zero interest loans to charter schools and scholarships for students to attend non-public schools. These scholarships are provided in part from the MFP, previously used exclusively for public education.

Act 2 created independent charter authorizers empowered to authorize charter schools, further removing state and local oversight from the chartering process. Charter schools, not the parish school board, are responsible for directly administering their own budgets.

Finally, Act 2 increased BESE‘s responsibilities exponentially. BESE can now transfer any school in the state to the RSD under certain conditions and is now responsible for overseeing all school boards, charter boards, charter authorizers, online educators, and home-school educators, concentrating power in the hands of one state authority, removed from local control.

The Reckoning: Measuring Education Legislation against the Research

Educational research does not support the changes being implemented with such haste. Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, initially supported NCLB, but now criticizes the draconian penalties imposed on schools for failing to reach unrealistic goals.

She also explains why the promise of charter schools has not been fulfilled. Most studies of charter schools show that they vary widely in quality and reflect no more gains than public schools. Further, as compared to neighboring public schools, charters enroll fewer disabled and disadvantaged students. Their higher graduation rates often reflect very high attrition due to “counseling out” the lowest performing students. The students who are hardest to educate are left to regular public schools, which makes comparisons between the two sectors unfair. This is not a model for public education, which must educate all children.

In their most recent book, Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan, experts on the subject of school reform, summarize the research on successful versus failed school reform efforts.25 Among the failed ―solutions they identify the following ―silver bullets:

• Closing down all the bad schools fails because the vast majority of students end up in other non-performing schools now farther from home.

• Importing ―smart and inexpensive teachers fails because most of these teachers move on after a few years, leaving instability in schools that need stability most.

• Replacing principals whose schools have poor testing results fails because it leaves poverty-stricken schools with more short-term leadership which, again, leads to more instability.

• Relentless timelines for continuous yearly improvement in test scores fails because such improvements are simply unsustainable.

• Focusing on charter schools fails because though exceptional charters change a few lives others rely on ―skim[ming] the best students and teachers from the top, and leav[ing] out students with the most challenging disabilities, or have no system to support students when they get into trouble.

• Performance-based evaluation of teachers fails because it uses measurements of students‘ growth purportedly to reward the best teachers and get rid of the ―worst based on the fallacies that we can solve our problems by substituting bad people with good ones and by over-relying on a narrow range of performance measures.

These ―silver bullets make for ―slick political promises but are based on incorrect assumptions about what directs sustainable school change; and yet they have all been enshrined in Louisiana. For example, the idea of rewarding and terminating teachers based only upon student test results is based on the false assumption that measuring students‘ gains on test scores reflects teachers‘ effectiveness.

But research shows that gains in student achievement are influenced by many factors besides the teacher. A teacher may have very high scores with one class and not another or in one year and not another, regardless of teaching techniques, or show higher scores but be less effective in attaining long-run achievement.

So a teacher, for example, could prepare students for a single year-end test, but neglect areas which would better prepare students for the next grade level. Veteran teachers have been dismissed based on scores who have also been voted teacher of the year and rated as exceeding expectations by supervisors. When teachers cannot identify the relationship between what they do in the classroom and their ratings, they become frustrated and demoralized.

The State Giveth: The Push to Privatize

If eliminating teachers based on faulty evaluations is not good for teachers or students, why would such a program be rushed through the legislature with lightning speed? One reason might be that testing is a growing industry, and testing companies exert an influence on legislation. Pearson, the world‘s largest for-profit education business, has a $32 million five-year contract to produce New York‘s standardized tests and a half billion dollar five-year testing contract with Texas.

Meanwhile, closer to home, a Minnesota company, Data Recognition Corp., has more than $93 million in LDOE contracts. Louisiana has a second contract for testing with the California company, Pacific Metrics, for $39.8 million.

This year more than 155,000 public school students in grades eight, nine, and 10 will take new tests—called EXPLORE and PLAN—designed to help students improve their performance on the ACT, a test of college readiness, which now almost all high school juniors will be required to take at state expense.

At least one-third of Louisiana’s entering high school students operate below the basic level in reading, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, and funding for Louisiana‘s colleges and universities has been slashed, but the state is requiring and paying for large numbers of high school students to take college admission tests.

Why?

Testing companies are not the only ones enjoying Louisiana‘s largess. Louisiana currently has 70 contracts worth more than $1 million each and totaling $282 million; most of these contracts go to out-of-state contractors and are monitored by the LDOE.

The RSD entered a $10.5 million contract with an Illinois company, Durham School Services, to provide bus transportation and another $500,000 to a Missouri company, Transpar Group, to design bus routes and provide oversight. In July 2012, Durham sent lay-off notices to about 200 bus drivers and monitors because the RSD owed the company $7.2 million.

Educational service companies are promoted by ideologically driven lobbying organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which gained notoriety for providing the model for Florida’s Stand Your Ground legislation. ALEC has as members some 2000 state legislators and corporate executives. From 2001 through 2010, ALEC companies spent more than $3 million in Louisiana political campaigns, including almost $132,000 to Governor Jindal.

ALEC drafts model bills on topics ranging from privatizing prisons, to toughening voter ID laws, encouraging privately-owned pensions, and opposing environmental regulation. In 2011, the Center for Media and Democracy, released an extensive archive of ALEC‘s model amendments. The model legislation often advances the economic interest of member corporations. For example, the chief executive officer of Data Recognition—a big Louisiana testing contractor—has been a member of ALEC‘s leadership network.

ALEC‘s model education legislation includes privatizing education through vouchers, scholarships, charters, and tax incentives to businesses and individuals that furnish scholarships to private school; increasing public school testing and reporting; increasing access to all facets of education by private entities and corporations; and reducing the influence of democratically-elected local school boards and school districts.

