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Archive for the ‘Transparency’ Category

LA. not the first state in which CNSI contracts have come under scrutiny but you’ll need a program to follow players

Posted in Contract, Contracts, Governor's Office, Health Care, Transparency on June 9, 2013 | 25 Comments »

Even as he was tweaking the bid specifications that would qualify Client Network Services, Inc. (CNSI) to submit a proposal for a $185 million contract with the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH), Bruce Greenstein must surely have known of problems his former employer had experienced in other states.

In a related story, LouisianaVoice has learned that James Gorman, a senior technical advisor for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) founded a company, HWT, a subsidiary of OptumInsight, a “trading partner” with Bayou Health, the program through which most of Louisiana’s Medicaid recipients receive health care services.

CMS is a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) which is charged with working in partnership with state governments to administer Medicaid. CMS must also give its stamp of approval on state contracts with companies such as OptumInsight and CNSI.

Greenstein worked in Seattle for Microsoft prior to his being named DHH Secretary by Gov. Bobby Jindal in July of 2010. Prior to that he also worked for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHH) where he oversaw the state Medicaid programs in the Northeast. He led the federal government’s efforts in working with states in reforming state Medicaid programs—a position that would have afforded him intimate knowledge of the workings of companies like CNSI, OptumInsight and others.

Then-DHH Secretary Greenstein awarded but then refused to identify CNSI as the winner of the contract a year ago. His refusal threatened his confirmation by a Senate committee before he finally relented and named CNSI.

Greenstein worked for CNSI in 1995 and 1996. He told the Senate committee that he had constructed a “firewall” between him and CNSI so that he could not influence the awarding of the contract. But emails obtained by the committee revealed that Greenstein and CNSI executives exchanged dozens of emails during the selection process.

Protesting the award at the time were unsuccessful bidders ACS State Healthcare of Atlanta, Ga., and Molina Medicaid Solutions of Long Beach, Calif.

ACS claimed that CNSI deliberately low-balled its cost. CNSI subsequently obtained a $9 million amendment, increasing the cost to $194 million and then requested an additional $40 million immediately prior to word that the FBI had subpoenaed all CNSI records from the Division of Administration.

Had the second amendment been granted, the cost would have been close to the $238 million bid of ACS but the CNSI contract was cancelled by the administration as a federal grand jury investigation got underway. That investigation is still ongoing.

While at CNSI, Greenstein was vice president for Healthcare. While there, he focused on state healthcare systems and claims payments and vital records systems.

Given his experiences with Medicaid systems and given the fact that he resided in Seattle at a time when CNSI was experiencing a multitude of problems with its system in Washington, it’s difficult to imagine that he was unaware of problems the company was having when he “tweaked” the bid specifications to accommodate his former employer.

In 2006, CMS launched an investigation into ongoing problems with the State of Maine’s web-based information management system. CNSI was contracted for that work in 2001 at $14.5 million, but the costs quickly escalated to $70 million as complaints began coming in almost immediately. CNSI had never built a Medicaid billing system before landing the contract with Maine and the company missed its 2002 deadline for completion as well as several subsequent deadlines. Even after the system finally went live in 2005, it malfunctioned and for more than a year the state had to send out estimated payments to Medicaid providers.

After only three days it was learned that the new system had sent 24,000 claims (about 50 percent of all claims) into a “suspended” file.

Normally, suspended claims were those that were either rejected or which contained minor errors. The original system had suspended only about 20 percent of the claims.

Now, instead of payments, doctors were receiving no payments and when they resubmitted the claims, the new system installed by CNSI automatically rejected them again because it was programmed to reject any claim it had already rejected.

Claims had to be processed by hand by state employees but they could process only 1,000 claims per week. Even when the rejection rate was reduced to 20 percent, doctors complained that it was still rejecting legitimate claims.

Doctors, dentists, hospitals, clinics and nursing homes received no payments for services for weeks at a time and some practices were forced to close their businesses or to take out loans to pay their bills.

The experience was much the same in Washington State where hundreds of thousands of claims went unprocessed, causing some doctors and clinics to cease taking new Medicaid patients until they got paid for the ones they’d already treated.

Glitches in the CNSI system resulted in the suspension of thousands of claims which, like those in Maine, had to be processed by hand. By November of 2010, there was a backlog of about 271,000 suspended claims.

One medical center said the state was about $3.8 million behind in payments.

A CNSI spokesperson attributed the problems to managerial mistakes and not deficiencies in the product. “We did not understand the magnitude of such an implementation,” he said. That would seem to be an understatement as the original contract cost of $71 million ballooned to $164 million.

In Michigan, a 2006 three-year, $51.5 million contract was amended no fewer than five times and the contract amount currently is $227.2 million.

And now, the State of Illinois, in an apparent effort to circumvent public bid laws, has entered into an interagency agreement with Michigan to create a shared Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) to serve both states with CNSI getting the contract for both states.

One of the common threads connecting Illinois and Louisiana is OptumInsight, which reported $1.3 billion in corporate revenues in 2008. OptumInsight has a contract with Illinois to administer its MMIS exchange.

Besides serving as a “trading partner” with Bayou Health, OptumInsight is a wholly-owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. UnitedHealth Group, in turn, offers benefits through two companies, UnitedHealthcare and Optum. UnitedHealthcare has an $83 million consulting contract with DHH to provide enhanced primary care case management. Bringing things full circle, Optum has three operating divisions: OptumHealth, OptumRx and OptumInsight.

If all that is confusing to you, don’t feel bad. The question is how difficult will it be for the federal grand jury to sort all this out so that it can make a determination of whether or not any laws were broken with Louisiana’s contract with CNSI?

A second, even more interesting question is why did the Jindal administration, in cancelling the CNSI contract, issue the self-serving statement that it would not tolerate corruption when there has been no trial or even any formal charges filed?

Third, and most important of all, if Jindal is so intolerant of corruption, why did he allow Greenstein to “resign,” but remain on the job for an entire month before his departure?

It would seem at this point that the answers to all three questions lie with Greenstein and those answers may well rest on what kind of deal he can make with federal prosecutors—depending, of course, on whether the investigation reaches the point of indictments.