The ALEC model legislation should sound familiar, because it is now Louisiana law.

“Silver Bullets” Line Some Pockets with Gold

Louisiana now funds so many programs that one must question whether those with access are spending it appropriately. These entities include charter schools, private schools with public scholarships or vouchers, and recipients of course providers funding. Some 45 different charter school boards that manage their own budgets now govern what was once overseen by the Orleans Parish School Board.

The proliferation of charter schools and vouchers throughout the state exponentially increases the opportunity for waste, graft, and theft. In 2008-09, the financial manager of a New Orleans charter school embezzled $660,000 from the school.

Nor is it clear who is monitoring the curriculum and the teaching that is taking place in all of these separate entities. For example, a nonprofit organization, Pelican Education Foundation, ran a charter school, Abramson Science & Technology High School in New Orleans East and Kenilworth Service and Technology Charter School in Baton Rouge. The state revoked Pelican‘s charter for Abramson after a number of allegations surfaced about the school:

• that the school was not serving special education students;

• that a teacher provided a more winnable science project to a student in place of the project that the student himself had prepared;

• that the teacher for its Turkish language class, disappeared from the classroom for months; and the school tried to bribe—through an executive of a Turkish-run business associated with the school—an Education Department official who had investigated some of the complaints.

The charter was revoked only after the Times-Picayune pressed for public records.

Pelican appears to have ties with the Cosmos Foundation, the largest charter operator in Texas, and similarly founded by Turkish educators and businessmen, and with Gulen, a movement started by a Turkish religious scholar. Cosmos schools have come under scrutiny for importing teachers from Turkey and favoring Turkish business contractors for everything from large construction to small vendors selling school lunches, uniforms and web design.

In Georgia, publicly financed charter schools tied to the Turkish Gulen movement came under scrutiny when they defaulted on bonds and an audit found the schools had improperly granted hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts to businesses connected to people committed to the Gulen movement.

Because charters are independent entities, students are left in the lurch when things go awry. Schools can be chartered for a five-year period. After year three, depending on student test scores, they may be told that their charters will terminate after year five. News that Sojourner Truth Academy in New Orleans was closing created an exodus of faculty and students. Students were left with the Hobson‘s choice of attending classes without teachers or transferring to other schools that would require them to repeat the year.

In its last year, Sojourner Truth lost over 20 faculty members. Student transfers lead to a budget crunch because schools receive per pupil funding. Locked into rental and service contracts, Sojourner Truth made drastic spending cuts. Paper towels in bathrooms became a luxury. Students reported a breakdown in discipline, and de facto free periods because qualified teachers could not be found to teach classes. A college-bound student reported not know[ing] any science or what fine arts is.

According to data published by the LDOE, in 2009-2010, almost 28 percent of the Recovery School District teachers were first year teachers as compared to less than 11 percent statewide. The RSD has been in a constant state of flux since its inception, taking over schools and then turning many into charters, each time with a change of faculty. This constant turnover means instability for students who can least afford it.

Now more public funds will flow not only to charters, but also to private schools. Act 2 expands the Student Scholarship for Educational Excellence Program allowing for 5,000 more students to move public school funding to private schools. This year taxpayers will spend approximately $12 million on vouchers. But while the accountability for public schools and teachers increased, there is little to none for the private schools receiving this public money.

The New Living Word School in Ruston topped of the state‘s voucher list, offering the most voucher seats in 2012-13—315—of any school. It was eventually awarded fewer vouchers after several news articles raised questions about the school. But in the prior school year, New Living Word enrolled only 122 students in a limited facility and taught mainly through DVDs.

Even if it ultimately receives fewer than requested, it will operate mostly with public funds, but still be considered private, with no obligation to hold public meetings to report how funds are spent and no consequences if its students fail to measure up.

Other small schools that were provisionally approved for vouchers have had their approval revoked but only after news reports raised questions about them. For example, the Alexandria Town Talk reported that a small school in Deridder, BeauVer Christian Academy, had experienced financial problems in prior incarnations, including liens and financial judgments. An agent and an officer of the limited liability company were convicted of issuing worthless checks.

In New Orleans, more than 24 private schools take part in the expanded voucher program. According to the Times-Picayune, the schools that enrolled voucher students last school year drew 37 percent of their students through vouchers, and voucher students made up more than 60 percent of the student body at some schools.

Like New Living Word, some will dramatically expand their student bodies through vouchers. For example, Life of Christ Christian Academy has 91 new seats available for vouchers which will more than double the enrollment, almost one-third of whom came from the voucher program last year.

Of the voucher students last year, only 13 percent were at grade level on standardized tests. At Upper Room Bible Church Academy, only 24percent of its voucher students met grade level last year; it could now receive almost $1 million in voucher funds. Yet these schools will not be publicly disparaged with labels of C, D, or failing like public schools based on their test results, so parents may move from one failing school to another, without knowing.

The greatest giveaway of all may be through the Louisiana Course Choice Program, which, according to the LDOE‘s website, will create Course Choice with per-course funding and multiple provider course delivery, creating access to unprecedented educational opportunities for tens of thousands of Louisiana students. It will also create an unprecedented bonanza for individuals to deplete funds that would otherwise go to public schools.

Course providers include business associations, educational entrepreneurs, and online courses. This program will not just serve impoverished students and students in schools rated ineffective, but also the full spectrum of students currently enrolled in Louisiana schools, including non-public and home schooled students.

The per-course tuition was to be taken from the Minimum Foundation Program, with the LDOE transferring funds from the city or parish school system in which the student resides to the authorized course provider. To be clear, these are not extra state funds, but funds allotted to public schools for educating public school students, but being diverted to a variety of course providers for the benefit of home schooled and private school students—until a Baton Rouge district court judge ruled such manipulation of MFP funds unconstitutional.