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Civil Service Commission rejects LSU Hospital privatization by 4-3 vote but re-hearing is already set for 8 a.m. Monday

Posted in Boards, Civil Service, Contract, Contracts, Governor's Office, Health Care, LSU, Transparency on June 5, 2013 | 52 Comments »

Gov. Bobby Jindal had another roadblock thrown in his path to privatization of four LSU hospitals on Wednesday when the State Civil Service Commission, by a 4-3 vote, rejected the state’s contracts with private hospitals to take over state-run facilities in New Orleans, Lafayette, Houma and Lake Charles.

The matter has already been scheduled for a re-hearing on Monday at 8 a.m. in the Louisiana Purchase Room on the first floor of the Claiborne Building at 1201 North Third Street in Baton Rouge.

In taking the action, commission members complained that the information provided by LSU was insufficient.

Really? A contract with 50 blank pages was not enough? The commission perhaps needed some specifics—like an offer and an acceptance and a termination clause?

It should be noted that the commission did not vote to reject the administration’s layoff plans relative to the privatization of the Interim Hospital in New Orleans, University Medical Center in Lafayette, Leonard Chabert Medical Center in Houma and W.O. Moss Medical Center in Lake Charles.

Civil Service Director Shannon Templet must make a decision on the layoff plan by next Tuesday in order for the layoffs to become effective on June 24.

But if the privatization plan is not approved, the hospitals would necessarily have to keep nearly 3,000 classified employees on the job in order to keep the hospitals open.

Dr. Fred Cerise, the former head of the LSU Health System who was fired by Jindal (through the Board of Stuporvisors, of course), said on Wednesday that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) still has not given the go-ahead for the hospital privatization plan and without that approval, everything else is moot.

Cerise said the state plans to use the $110 million that Children’s Hospital in New Orleans is paying to take over the Interim Hospital (formerly Big Charity before that facility was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina and a new structure built) will be used by the state to leverage greater matching funds from Medicaid.

“But if CMS does not approve the plan, the state will have to repay Medicaid for any excess money it received on the basis of that $110 million,” he said, adding, “I don’t think there’s any way CMS is going to give its stamp of approval to this plan.”

Dr. Michael Kaiser, Chief Executive Officer of the LSU Health Care Services Division, said he would ask the commission to reconsider its decision. He said the commission would be provided with the agreements between LSU and the private companies.

“I’m not sure what they intend to show the commission on Monday,” Cerise said, “but there’s no way they can show a savings when contracts for privatizing two of the hospitals (Chabert and Moss) don’t even contain any financial details.”

That, of course, raises the question of just why was the commission not provided copies of the agreements in the first place. Did Kaiser expect the commission to simply rubber stamp the privatization plan as it has in the past and as the LSU Board of Stuporvisers does on a regular basis with anything Jindal sends over?

In the past the Board of Stuporvisers has done Jindal’s bidding without question—from the firing of LSU President John Lombardi, LSU System General Counsel Raymond Lamonica, and Drs. Roxanne Townsend and Cerise, to operating in complete secrecy to hire a new LSU president who possesses credentials that are questionable at best, to approving essentially blank contracts for the takeover of LSU hospitals in Shreveport, Monroe, Houma and Lake Charles. The contracts consisted of about 50 blank pages and contained no mention of financial terms, specific offers, acceptances or termination clauses.

And for the privilege of doing Jindal’s bidding, members of the Board of Stuporvisers get to metaphorically lick the master’s hand with campaign contributions totaling about a quarter-million dollars between them.

All of which raises another question that no one has asked to this point but one for which there is a desperate need for an answer:

• When was the last time the LSU Board of Stuporvisors took any action during this governor’s administration that supported academics and was not done to achieve a political agenda—Jindal’s political agenda, to be specific?

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?

Kaiser, in the wake of the unexpected rejection of the administration’s plan by the commission, only now bemoans the fact that in anticipation of approval of the privatization, the public hospitals have no money in the state budget for the new fiscal year that begins on July 1.

That would be because Jindal did not include funding in his budget back in January because he was certain his privatization plan would be approved.

Somewhere out there, the ghost of Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle is flashing a big, innocent grin and saying to Bobby Jindal, aka Barney Fife, “Sur-PRISE, Sur-PRISE, Sur-PRISE!” (Our apologies to Barney Fife.)

Kaiser said the administration would have to try and determine what other action could be taken if the privatization is not approved.

More than 3,500 employees work at the four hospitals. Of that number, 2,953 are classified, or Civil Service rank-and-file employees. The remainder are unclassified and do not enjoy Civil Service protection. Their layoffs do not have to be approved by the commission.

More than half of the classified employees (1,690) are employed at the Interim Hospital in New Orleans. The remainder are at University Medical Center in Lafayette (487), Leonard Chabert Medical Center in Houma (556) and W.O. Moss Medical Center in Lake Charles (220).

It will be interesting to see if any legislators from the affected areas show up for Monday’s Civil Service Commission re-hearing. Republican House Speaker Chuck Kleckley is from Lake Charles.

Other Calcasieu Parish House members include Democrats Michael Danahay, A.B. Franklin, and Dorothy Sue Hill and Republicans Brett Geymann, John Guinn and Ben Hensgens.

Calcasieu senators include Republicans John Smith, Ronnie Johns and Dan “Blade” Morrish.

House members from Lafayette Parish include Democrats Terry Landry, Jack Montoucet, Stephen Orgego and Vincent Pierre and Republicans Taylor Barras, Stuart Bishop, Nancy Landry, and Joel Robideaux.

Senators who represent Lafayette Parish are Republicans Elbert Guillory, Johathan Perry, Page Cortez and Fred Mills.

Terrebonne/Lafourche parish House members include Republicans Gordon Dove, Sr., Joe Harrison and Lenar Whitney of Terrebonne and Democrat Jerry Gisclair and Independent Jerome “Dee” Richard, both of Lafourche. Richard, by the way, was present at Wednesday’s commission hearing.

Representing Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in the Senate are Democrats Troy Brown and Gary Smith and Republicans Norbert Chabert and Bret Allain.

Orleans Parish House members include Democrats Neil Abramson, Jeffery Arnold, Austin Badon, Wesley Bishop, Jared Brossett, Walt Leger and Helena Moreno. Orleans Republicans include Raymond Garofalo, Christopher Leopold and Nick Lorusso.

Senators who represent Orleans include Republicans A.G. Crowe and Conrad Appel and Democrats Karen Carter Peterson, Jean-Paul Morrell, David Heitmeier and Edwin Murray.