Conclusion

Highly ranked public schools in Louisiana are those that either have admissions standards limiting who can attend or are located in high income areas; while those ranked at the bottom are those in impoverished areas or areas in which the school population is impoverished because of high middle class attendance at private schools.

“A” and “B” schools did not start out as “failing” or “D” schools and work their way up; they started out with high rankings because of their school populations. There is no evidence that using simplistic measures to test and label schools and teachers helps them improve their delivery of education services to children. On the other hand, considerable evidence suggests that these labels only erode confidence in the schools among the public and the children who attend them and demoralize teachers.

Allowing a few students from impoverished public schools the “choice” to attend a different school does nothing for the vast majority of students remaining except to reduce their funding. Nor is there evidence that the “A” and “B” schools are doing a better job with the students they have, rather than enrolling students who are themselves doing a better job.

All students can learn and succeed and we should all commit to their doing so. But we must recognize that some students—those who live in areas of higher unemployment and crime, whose parents never finished high school, let alone college, and whose parents are working two jobs to pay the light bill—need the dedication and cooperation of all concerned toward educational problem-solving, not political rhetoric and blame.

There are no easy solutions. Unfortunately, political rhetoric has eliminated sound educational theory and testing has been substituted for teaching. Pointing the finger at individual teachers and principals is simplistic and self-defeating as is pointing the finger at one school or another. The teacher is the key but this does not mean that we should focus on getting and rewarding or punishing individual teachers.

We need to dedicate ourselves to extending what is working to the entire system and problem-solving what is not. But tossing around public school funds like so many Mardi Gras beads is irresponsible, short-sighted, and an evasion of our responsibility to educate all citizens.

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Jindal tax plan was like watching movie from back row of a drive-in theater on a foggy night…before he punted to Leg.

Posted in Budget, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Taxes on April 9, 2013 | 19 Comments »

It seems Gov. Bobby Jindal’s $500,000 advertising campaign was good money thrown after bad.

You’ve probably seen those ads paid for by Believe in Louisiana, the non-profit 527 political organization founded by Jindal supporter and Baton Rouge Business Report publisher Rolfe McCollister.

The advertising blitz was supposed to turn the tide in favor of Jindal’s proposal to abolish the state income tax in favor of a state sales tax increase that kept changing. The ads laid it out loud and clear: you either wanted to get rid of the state income tax or you preferred to “keep loopholes for lobbyists.” The ad concludes with the question, “Whose side are you on?”

Pretty simplistic. Very much like former President George W. Bush’s “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” in his dust-up to his Big Iraq Attack.

But just as Bush’s “Mission accomplished,” and his “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie” were a bit premature, so was the ad campaign.

And they were still running on Tuesday, a day after Jindal suddenly folded like a cheap suit on his tax proposal. That’s what happens when you make a large media buy. Just like furniture store and automotive ads that often continue to run a couple of days after a special promotional ad, the tax ads continue to implore viewers to tell their legislators to support the tax plan.

Jindal unexpectedly pulled the rug from under legislators who first heard that he was pulling the tax proposal bills when the governor announced it during his uncharacteristically brief 13-minute address to open the 2013 legislative session on Monday.

His decision, besides catching legislators short, also disappointed many who have grown to detest everything about this governor.

“I was almost sorry Jindal folded,” one Baton Rouge resident said. “I was hoping for a well-deserved humiliating defeat, which would have been good for the state, if not for him. He’s got about three more years to keep wrecking Louisiana. I’d rather have Edwards or Uncle Earl (Long) when he was in Mandeville,” he said in reference to Long’s commitment to East Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville in 1959 during the waning days of his last administration.

“Jindal is wrong about the GOP being the stupid party,” he said. “It’s the crazy party now and for the immediate future.”

Another longtime political observer said, “I wasn’t surprised that he capitulated. That was going to happen sooner or later. But I really was surprised that he had no Plan B,” he said. “How could they not have a fallback plan?”

The sudden retreat should not have caught anyone by surprise. Trying to decipher the governor’s tax plan was closely akin to trying to watch a black and white movie from the back row of an old drive-in theater in a thick fog.

But then, anyone parking on the back row of a drive-in theater on a foggy night probably had no intention of watching a movie in the first place, so perhaps that’s a bad analogy.

The lack of an alternative plan prompted retired Louisiana State Budget Director Stephen Winham to say that Jindal “never had a plan beyond elimination of income taxes and franchise taxes as an ancillary.”

But then Winham perhaps captured the quintessential Jindal when he predicted that Jindal would turn lemons into lemonade. “I think he can possibly salvage his national reputation, again based on my original premise that he can claim he tried to lead us to the Promised Land, but we just didn’t have sense enough to go.”

Winham said in a guest LouisianaVoice column way back on Jan. 25 that Jindal had “already achieved a major goal of this proposal—getting extensive national media coverage for making a bold proposal to fix Louisiana’s budget and economic development problems.”

A somewhat jaded Baton Rouge political junkie said Jindal realized his ambitious tax plan was stalled and would never get out of the House Ways and Means Committee. “No governor could have his plan die in committee, so he got in front of it and pulled it,” he said.

“I also think he did the smart thing by throwing it to the legislature. Now it’s on their backs. If they don’t come up with a plan (and they won’t) Jindal can blame the legislature,” he said, echoing Winham in predicting Jindal will play the blame game on his renewed national speaking tour.

Moving forward at the end of the day (as Jindal is fond of saying), the blame game is about all that is left for him in his efforts to save face in the coming weeks.