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Jindal’s criticism of IRS investigations of conservatives is more of the same notoriously lame, hypocritical hyperbole

Posted in ATC, Education, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Lobbyist, Politicians, Public Records, Transparency on May 30, 2013 | 6 Comments »

It was with more than a little amusement that we read a couple of weeks ago that Gov. Bobby Jindal had called for jail time for any Internal Revenue Service officials found to have unfairly targeted conservative groups to be put in jail.

As usual, Jindal made his indignant, self-righteous proclamation at an out-of-state forum. This time, it was in a speech to Virginia Republicans in yet another stop in his 2016 presidential campaign that would be better suited for a Saturday Night Live parody skit than serious political discourse.

Oh, it’s not that we don’t agree with Jindal on this one point. The IRS certainly is far too powerful and is a force to be feared if one happens to be on the wrong end of a tax audit.

But coming from Jindal, it is simply yet another example of the “reform” governor’s façade of pseudo-transparency—hypocritical at worst, the subject of stinging ridicule at best.

“You do not take the freedoms of law-abiding citizens, whether you disagree with them or not, and keep your own freedom,” the Boy Blunder opined. “When you do that, you go to jail.”

But here’s the thing, Guv: It was only last March 11—not even three months ago—that we learned that one of Bobby’s boys, one Troy Hebert to be precise, director of the Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control (ATC), had ordered a background investigation on LouisianaVoice editor Tom Aswell (that would be me). Here is the link to that post:

http://louisianavoice.com/2013/03/11/atc-director-troy-hebert-orders-background-investigation-of-louisianavoice-publisher-tom-aswell-but-did-we-pass/

Normally, we would not hold Jindal accountable for the actions of a rogue department head. But now the question must be asked if Hebert’s investigation was truly the action of a rouge department head, of someone who went “off the reservation,” or if the investigation may have been ordered by higher-ups.

Hey, even Henry Kissinger once said paranoid people sometimes have real enemies and recent events and revelations may well justify that paranoia. Read on.

On May 11, we sent a public records request to Superintendent of Education John White and we copied Department of Education (DOE) General Counsel Joan Hunt as is our practice when seeking records.

The request was straightforward enough: we asked for correspondence between White and his old New York boss Joel Klein dating back to July 1, 2011. Specifically, we were attempting to learn what communication the two had conducted relative to InBloom, the company Klein is now affiliated with and which was founded by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch to serve as a “parking place” (in White’s words—a computer data bank, in more formal terms) for sensitive personal information on Louisiana students and teachers.

Hunt, subsequent to our request, fired off an email that same day to White, DOE attorney Willa LeBlanc and Hebert that said, “Troy, we need to reply and say that.”

But Hunt, most likely inadvertently, copied us into the reply as well.

Curious as to why Hebert would be included in the loop since he is about as far removed from DOE as possible (he’s under the Louisiana Department of Revenue) and equally curious as to what was supposed to have been said, we sent another public records request for all correspondence between DOE officials and Hebert.

The response to that request was even more puzzling:

“No Documents. Attorney-client privilege.”

Okay, first there are no documents but if there were, they would be privileged. That’s like the attorney who responded to a claim that his dog had bitten a passerby: “My dog does not bite. My dog was confined in the yard that day. I don’t own a dog.”

Really puzzled now, we sent another email on May 26 reiterating our request for correspondence between DOE and Hebert: “Inasmuch as you took the liberty to send your email to Troy Hebert, director of ATC and who is not an attorney nor is he a client of you or DOE, there is no client-attorney privilege.”

We also told Hunt that her provision of information about me to a non-involved third party constituted a “serious breach” that I was willing to report to the Louisiana Supreme Court’s Attorney Disciplinary Board.

Two days later we received another letter from the DOE legal office which said:

“As was indicated in the Department’s response dated and emailed to you on May 15, 2013, the Department has no public records responsive to your request. Any communications between the Legal Staff of LDOE and Troy Hebert would be privileged (attorney work product/privilege) and not subject to being released pursuant to a public records request. In addition, the Department is not in possession of any emails between Troy Hebert and John White.” There it is again: My dog doesn’t bite; I don’t own a dog.

We remained perplexed as to why Troy Hebert was brought into the conversation about our initial request. As the director of an agency completely removed from DOE, we knew there was no way possible that Hebert could be a client of either DOE or any of its legal staff and that fact only intensified our determination to learn what was going on.

Then we had occasion to interview Sen. Bob Kostelka (R-Monroe) Tuesday night about the Senate and Governmental Affairs deferral of a bill to protect state employee whistleblowers which had passed unanimously in the full House.

In that interview, Kostelka, a remarkably candid public servant, intimated that the committee had killed the bill to protect employees from supervisory reprisals for revealing official wrongdoing because one Troy Hebert had personally contacted each of the committee members to convey the message that the administration, i.e. Jindal, was not in favor of the bill. Kostelka, seeing the proverbial handwriting on the wall, did not object to the motion by Sen. Greg Tarver (D-Shreveport) to defer the bill.

It is not entirely clear why Hebert would be interjecting himself into legislative matters given the somewhat watery thin theory (in the case of Louisiana, at least) of separation of powers under which our state government proclaims to function.

He is, after all, a member of the administration, or executive branch and should not be lobbying the legislative branch. In fact, he is not even a registered lobbyist. And his dog doesn’t bite.

But at least we can now connect the dots as it all comes together. Hebert is one of those hangers-on—kind of like the new kid in town who hangs around the fringes of the playground hoping to make friends with the locals. He will do anything to curry favor with his boss—not exactly a wise career move at this point—including serving as a go-between messenger boy between the governor’s office and legislators.

…And between the governor’s office and DOE.

And Jindal now has the cajones to vilify the IRS for spying.

We bet Jindal doesn’t even own a dog.

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Troy Hebert resurfaces as Jindal bag man in successful effort to defeat Rep. John Schroder’s whistleblower protection bill

Posted in ATC, Ethics, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, State Agencies, Transparency on May 29, 2013 | 15 Comments »

Bobby Jindal as a reform governor in favor of transparency, accountability, integrity, honesty, and ethics, is a joke. A cruel joke.

There, we’ve said it. The man is a chameleon. If you threw him into a big box of crayons, he would explode from system overload.

He says he is for transparency but then he hides behind the deliberative process that he pushed through the legislature shortly after taking office.

Apparently, he also is now hiding behind Troy Hebert, director of the Alcohol and Tobacco Control Agency.

Jindal claims he will not tolerate any compromise of ethics.

To put it bluntly, he lies.

Take House Bill 387 by Rep. John Schroder (R-Covington) for example.

It passed the House unanimously, 100-0 with five members not voting.

On Wednesday, the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee unceremoniously deferred the bill without objection and with virtually no discussion.

All HB 387 would have done was protect state whistleblowers from reprisals.

The bill said, in part:

• Any public employee who provides information to a legislator or to a legislative committee upon request of a legislator or legislative committee shall be free from discipline, reprisal or threats of discipline or reprisal by the public employer for providing such information;

• No public employee with authority to hire, fire, or discipline employees, supervisor, agency head, nor any elected official shall subject to reprisal or threaten to subject to reprisal any public employee because of the employee’s disclosure of information to a legislator or legislative committee upon request of a legislator or legislative committee;

• If any public employee is suspended, demoted, dismissed, or threatened with suspension, demotion, or dismissal as an act of reprisal in violation of this Section, such employee shall report such action to the Board (of Governmental Ethics);

• An employee who is wrongfully suspended, demoted, or dismissed shall be entitled to reinstatement of his employment and entitled to receive any lost income and benefits for the period of any suspension, demotion, or dismissal;

The bill also provided for punishment of any supervisor who attempted to discipline, demote or fire a whistleblower.

The Jindal administration had opposed the bill as being “too broad,” claiming it could create “unintended consequences” that would inhibit the ability of agency leaders to manage their departments.

The bill was introduced after some state officials who disagreed with the Jindal administration lost their positions (“teagued”) and lawmakers subsequently experienced difficulty in obtaining information from agencies.

Perhaps it was “unintended consequences” that Jindal feared last year when he vetoed Senate Bill 629 by Sen. Ronnie Johns (R-Lake Charles).

SB 629, for those of you who don’t remember, would have provided “’transparency’ reporting to the legislature by the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) concerning the Louisiana Medicaid Bayou Health program and the Louisiana Behavioral Health Partnership and Coordinated System of Care programs.”

SB 629 was approved unanimously in the House, by a 102-0 vote with three absences. Then it went to the Senate where is was again approved unanimously, 38-0 with one absence.

Jindal promptly vetoed the bill.

Fast forward six months and the FBI issues a subpoena for all records in the possession of the Division of Administration relative to the $184 million CNSI contract with DHH.

Bruce Greenstein, who was DHH secretary at the time the contract was awarded, had once worked for CNSI and it was learned that he had tweaked the bid requirements in order that CNSI might qualify as a bidder on the contract.

Embarrassed, Jindal cancelled the CNSI contract and Greenstein resigned.

In an unrelated incident, Greenstein eliminated the position of internal auditor at DHH and some months later, a DHH employee was arrested for embezzling funds from the agency. With no internal auditor, how was it that the employee was discovered?

A private investigator.

That’s right, a private investigator. That’s indictment enough of this administration, but to allow the continued intimidation of state employees who know of illegal or unethical activity is to encourage the continued abuse of power by supervisory personnel even as the state treasury is looted.

But Jindal vetoed SB 629 as being unnecessary, perhaps even burdensome.

So now, the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, at the urging of Hebert, deferred without objection HB 387.

Sen. Bob Kostelka (R-Monroe), who sits on the committee, said Hebert had contacted every member of the committee to convey the message that the administration was opposed to the bill.

So why is Hebert carrying the water for Jindal? He has enough troubles running his own agency.

Who knows? Perhaps he fancies himself as Jindal’s heir apparent. He has about as much chance of achieving that objective as Jindal has of becoming president.

Kostelka described Schroder as “pissed” at the Senate committee’s deferral of his bill. “I see what’s happening here,” he was quoted by Kostelka as saying as he got up from the witness table to exit the committee room.

So now Jindal has won his version of transparency, accountability, integrity, honesty, and ethics. State employees may now continue to fear leaking information to legislators or the media. Only the bravest will dare come forward now and then only with total confidence that their names will never be divulged—a standing guarantee from LouisianaVoice.

Kostelka said he did not object to the motion by Shreveport Democrat Greg Tarver to defer the bill “because I saw the handwriting on the wall. The governor had gotten to the committee members through Hebert.”

Here are the other Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee members and their email addresses:

• Jody Amedee (R-Gonzales, chairman): amedeej@legis.la.gov

• Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe, vice-chairman): walsworthm@legis.la.gov

• Jack Donahue (R-Mandeville): donahuej@legis.la.gov

• Jean-Paul Morrell (D-New Orleans): morrelljp@legis.la.gov

• Ed Murray (D-New Orleans): murraye@legis.la.gov

• Jonathan Perry (R-Kaplan): perryj@legis.la.gov

• Neil Riser (R-Columbia): risern@legis.la.gov

• Greg Tarver (D-Shreveport): tarverg@legis.la.gov

If you are predisposed to do so, shoot them an email and ask 1): what they’re trying to hide; 2): why they knuckle under to a lame duck, dishonest, self-absorbed, politically ambitious excuse of a governor, and 3): if they always check their manhood at the door.

The time is long past for the electorate of this state to stand together and call an end to politicians pimping out the state’s resources and contracts to political cronies and campaign contributors.

The only reason to send errand boys like Troy Hebert to massage legislators is to ensure that state government works only for the perpetuation of political corruption and not for the benefit of the governed.

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Only silence from House and Senate Education committees as fraudulent Course Choice registrations spread like kudzu

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Transparency on May 23, 2013 | 18 Comments »

The reports of fraudulent registration of students for courses in the Louisiana Department of Education’s (DOE) Course Choice program continue to filter in with more reported signups and solicitations in East Baton Rouge, Calcasieu and Claiborne parishes.

And while State Superintendent of Education John White is certainly culpable in the whole sordid mess, it is significant that only one of 28 legislators who are members of either the Senate or House Education Committees took the opportunity to address two emerging education issues when asked to do so by LouisianaVoice.

We sent emails to each member of the two committees (along with a select few other legislators). We identified ourselves at the outset and said that we had been writing about the leaking of teacher evaluation data by White, which would seem to be in clear violation of Act 54 of the 2010 Legislature.

We also said we were continuing work on the developing story about 1100 students in Caddo and Webster (a story that has since grown to include the parishes of East Baton Rouge, Calcasieu, Claiborne and Bossier) who were signed up for courses by Course Choice providers without either the knowledge or consent of the students signed up or their parents.