With the tax issue all but dead now, we can all turn our attention to the legislative debate on Jindal’s patchwork budget proposal.

That should be every bit as interesting as the highly anticipated tax debate that went out with a whimper after a lot of bravado, buildup and B.S.

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Greenstein: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain; Richard: CMS says DHH unresponsive to Medicaid questions which, if unanswered, could cost LA. another $800 million

Posted in Attorney General, Budget, Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, Health Care, Public Records on March 24, 2013 | 17 Comments »

Gov. Bobby Jindal may be about to deliver another $800 million kick in the teeth to Louisiana’s working poor with the same tactic he employed in losing that $80 million broadband internet grant: doing nothing.

But then, doing nothing seems to be what he does best these days (see: Bayou Corne; see: gaining traction as a viable presidential candidate for 2016), although he was rather decisive in cancelling the CNSI contract once word of a federal investigation became public knowledge—nearly three months after Jindal became aware of it.

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH), already laboring under the cloud of a federal investigation, is running out of time to qualify for approval of the administration’s sweeping plan to privatize state-run hospitals or risk losing additional federal matching Medicaid funding.

That was the word contained in a letter of Jan. 30 from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to Ruth Kennedy, director of the DHH Bureau of Health Services Financing.

State Rep. Jerome “Dee” Richard (I-Thibodaux) said Friday that DHH has never responded to a list of questions submitted by CMS in its letter to Kennedy.

“I just talked to the CMS representatives this week and they have received absolutely nothing from the state,” Richard said. “If they don’t respond to the questions and get approval before the budget is approved by the legislature, the state stands to lose another $800 million—and we’re already a billion dollars in the hole.”

Richard said he encountered DHH Secretary Bruce Greenstein recently and Greenstein assured him that everything had been approved.

“Somebody’s lying,” Richard said, “and I don’t think its CMS.”

At the same time, LouisianaVoice has received a copy of a March 18 letter from State Rep. Regina Ashford Barrow (D-Baton Rouge) to the LSU Board of Supervisors “to express grave concerns” over what she described as the failure of the LSU Health Sciences Center (LSUHSC) to receive necessary approval for certain elements of the cooperative endeavor agreement (CEA) facilitating the closure of Earl K. Long (EKL) Hospital in Baton Rouge.

“The clinics receive federal reimbursement for uninsured care, including payment of physicians and physicians in training who deliver that care,” she said. “CMS requires that the clinics be attached to a hospital for the funding stream to flow to cover outpatient care.

“While (DHH) has taken the position that CMS approval is not necessary and is moving forward with plans for Our Lady of the Lake (OLOL) Medical Center to operate the provider-based clinics, there remains the potential to lose significant federal funding for noncompliance with CMS requirements.”

Barrow said states “must meet certain requirements relative to decisions involving any provider, including outpatient clinics, of services under the Medicaid program. The failure to receive CMS approval for the transfer of the EKL attached outpatient clinics and the medical education program may result in loss of services to those most in need.”

Barrow then addressed several questions to the board:

• Has CMS approved the plan for OLOL to operate the clinics? If not, why?

• By proceeding forward without CMS approval, can this result in a disallowance that the state will have to repay?

• If CMS doesn’t approve this endeavor, how will the state satisfy its portion of the contract since the state is already facing a financial deficit?

• Who will provide care for uninsured women since the deal with Woman’s Hospital fell through?

• Who will monitor the entire CEA to ensure that it saves money and meets the benchmarks stated in the contract?

• Could there be any legal ramifications to LSU-HSC board members?

“It is imperative that all parties involved are fully apprised of all the details prior to moving forward with the CEA,” Barrow said. “The process continues to evolve and CMS has indicated that they have not been a part of any recent developments.

It turns out that CMS has a few questions of its own.

“The state plan must be comprehensive enough to determine the required level of federal financial participation (FFP) and to allow interested parties to understand the rate setting process and the items and services that are paid through these rates,” the six-CMS letter said.

Among the requests and questions submitted to the state by CMS were:

• No financial impact was noted due to the proposed revisions. Please provide a detailed analysis of how this determination was made and provide supporting documentation of the calculation;

• Please explain why the state proposed an effective date of Nov. 1, 2012, when no agreements have been signed (note that the CMS letter was written on Jan. 30, 2013).

• CMS must have copies of all signed standard cooperative endeavor agreements. In addition, please provide copies of all signed intergovernmental transfer (IGT), management agreements, MOUs (memorandums of understanding), management contracts, loan agreements and any other agreements that would present the possibility of a transfer of value between the two entities;

• Did the state receive any feedback or complaints from the public regarding the CEA? If so, what were the concerns and how were they addressed and resolved?

• Please provide information demonstrating that the changes proposed (in certain documents) comport with public process requirements. Please provide copies of the legislation authorizing the proposed changes.

• How many entities does the state anticipate will participate in this arrangement? Please submit a list of all participating hospitals, all transferring entities doing the IGT, and the dollar amount that the transferring entities will IGT. Please describe how the hospitals are related/affiliated to the transferring entity and provide the names of all owners of the participating hospitals.

• What is the source of all funds that will be transferred?

• What are the sources of IGT funds?

• Does the state agree to provide certification from the transferring entities that the IGTs are voluntary?

• The Social Security Act provides that the lack of adequate funds from local sources will not result in lowering the amount, duration, scope or quality of care and services available under the plan. Please explain how this proposal complies with this provision.

• Please provide an Upper Payment Limit demonstration applicable to the payments for the current rate period for all classes.

• Please include a detailed narrative description of the methodology for calculating the upper payment limit in the state plan language.

• Please clarify if the state or a hospital service district has issued any proposals or enacted any legislation to support the public-private partnerships. Please submit that documentation for our review.

• Are the hospitals required to provide a specific amount of health care service to low income and needy patients? Is this health care limited to hospital only or will health care be provided to the general public? What type of health care covered services will be provided?

• How did the state determine that the Medicaid provider payments are sufficient to enlist enough providers to assure access to care and services in Medicaid at least to the extent that care and services are available to the general population in the geographic area?

• How were providers, advocates and beneficiaries engaged in the discussion around rate modifications?

• Is the state modifying anything else in the state plan which will counterbalance impact on access that may be caused by the decrease in rates?

• Please provide a list of facility closings and services that are being cut by LSU.

• Please describe how the state share of each type of Medicaid payment is funded. Please provide an estimate of total expenditure and state share amounts for each type of Medicaid funding.

That’s quite a to-do list.

Keep in mind the CMS letter was written on Jan. 30. At that time, LSU and DHH were in negotiations with St. Francis Medical Center in Monroe and Willis-Knighten for their takeover of E.A. Conway Hospital and LSU Medical Center, respectively.

Subsequent to that letter, the state abruptly pulled out of the negotiations and is now on the verge of consummating a deal with Biomedical Research Foundation (BRF) of Shreveport whose incoming president and CEO, Dr. John George, also serves on the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Jindal said that George, who presently serves as vice president of BRF, is not being paid a salary by BRF, so there is no conflict of interest. Current President and CEO John Sharp, however, is paid $275,400 and it is assumed that when George ascends to that position, he will be paid as well.

Greenstein, you may remember, refused to tell a Senate Committee in June of 2011 that his old employer, CNSI, had won a contract with his agency worth more than $184 million.

Faced with not being confirmed as DHH Secretary, he finally relented and told the committee that CNSI was the winner of the contract but then said that he had built a “firewall” between him and the selection process and that he had no contact with CNSI representatives during the selection process.

The committee later learned that he had indeed had ongoing discussions with CNSI executives during the bid process and that Greenstein was even responsible for rewriting the request for proposal (RFP) that made CNSI eligible to submit a proposal.

The circumstances surrounding the awarding of that contract are now being investigated by a federal grand jury.

Now Greenstein tells Richard everything was already done and all is well with CMS.

CMS told Richard it had received nothing from Greenstein or DHH.

And now the FBI and Louisiana Attorney General are investigating Greenstein’s agency.

And the health care of hundreds of thousands of Louisiana’s poor hangs in the balance.

It all comes down to one simple question:

Who do you believe?

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First it was mental health, then hospitals and hospice; now immunization program terminated at parish health units

Posted in Budget, Governor's Office, Health Care on March 6, 2013 | 16 Comments »

First it was the closure of Southeast Louisiana Hospital, shutting off mental health services to residents of the state’s most densely populated area, then there was the move to “partner” state hospitals across the state with private facilities, followed by an unsuccessful attempt to terminate Hospice care.

Now Gov. Bobby Jindal, in submitting his executive budget, has announced intentions to cease immunizing the state’s indigent children at parish health units throughout the state.

Instead, private pediatricians will take over the duties of immunizing children under the state’s Vaccines for Children (VFC) program.

Through the VFC program, vaccine is made available at no charge to enrolled public and private health care providers for eligible children, according to the Department of Health and Hospitals web page.

Children 18 years of age and younger who are Medicaid eligible, uninsured, American Indian or native Alaskan are eligible for VFC.

But even if the immunizations themselves remain free, pediatricians will probably charge for an office visit—particularly those who do not accept Medicaid patients.

The cuts to the program were included in the Executive Budget presented to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget on Feb. 22. “One of the items included (in the budget) was restructuring of the administration of the DHH Office of Public Health’s (OPH) Vaccines for Children program,” said a statement released by DHH on Wednesday.

“Under the proposed restructuring, children who received immunizations at parish health units would be transitioned to receive immunizations by their private pediatricians or health care providers, where 92 percent of children already receive their immunizations through the program,” the statement said.

The DHH web page indicated that parish health units provide only about 5 percent of all immunizations statewide.

“The DHH Office of Public Health recently sent pediatric immunizations providers a notice letting them know this was proposed as an element of the State’s fiscal year budget,” DHH’s statement said.

“The proposal is on the table,” a DHH spokesperson added.

“Providers administer the bulk of their childhood vaccines in July and August as part of back-to-school preparations, so OPH wanted providers to be aware of this proposed program restructuring in advance,” the statement released by DHH said.

The final budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on July 1, 2013, will not be determined until the legislative session which begins on April 8, DHH said. “Until the legislature passes a final operating budget for FY-14, exact details of the elements involved will not be discernible,” the statement said.

Efforts to learn the administrative cost of the immunization program at the parish health units also were not immediately successful but federal VFC programs provide the vaccine to doctors and other providers at no costs.

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Teach for America solicits donations, public funds, finder fees while amassing $1 billion fortune, tax records show

Posted in BESE, Budget, Education, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Public Records, Taxes on March 5, 2013 | 15 Comments »

Remember when teaching was about answering to a calling—before the Jindal administration came charging onto the scene with its half-baked ideas of education reform through sweeping legislation that promoted something called Teach for America?

As noble and magnanimous as Teach for America (TFA) would have you believe its motives to be, it would be wise to keep your eye on the dollar sign.

While Teach for America is going around asking for money from state legislators and local school districts, the organization has quietly been amassing a fortune even as TFA comes under fire from former TFA teachers and the media.

Like a snake trying to swallow its own tail, TFA has begun to devour itself, to feed off its own perceived success to the detriment of those it was formed to help.