Course Choice providers like Fast Start and FastPath are paid one-half of their tuition, which ranges from $700 to $1250 per course, up front with the remaining one-half being paid upon the student’s completion of the course. Course Choice providers are given wide latitude in deciding whether or not a student completes his or her course.

We posed the question of whether or not an investigation should be conducted into how FastPath and Smart Start received students’ names and other personal information in order to sign them up for the courses.

One member, Rep. Rob Shadoin (R-Ruston), responded to our inquiry, saying, “I do not know enough details on these matters to give you a comment. I have general knowledge of what you speak but no specifics. I’m sorry I ain’t much help to you on the subject.”

Might we suggest, Mr. Shadoin, that as a member of the House Education Committee you might wish to bring yourself up to speed on education issues such as these—or resign from the committee?

But at least Shadoin did respond, such as it was.

That was a little better than the deafening silence from the all but one of the other members of the two committees.

State Rep. John Bel Edwards (D-Amite) said of the leaking of evaluation data on three Caddo Parish teachers to State Rep. Alan Seabaugh by White, “It would seem that whoever disclosed the information in the DOE in blatant disregard for the statutory protections affording teachers the right to keep certain specific evaluation information from public view is just the latest indication, among many, that those folks (in DOE) have no respect for the rule of law.”

Edwards also was critical of the Course Choice registrations. “The roll-out of Course Choice is proving to be every bit as scandalous and controversial as the roll-out of vouchers: unfit providers offering inferior educational opportunities while aggressively seeking to profit at taxpayer expense and while mal-educating our children and deceiving their parents.”

Here are the responses of the members of the House Education Committee:

• Stephen Carter (R-Baton Rouge), Chairman: Silence;

• Patrick Jefferson (D-Homer), Vice Chairman: Silence;

• Wesley Bishop (D-New Orleans): Silence;

• Christopher Broadwater (R-Hammond): Silence;

• Henry Burns (R-Haughton): Silence—in fact, deleted our email without reading it;

• Thomas Carmody (R-Shreveport): Silence;

• Simone Champagne (R-Erath): Silence;

• Cameron Henry (R-Metairie): Silence;

• Paul Hollis (R-Covington): Silence;

• Barry Ivey (R-Baton Rouge): Silence;

• Nancy Landry (R-Lafayette): Silence (Readers may remember Landry as the member who attempted to ram through a rule that teachers testifying before the committee in 2012 should be compelled to say whether or not they were on annual or sick leave);

• Edward Price (D-Gonzales): Silence;

• Jerome “Dee” Richard (I-Thibodaux): responded he would have a statement, but never sent it;

• Pat Smith (D-Baton Rouge): Silence;

• Jeff Thompson (R-Bossier City): Silence);

• Alfred Williams (D-Baton Rouge): Silence;

• Ex Officio member House Speaker Chuck Kleckley (R-Lake Charles): Silence;

• Ex Officio member Walt Leger (D-New Orleans): Silence.

Senate Education Committee members and their responses:

• Conrad Appel (R-Metairie), Chairman: Silence;

• Eric LaFleur (D-Ville Platte), Vice Chairman: Silence;

• Dan Claitor (R-Baton Rouge): Silence;

• Jack Donahue (R-Mandeville): Silence;

• Elbert Guillory (D-Opelousas): Silence;

• Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe—still trying to learn if humans can be grown from high school lab cultures): Silence;

• Mack “Bodi” White (R-Baton Rouge—obviously too busy trying to get his breakaway school zone in South Baton Rouge approved): Silence;

• Interim member Page Cortez (R-Lafayette): Silence.

Nine House Education Committee members—Carter, Ivey, Smith, Alfred Williams, Jefferson, Henry Burns, Carmody, Jeff Thompson and Kleckley— and two Senators—Claitor and White—represent parishes into which these Course Choice providers have already moved to begin registering students and yet they still choose to remain silent on the issue.

Yes, it’s easy to point the finger at the snow cone stand mentality of DOE management by White and Course Choice ramrod Lefty Lefkowith but by their overwhelming silence in this matter, these committee members are every bit as complicit as anyone in the Claiborne Building.

It’s as if these people live in a vacuum. Take the computer-generated response we received from Sen. Neil Riser (R-Columbia):

“Thank you for contacting Senator Riser regarding your thoughts and concerns. He appreciates hearing from you. He will keep this in mind as they go thru the legislative process.”

Now that’s taking an issue head-on.

Meanwhile, Course Choice peddlers have moved into East Baton Rouge and Calcasieu to sign up students. Two in Calcasieu have been rejected thus far; one was a student signed up for two courses deemed inappropriate for the student’s grade level and another student registered for five courses (at $700 to $1250 each—half up front, remember) was not enrolled at the school the student said he/she was.

Course Choice representatives have begun canvassing neighborhoods in Homer in Claiborne Parish to sign up students and offering them free iPads.

Caddo, Bossier, Webster and Claiborne are all contiguous parishes in northwest Louisiana.

Claiborne Parish school officials have issued public announcements that the local school board has no connection to the Course Choice representatives.

Meanwhile, from the House and Senate Education Committees, to borrow a line from Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence:

Silence Like a Cancer Grows.

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Rep. Richard has money-saving bill: cut state spending on professional, personal, consulting contracts by 10 percent

Posted in Budget, Contract, Contracts, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Revenue, State Agencies, Transparency, Waste on May 23, 2013 | 23 Comments »

State Rep. Jerome “Dee” Richard believes he may have found a way in which to cut into the state budget deficit to the tune of about half-a-billion dollars.

HB-73 by Richard would require a 10 percent reduction in the total dollar amount for professional, personal and consulting service contracts under the jurisdiction of the Office of Contractual Review (OCR) for Fiscal Year 2013-14.

The proposed law also would require the OCR to submit reports on the status of the implementation of the law to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget on Oct. 1, 2013, Jan., April 1 and July 1 of 2014.
It also would require that the OCR director to submit a monthly report to the House Appropriations Committee summarizing all contracts and dollar values awarded the previous month.

The Legislative Fiscal Office (LFO) said the annual report of the OCR released in January of this year showed there were 2,284 professional, personal and consulting contracts with the state with a combined contract value of approximately $5.28 billion.