TFA’s 2010 federal tax return reveals that it has received nearly $907.5 million in gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees over the five-year period from 2006 through 2010, including $243.6 million in 2010.

The breakdown, by year, shows that TFA had $77.94 million in income in 2006; $142.35 million in 2007; $251.52 million in 2008; $193 million in 2009, and $243.65 in 2010.

Other 2010 revenue brought TFA’s total income to $270.5 million against expenses of $218.7 million for a net income of $51.8 million, the return shows.

Of those expenses, $129.9 million was for salaries.

Another $548,437 was spent on “direct contact with legislators, their staffs, government officials and legislative bodies,” or lobbying.

TFA CEO Wendy Kopp is paid $393,600 by the organization she founded in 1989, according to the tax return, but the salaries of her support staff are equally impressive for an outfit that purports to wants only to uplift the nation’s neediest students in poverty-stricken school districts. A few examples:

• Matthew Kramer, President: $328,100;

• Tracy-Elizabeth Clay, General Counsel, Secretary: $174,500;

• Osman Kurtulus, Vice President of Accounting & Controls & Assistant Secretary: $178,500;

• Miguel Rossy, Chief Financial & Infrastructure Officer: $260,600;

• Elisa V. Beard, Chief Operating Officer: $233,400;

• Elissa Clapp, Senior Vice President of Recruitment: $246,700;

• Ellen N. Shepard, Chief Information Officer: $214,800;

• Lily Rager, Executive Vice President: $178,500;

• Aylon Samouha, Senior Vice President, Teacher Preparation Support: $253,500;

• Eric Scroggins, Executive Vice President: $231,000;

• Jeffrey Wetzier, Senior Vice President, Chief Learning Officer: $235,300;

• Kevin Huffman, Executive Vice President, Public Affairs: $243,300;

• Gillian C. Smith, Chief Marketing Officer: $238,800;

• Aimee Eubanks Davis, Chief People Officer: $229,000;

• Theordore Quinn, Vice President, Strategy & Research: $179,900.

So now, TFA, which faced financial collapse several times in the early years, comes begging to the state of Louisiana with a $5 million request for NGO (non-government organization) funding even though that request is a bit misleading.

The request is made on behalf of TFA by the compliant Department of Education (DOE) to fund TFA operations in several high need areas of the state. Instead, the legislature funds, through DOE, three contracts totaling more than $2.3 million to help recruit TFA teachers in different school districts around the state, including $1.27 million to specifically recruit teachers for the Recovery School District and for the Teaching Fellows program in northwest Louisiana.

In neighboring Mississippi, TFA requested a legislative appropriation of $12 million to send 700 recruits to the impoverished Delta area of the state. Instead, the Mississippi legislature appropriated $6 million, sufficient to fund 370 teachers.

Just how the money is spent is something of a mystery because the local school districts are required to pay TFA a fee of $3,000 per teacher recruited and the districts must also pay the TFA teacher salaries.

On top of all that, TFA receives generous grants and contributions from such philanthropists as the Walton family of the Wal-Mart retailing empire.

TFA does offer summer training to prepare recruits for the classroom—an entire five-week training course as opposed to four years and more (for advanced degrees) for teachers to receive college degrees in education and who generally sign up for the long run as opposed to TFA teachers who commit to only two years.

Some remain beyond the two year hitch but for the most part the TFA turnover is a negative factor in educating kids and in school staffing continuity.

Despite that, Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White, himself a TFA alumnus, calls TFA “an incredibly good investment.”

Of course they are. School districts are laying off veteran teachers with years of education and classroom experience in favor of TFA corps members because they are less expensive to hire. Some districts seem to prefer to cycle through ill-trained TFA teachers every two years.

A former TFA teacher claims that the organization’s five-week training model is ineffective, that TFA spends $33 million “doing a poor job teaching corps members to teach.” He describes the TFA training as “not enough depth, not enough breadth, not enough time.”

Reuters News Service, in an article entitled “Has Teach for America betrayed its mission,” quotes TFA alumni as claiming that policies promoted by TFA-trained reformers threaten to damage the very schools TFA once set out to save and that TFA’s relentless efforts to expand has betrayed its founding ideals.

For example, Reuters says that TFA, founded to serve public schools so poor or dysfunctional they couldn’t attract qualified teachers, now sends fully one-third of its recruits to privately-run charter schools, many of which have outstanding academic credentials, wealthy donors and flush budgets.

It’s about the money, folks.

And while there certainly are TFA teachers who truly have the welfare of students at heart and who are effective teachers, TFA has backed off its claim that almost half of its teachers achieve outstanding academic gains by students.

Heather Harding, TFA’s former research director, told Reuters that statistics claiming significant gains were unreliable and misleading because only 15 percent of TFA recruits even teach subjects and grades that are assessed by state standardized tests. As an alternative means to measure growth, Harding said, many teachers rely on assessments they design themselves.

So while TFA recruits may come into the classroom with high ideals and lofty goals for their students, TFA long ago stopped being about the students and became all about the money.

It would be a mistake for parents, legislators, school administrators and benefactors to forget that.

Any coach of any sport will tell every player on his team to keep his eye on the ball.

In this case, keep your eye on the dollar signs.

It’s all about the money.

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Forget Boehner, Obama and sequestration; the real debate is between Kristy Nichols and John Kennedy over state budget

Posted in BESE, Budget, Education, Governor's Office, Health Care, Legislature, Legislators, Privatization, Revenue on March 4, 2013 | 5 Comments »

The relationship between the offices of Gov. Bobby Jindal and State Treasurer John Kennedy, if indeed a relationship ever existed in the first place, has deteriorated into a colorful exchange of pointed jibes and name calling—mainly by Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols who certainly knows how to use the terms “going forward” and “the reality is” to make her point.