The LFO said the bill would result in an “indeterminable decrease” in overall state expenditures in FY-14. “To the extent this bill would have been enacted during the 2012 regular legislative session, the projected 10 percent reduction in the value of OCR approved professional, personal and consulting services contracts for FY-13 would have equated to approximately $528 million less,” the LFO’s fiscal notes said.

Richard’s bill would allow exceptions but only if certain conditions were met, namely:

• There were no state employees available or capable of performing the needed work;

• Required services are not available as a product of a prior or existing contract;

• There be a written plan to monitor and evaluate performance of the contract;

• The proposed contract would be determined to be a priority expenditure by the Commissioner of Administration.

Such a reduction, should it be approved and implemented, would help close a gaping budget hole of hundreds of millions of dollars for the state.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Notable Quotables, Public Records, Transparency on May 20, 2013 | 6 Comments »

“We have received 52 enrollment requests since the inception of Course Choice. Of the 52 requests, 42 have been from the Bossier Technical Center.”

—Spokesperson for Bossier Parish School Board, commenting on 52 attempted registrations for Course Choice courses by providers FastPath and Smart Start. He said there are no students at Bossier Technical Center.

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More sordid details emerging in apparent fraudulent Course Choice registrations in three northwest Louisiana parishes

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Public Records, Transparency on May 20, 2013 | 26 Comments »

It’s not always writer’s block when you have trouble putting your thoughts into something resembling comprehensible form.

In the case of the Louisiana Department of Education’s (DOE) Course Choice program, the players are so intertwined as to be considered downright incestuous.

It’s not enough that the State Supreme Court has ruled that Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) funds cannot be used to pay the tuition for Course Choice. Superintendent of Education John White has given every indication that he fully intends to plunge ahead with Course Choice and vouchers.

The depth of the apparent fraud is already emerging, even before Course Choice is really up and running, at a staggering rate sufficient to alert every investigative agency in Baton Rouge, from the local district attorney to state Attorney General and Legislative Auditor’s office to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

So where are they?

No, it’s not writer’s block. This convoluted mess called Course Choice can best be described as a cluster fart (okay, we cleaned that up a bit).

We just posted a story last week about FastPath, that Austin, Texas, firm headed by Rod Paige, former Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. FastPath, it has been learned, signed up 1100 students from Caddo and Webster parishes for Course Choice courses without the knowledge or consent of the students or their parents.

One of those registering for courses in Webster Parish was a parent and “at least one was a Severe Profound child,” said a spokesperson for the Webster School Board. “The recruiters went down the street knocking on doors,” he said.

Some of the courses for students allegedly signed up for in Webster included math courses entitled Single Variable Equations, Two Variable Equations, Number Line Inequalities, Applied Linear Equations 1 and 2, Quadratic Formula, Quadratic X-Intercepts, Trinomial Factoring and Graphs to Linear Inequalities.

Now, LouisianaVoice has learned that another 64 were signed up for course choice courses in Bossier Parish. Fifty-two of those were signed up by FastPath and Smart Start but a few others were signed up by other providers approved by DOE, namely K-12, Inc., Advanced Academics, APEX Learning and Education Solutions.

Smart Start is the company that we reported last week was running ads in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Central Louisiana for sales reps to earn up to $75,000 within six months by signing up students for course choice courses.

The ads have since been taken down but we subsequently learned that FastPath was running a similar ad for sales reps for the Monroe area.

All 64 applications were rejected by Bossier Parish. Of the 34 signed by Smart Start, all attempted to register for Precision Math and Reading Acceleration courses. One student who was not even enrolled in a Bossier Parish school attempted to register for two courses. The student identified his/her school as the Life Skills Center as the school he/she is presently attending. The Life Skills Center is closed.

Two students, a brother and sister from another parish attempted to register for four courses through Haughton High School.

One first grade student had someone attempt to register her in two courses—high school Latin and high school English. Her legal guardian did not enroll her through Course Choice and has no consistent computer access.

Another student attempted to register for two courses considered “academically inappropriate,” according to a Bossier Parish spokesperson.

Following our initial story last week, David Callaway, chief compliance officer for FastPath sent us an email that said everything was on the up and up with his company.

But judging from the track record of its CEO, Rod Paige, no one should be surprised if things aren’t completely on the level. While he was serving as Secretary of Education under the younger Bush, a major scandal erupted when it was learned that while he headed up the Houston Independent School District, the fifth largest district in the nation, the district falsified its dropout statistics.

In his response, Callaway said, “We have a strict protocol that all of our representatives follow, and they are paid a flat hourly rate for their work ($16 per hour, according to FastPath’s ad). As part of this protocol, parents are ALWAYS present during enrollment. All or our representatives wear identifying badges and we take immediate action to address all legitimate concerns. Parents enroll in significant numbers because our program works. Over 95 percent of parents report an increase in their child’s grades in multiple subjects.”

We fired off a second email asking him to quantify his 95 percent claim via a written document. We have not heard back from him.

“Before a student’s enrollment is completed,” he said, “it is approved by a guidance counselor to ensure it is academically appropriate.”

The Bossier Parish spokesperson, however, said the only way the local school board becomes aware of enrollees is by logging onto the DOE dashboard through the Course Choice website. For all intents and purposes, the local guidance counselors are out of the loop on Course Choice registrations until well after the fact.

Callaway said FastPath does not receive full tuition from the state for students “unless our program results in significant gains on the LEAP/iLEAP.”

The actual agreement between FastPath and DOE, however, is not quite that strict. FastPath, as with all course choice providers, charges $700 to $1250 in tuition and like all providers, receives 50 percent of that ($350 to $625) up front. Only 10 percent of the final 50 percent (or 5 percent of the overall tuition) is contingent upon students’ showing only an increase, not a “significant” increase. Thus, if a FastPath student failed to show gains, FastPath would lose only $62.50 of a total tuition of $1250 or $35 of a $700 tuition.

Some penalty.

Now here’s where it begins to get a bit muddled and we’re probably going to have to develop an organizational, or flow chart to illustrate just how tight this little cadre really is.

First, we should point out that FastPath has two sister companies, Tutors with Computers and Read and Succeed, both of which have numerous complaints registered against them for deceptive practices.

That, however, has not deterred one Eric Nadelstern, Ed.D., from offering ringing endorsements of both companies. Nadelstern has been called “The great apologist for everything Joel Klein did for a decade.”

Nadelstern was Klein’s Deputy Chancellor for Academics in New York and was John White’s boss there.