Actually, the running feud between the two offices has been simmering for some time but this week took an ugly turn on the heels of a radio show appearance by Nichols and an op-ed column written by Kennedy.

“Imagine, God forbid,” Kennedy wrote, “that your boss just cut your salary by 25 percent because business is bad. Instead of reducing your spending or getting a second job, you elect to do the following:

• Take a cash advance on our credit care to pay your car note.

• Refinance your mortgage, but instead of choosing to lower your monthly payments, ask for the one-time savings up front to pay for your Disney World vacation.

• Decide reluctantly to sell your bass boat. It’s worth $2,500. You ask $10,000. You wonder why it doesn’t sell.

• Instruct your kids they must begin paying for room and board. When they ask where they’ll get the money, tell them to borrow it.

“Your plan may work—for a while. Then, as sure as ‘eggs is eggs,’ you’ll go broke, just like Louisiana eventually will if the legislature passes the Jindal administration’s proposed, yet again unbalanced budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

“Here’s how the administration plans to ‘balance’ state revenue and spending this time (with Nichols’ boldface response in parentheses):

• Pretend the state will have an extra $800 million to spend as a result of the yet-to-be-realized savings from leasing state hospitals to private hospitals, even though the leases have not been negotiated (With this point, Treasurer Kennedy reveals himself to be an opponent of reforming the old charity hospital model, not to mention that he apparently does not know how to read the budget.);

• Refinance the state’s tobacco bonds (good idea) but dump the $90 million one-time savings into the operating budget and spend it next year (bad idea) (The Treasurer insults Louisiana’s young people by comparing the state’s commitment to providing them a college scholarship to paying for a ‘Disney World vacation.’);

• Proposed to sell state real estate at inflated prices well above appraised value and spend the money before they sell (Again, the Treasurer exposes himself as a big government defender of the status quo who would rather keep underutilized property in government’s hands instead of downsizing the government’s footprint and returning the property to the private sector.);

• Borrow $100 million from the New Orleans Convention Center to keep our colleges open while promising to repay the loan with proceeds from future bond issues that will exceed the state’s constitutional debt limit (It was the Treasurer’s office itself that recently created a manufactured crisis over the state’s debt limit because of its inability to count. Thankfully, the Division was able to correct the Treasurer’s error.);

• Raise college tuition 10 percent for Louisiana students who already owe $900 million in student loans, despite the fact that education is the new currency of our global economy and 8 percent fewer Louisianans have a college degree than the rest of America;

“Call this budget what you like: a fond illusion or smart accounting,” Kennedy said. “The result will be the same: mid-year budget cuts for the sixth year in a row, because the budget is not balanced. Why should we care? Because making a college cut $10 million with six months left in the fiscal year is like a $20 million cut from day one. That shreds muscle, not fat.

“There’s a better way. It’s not complicated: don’t spend more than you take in, and when you do spend money, spend it on things you need, not things you simply want.

“Louisiana families know that. So do Louisiana businesses. Why can’t government figure it out?”
Because Jindal can never face up to a confrontation, he sent Nichols in as his proxy for this fight. Her response was almost immediate.

“We appreciate the treasurer’s opinion,” she said, “but given his long track record of half-baked gimmicks and his office’s recent miscalculation of the state’s debt, we will pass on his suggestion.”

Ms. Nichols, let’s clarify a point here: were you talking about half-baked gimmicks on the part of the State Treasurer or the Governor? It’s a little difficult to distinguish.

“The reality is that the budget is balanced,” she said.

Last week, when appearing as a guest on the Jim Engster Show on Baton Rouge public radio, Nichols said, “We have sufficient funding for construction projects going forward. The reality is we have many significant opportunities and may options in terms of how we finance construction going forward and do not have an issue with the ability to continue construction projects today and to move forward with construction projects going forward.”

Nichols told Engster that the Medicaid reductions “gave us an opportunity to look at the public hospital infrastructure and find ways to deliver services in partnership with local providers. The reality is once we made reductions to Medicaid, we were faced with $300 million in mid-year reductions,” she said.

To a caller who ask how the state would save money by having physicians see patients when under the Charity Hospital system, Nichols said, “The reality is as again, we moved forward with the challenge of reductions of federal Medicaid rates and we looked at ways to transform and continue to provide public hospital services, we looked at the cost structure of the public hospital system. As private hospitals take over services, by leveraging those economies of scale, we were able to reduce the cost of the same care provided in public hospitals and the reality is that same service in public hospitals was very costly on a per unit basis.”

When Engster asked about the Medicaid expansion as it relates to the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), Nichols said, “We balanced the budget irrespective of the Medicaid expansion. The reason we are not participating (in ObamaCare) is very clear. The way it is structured…the program in totality needs to be structured in a way to give the state flexibility to provide services in a way reflective of the state’s needs and reflective of the state’s budget. The reality is the state will be faced with coverage of half-a-million more people on the Medicaid rolls. That’s a 40 percent growth.”

When another caller from New Iberia asked about cuts of 45 percent to the University of Louisiana Lafayette budget since 2008, she said, “As we looked at moving forward past mid-year, we made a decision not to reduce the higher education budget. We are committed to that going forward. We are committed to not cutting budgets and to work with higher ed to consider options to increase revenue. As we move forward, we look at opportunities to raise revenue.

The reality is we’re certainly glad she cleared all that up as the administration moves forward.

Gov. Jindal couldn’t have said it better.

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Yet another courtroom setback to Jindal education ‘reform’

Posted in BESE, Budget, Charters, Courts, Education, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators, Privatization, Revenue on March 4, 2013 | 11 Comments »

State District Judge Mike Caldwell, who earlier threw out parts of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s education reform law that limited the authority of local school boards has dealt another crushing blow to the Louisiana’s gonenor’s* overreaching education revamp.