Oddly enough, he appears on the web pages of both Tutors with Computers and Read and Succeed with identical blurbs with only the company’s name changed: “(Name of company) delivers outstanding products and services that effectively raise reading and math proficiency,” his endorsements say.

The DOE official responsible for coordinating all the course choice programs is one David “Lefty” Lefkowith, the frequent flyer who commutes to and from his home in Los Angeles for a $146,000 per year salary.

Travel records released to LouisianaVoice as part of the settlement terms of our recent public records lawsuit against DOE reveal that Lefty was reimbursed $860 for traveling to Austin, Texas, on Feb. 17-18 to meet with officers of Agilix Labs regarding Course Choice registration.

So just who is Agilix Labs? It’s a company that thus far has managed to fly under our radar but which we now know has a contract with DOE to help develop its Course Choice platform. We’ve not been able to determine the amount of that contract but we have made a public records request for the document.

Agilix announced in a Feb. 27 news release that it had created “one of the first educational applications to tap into the emerging InBloom data standard (IBDS).”

The news released continued by saying, IBDS was designed by its creators at Shared Learning Cooperative (SLC) to standardize access to myriad disparate forms of student, school, course and other educational data across platforms. Supported with $100 million from the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and others, InBloom supports data needs of states, districts, nonprofits and corporations promoting personalized learning.”

What?

“We had to look at the issue of how to interface with all these systems to provide the broadest possible access to our customers,” said Agilix CEO Curt Allen. “After much analysis, we settled on adopting the rapidly emerging InBloom standard. That choice means that any school district or state that supports IBDS can leverage Agilix Honeycomb technology.

“John White, Superintendent of Louisiana schools, says, ‘By connecting to IBDS, Agilix opens a lot of doors for our Course Choice product not only for registration but also for detailed analysis of student performance. We expect this will assist greatly in tracking and reporting results of Course Choice adoption to state authorities,’” the news release said.

So there you have it. The circle is complete. After all the guarantees that data provided to InBloom would not be shared, we have Agilix, contracted by the state, saying otherwise.

We have White’s former boss endorsing two shady companies affiliated with a course choice provider (FastPath) from the same city as Agilix (Austin) that is signing up students in three northwest Louisiana parishes without the knowledge or consent of the students or parents.

And Agilix is joined at the hip with InBloom to whom White was going to provide sensitive personal data on some 700,000 Louisiana school students to “park” the information in its “data garage.” White has since said he cancelled the agreement with InBloom but in response to our public records request has denied the existence of any document verifying any such cancellation. Nor has he ever produced a contract or memorandum of understanding with InBloom to provide the data in the first place.

And coordinating the entire Course Choice racket is a nomad who jets in from Los Angeles for a four-day work week before heading back to the West Coast every Thursday—a nomad with his own questionable past of working with the now defunct Enron and the Jeb Bush administration in Florida in an unsuccessful effort to corner the market on drinking water there.

What could possibly go wrong here?

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Course Choice provider who enrolled 1100 students without their knowledge tied to Bush, Romney, Tex. dropout scandal

Posted in BESE, Contract, Contracts, Education, Ethics, Public Records, Transparency on May 16, 2013 | 27 Comments »

More than 1100 students in the parishes of Caddo and Webster have signed up for course choice programs with a provider whose chairman with close ties to former President George W. Bush and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

An outfit named FastPath Learning of Austin, Texas, has somehow managed to obtain student information to sign up the students without the knowledge of the student or of their parents.

If true, that’s fraud, pure and simple—and a blatant violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

And the chairman of the board for FastPath? None other than Dr. Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education during President George W. Bush’s first term and a member of Mitt Romney’s Education Policy Advisory Group during last year’s presidential campaign.

Paige, it should be noted, also once served as superintendent of Houston’s schools and during his tenure there, he became mired in an ugly scandal when it was learned that the Houston system, seventh largest in the nation, had falsified its dropout statistics.

Course Choice, which is under the supervision of Department of Education (DOE) Deputy Superintendent of Portfolio Dave “Lefty” Lefkowith, is a DOE program whereby Louisiana public school students are allowed to sign up for online computer courses offered by providers approved by DOE.

Lefkowith, who once worked with Enron and with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, commutes from his home in Los Angeles and is paid $146,000 per year by DOE.

Tuition for the courses ranges from $700 to $1,275 each and providers get one-half of their tuition fees up front upon registering students for courses. The second half is paid when a student successfully completes a course and the course providers have full autonomy in making the determination of when—or if—a student completes a course. The incentive to the provider, of course, is to have as many students as possible “complete” the courses.

Fox, welcome to the hen house.

The tuition is free to the student with the state picking up the tab. Students also receive a free iPad upon registering. There was no word if the 1,100 students who were unknowingly registered received iPads.

Students are allowed to take up to five classes outside their home school at taxpayer expense.

Students and parents in the two parishes say they never requested nor approved the registering of the students for the courses. One student was registered for a class he had already successfully completed in the classroom—with an A grade.

State Superintendent of Education John White, asked about the apparent lack of oversight, said Course Choice providers underwent a “rigorous” four-part approval process before being allowed to offer classes and that checks and balances are in place to insure that students do not end up in an academically unsound course.

Really?

On Wednesday, White announced DOE would attempt to finance the Course Choice program through its own resources following last week’s Louisiana Supreme Court ruling upholding a lower court decision that the method of using Minimum Foundation Program funds to pay for the vouchers was unconstitutional.

White said that more than 3,000 courses have been chosen thus far at an average cost of $700 each, a total of $2.1 million. Registration will remain open through August, he said.

The revelation of the 1,100 registrations which, if true, could be construed as fraud and theft could also involve a violation of the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) since FastPath would necessarily require certain student information, including names, addresses, social security numbers, etc., in order to register the students.

The question then becomes just who provided that information to FastPath? There are already questions about White’s leaking information about evaluations of three Caddo Parish elementary teachers through an intermediary to the Baton Rouge Advocate last October.

That intermediary was Rayne Martin, a former employer of DOE who currently serves as executive director of Stand for Children Louisiana.

In the wake of the flap over the negative evaluations of the teachers, the Advocate published a letter to the editor which defended the Value Added Model used by DOE to evaluate the teachers and which even cited statistics from the leaked document.

Turns out that letter was written by Monica Candal, policy and data analyst for Stand for Children Louisiana, leaving one to wonder about the connection between White and Stand for Children.

Who knew?