Caldwell had earlier left intact the provision that made it more difficult for teachers to attain job protection via tenure but on Monday agreed with the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and reversed his previous ruling, saying that the entire bill must be declared unconstitutional because too many different items were crammed into it.

In previous court cases, Judge Tim Kelley, Caldwell’s contemporary in the 19th Judicial District which is East Baton Rouge Parish, had struck down the method by which the state, through Jindal’s school voucher program, planned to pay private-school tuition with public funds.

Both Kelley and Caldwell are Republicans and Kelley’s wife served as Jindal’s commissioner of administration during most of his first term.

Prior to those two rulings, a federal judge knocked down the proposed voucher program, saying that it had the potential to disrupt a desegregation consent decree in Tangipahoa and possibly other districts.

Another 19th Judicial District Judge, Republican Tim Morvant, ruled back in January that a 401(k)-style retirement plan for future Louisiana employees was unconstitutional because it had received only a simple majority of legislative votes instead of the required two-thirds vote.

The administration has said in each case that it would appeal and repeated that assertion following Monday’s ruling but all in all, it’s not been a good few months in court for Jindal and his attorney, Jimmy Faircloth.

But at least all those appeals will keep the meter running for Faircloth.

*Gonenor is a hybrid word coined by one of our readers (we only wish we could take credit) that combines the words “gone” and “governor,” which, when combined, implies (correctly) that Gov. Jindal is often absent from the state.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in BESE, Budget, Charters, Education, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables on March 3, 2013 | 1 Comment »

“Currently our 500 corps members work with nearly 45,000 students in the state of Louisiana. Our 1,000 alumni run schools, continue teaching in classrooms, are setting policy and otherwise influencing the debate for educational change in a positive direction.”

—Teach for America, describing its public purpose in its application for a $5 million appropriation in NGO funding from the Louisiana Legislature.

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$12 trillion NGO request to legislature from mythical Georgia applicant manages to sneak onto 2013 wish list

Posted in Budget, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Revenue on March 1, 2013 | 9 Comments »

Non-government organizations (NGOs) traditionally submit requests for funding each year before the legislature convenes but in recent years those projects have met with increasing difficulty obtaining needed revenue given the financial plight of the state.

NGOs include organizations like councils on aging, various foundations, the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport, local tourism associations, and even the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and in the past, requests have numbered as many as 450 as recently as 2010 but that number has dropped off sharply to 170 in 2011, about 90 last year and just 81 so far this year.

Many of those that were approved by the legislature were subsequently vetoed by Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Among this year’s submissions are requests for:

• $3.25 million for the 2014 NBA All-Star Host Committee;

• $544,000 for the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation;

• $280,577 for the New Orleans Bowl;

• $2.47 million for the Jazz Festival;

• $2.5 million for the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport;

• $403,100 for the Washington Parish Fair;

• $12 trillion for the National Security Agency’s Leonard Cross Hendrickson, Jr.

Wait. What? How much and for whom?

That’s right: $12 trillion for something called the National Security Agency’s Leonard Cross Hendrickson, Jr.

Obviously, the request is someone’s (probably someone named Leonard Cross Hendrickson, Jr.) idea of a joke.

And the fact that the request actually got past whatever passes for the legislature’s screening process or committee indicates Hendrickson’s joke is an unqualified success.

To request NGO funding, entities must complete a detailed questionnaire, which Hendrickson did but some of the answers he provided should be a cause of some red faces somewhere in the state bureaucracy.

Let’s start with the requesting recipient entity’s mailing address: 7998 Hwy. 5, Douglasville, GA.

An out-of-state entity seeing a state appropriation of $12 trillion (the national budget is something in the neighborhood of $3.8 trillion) should have sent up sufficient red flags and triggered enough alarms to catch someone’s attention.

But wait. There’s more.

The request form asks applicants to provide the name of each member of the recipient entity’s governing board, to which Hendrickson obligingly listed the CIA, DEA, DNI (Director of National Intelligence) and the Bush administration.

“Provide a summary of the project or program,” the questionnaire instructed, to which Hendrickson responded: “Measure waste water from space and space-based earth assets control and code enforcements water cosmic ray shields.”

Had that nonsensical response appeared on a federal grant application, Hendrickson probably would have received the money.

“What is the budget relative to the project for which funding is requested?” was the next question on the application form. Hendrickson’s response was classic:

• Salaries—$75 million;

• Professional Services—$250 million;

• Contracts—$12 billion (with the Jindal administration, that’s entirely believable);

• Acquisitions—$9 billion;

• Major Repairs—$12 billion;

• Operating Services—$100 billion;

• Other Charges—$100 trillion.

If you did the math as you read this, you know that the last item, $100 trillion for “other charges” is more than eight times the total amount requested.

For his contact information, Hendrickson provided two telephone numbers, both in the Atlanta area code. One was a non-working number and a woman answered the second number only to say she had received several calls for Leonard Cross Hendrickson but that no such person lived at that number.

So we Googled Mr. Hendrickson and a web address appeared: http://www.lookwhogotbusted.com/douglas-county-ga/hendrickson-leonard-cross-2.

Against our every instinct, we clicked on the address and up popped a photo of a smiling man identified as “Hendrickson, Leonard Cross,” 35, who, according to the website, was booked into Douglas County, GA. Jail for probation violation.

We have no way of knowing why he was on probation or what he did to violate that probation but we have to give Mr. Hendrickson high marks for successfully sneaking in his request.

Now the big question remains: will it be approved by legislature and if so, will Jindal veto the appropriation?

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