Louisiana Voice attempted to contact FastPath by telephone. An automated message told us to press 1 if we were a student already enrolled in FastPath or to press 2 for “all other inquiries.”

We pressed 2 and got another automated message that said, “We’re sorry we are unable to answer your call at this time.” So we called back and pressed 1 and got an automated message that said (take a deep breath and count to 10), “We’re sorry we are unable to answer your call at this time.” This was at 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, so it wasn’t because they close during lunch.

Next, we went online and clicked on “Contact us” and several boxes popped up on our computer screen asking for our name, our organization, our email address and the city and state from which we were emailing them. Strangely, it did not request our telephone number, though we would have been happy to provide that as well.

The following note was typed into the message box:

“This is for Compliance Officer David Callaway:

How did FastPath obtain the information (names, schools, home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, etc.) on the 1100 students in Caddo and Webster parishes who were signed up for your Course Choice courses without, the students and parents claim, their knowledge or consent?

It would appear that you would have to be in possession of certain information in order to enroll these students and I simply want to know who provided that data to you.

Thanks.”

A few minutes after we sent the message, we received a computer-generated message in our email in-box that said, “Thanks for contacting us! We’ll get back to you soon.”

Does anyone care to take odds on whether or not we’ll ever hear back from them?

The leaks would seem to validate concerns about a recent agreement, since cancelled because of a public outcry, to furnish personal information on some 700,000 Louisiana school children to a data bank run by White’s former boss Joel Klein, now with inBloom, a data storage company (or data “parking garage,” to use White’s terminology) run by NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch.

inBloom had offered no guarantees that the data could not be accessed by hackers and in fact, an unrelated privacy breach on Bloomberg News occurred when reporters extracted subscribers’ private information to break news stories. That breach would seem to lend credence to security concerns about inBloom.

Recent stories by LouisianaVoice have prompted a witch hunt at DOE in an effort to determine the source of recent stories. Personal printers have been removed so that documents must now be printed at a central location more easily monitored. IT personnel have been called in to review emails.

It seems to us, security—and Louisiana taxpayers—would somehow be better served through efforts to attempt to learn who provided FastPath with personal data on 1,100 students signed up for courses without their knowledge or consent.

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DOE run like a snow cone stand, but Course Choice fraudulent enrollments looking like a major scandal

Posted in BESE, Education, Layoffs, Public Records, Transparency, Vouchers on May 16, 2013 | 11 Comments »

Could it possibly get any worse for Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White?

For that matter, could the State of Louisiana possibly do any worse than John White as education superintendent?

Good questions both. The answers are, in order:

That remains to be seen, and

Probably not.

There are so many things going on with the Department of Education (DOE), not the least of which is the breaking story of what appears to be the fraudulent enrollment of more than 1,100 students in two north Louisiana parishes in Course Choice classes without their knowledge and the close association of the chairman of the course choice provider company to former President George W. Bush and recent Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Folks, this is a huge story.

More about that later, but first a few others:

• Voucher funding knocked down by the courts;

• Confidential files on teachers evaluations leaked to the media;

• Personal information on Louisiana students provided and then, presumably revoked, to a data base “parking garage” operated by Rupert Murdock and Bill Gates;

• Mass layoffs by DOE even as it advertises for yet another six-figure unclassified appointment;

• Rejection of the Minimum Foundation Program formula by the State Senate;

• A legislative bill to reorganize DOE even as White moves forward with doing just that without benefit of the bill’s passage;

• Attempts to tweak the Value Added Model for teacher evaluations, lending ample evidence that the entire methodology was flawed from the outset;

DOE is the single agency that is responsible for the expenditure of more funds—federal and state—than any other state agency and for the education of hundreds of thousands of Louisiana children.

And it’s being run like a snow cone stand.

And that snow cone stand is being run by a gaggle of highly overpaid, grossly under-qualified preppies who have somehow convinced themselves that six-weeks of Teach for America courses and/or a six-weekend course spread over 10 months translates to solid credentials that qualify them to run roughshod over people who have obtained full-blown college degrees, many of those advanced degrees, and who have dedicated their entire professional lives to educating children.

And on top of everything else, White just can’t seem to be able to resist embellishing facts or simply plucking them out of thin air. He seems to forget that while he is certainly entitled to his own opinion, he is not entitled to his own facts.

Case in point:

Last week, immediately after the Louisiana Supreme Court ruling upholding the lower court’s decision that the funding formula for school vouchers was unconstitutional, White was quoted thusly:

“On the most important aspect of the law, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of families (that, folks, is what is known as spin). The scholarship program will continue and thousands of Louisiana families will continue to have the final say in where to send their children to school. Nearly 93 percent of scholarship families report that they love their school, and we will work with the legislature to find another funding source to keep parents and kids in these schools.

The “93 percent” caught our eye and as we have begun doing with any such utterance by White, we went after documentation. After all, someone once said 87.5 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. Accordingly, we fired off the following public records request:

• Where do the data supporting the 93 percent approval come from? Please be specific and provide all written documentation supporting this claim;

• Are your data from a survey of parents actually conducted in the spring of a particular school year? If so, which year?

• Are students and/or parents who are unhappy and/or who transfer out of a voucher school included in your survey?

• In calculating the 93 percent favorable rate, do you/DOE count all surveys sent out or only those that are returned?

Because of this week’s public records lawsuit settlement that was favorable to LouisianaVoice, DOE actually responded in a timely fashion and with precisely the answer we expected:

“…The Department is not in possession of any public record(s) responsive to the above-written request.”
Go figure.

So, if there are no public records to support his claim, just how did White arrive at that “nearly 93 percent” figure?

Who knows, but hey, it’s not the first time that White has been unable to back up his claims. Remember, he claims that he cancelled the agreement with inBloom to provide personal data on hundreds of thousands of Louisiana students to its data base but when asked for the written communication of cancellation, guess what? “…The Department is not in possession of any public record(s) responsive to the above-written request.”

Anyone detect a trend here?

HB 650 by Jindal old reliable ally Rep. Stephen Carter (R-Baton Rouge) calls for the reorganization of DOE and would give White broad powers in creating new offices—undoubtedly at exorbitant salaries to more under-qualified appointees—for the department.

But White isn’t waiting. The reorganization has already begun.

White has submitted a layoff plan which, if approved, will put 34 civil service (classified) employees out of work. These are the ones, just as in other agencies, who get things done, who show up day in and day out to process paperwork, answer inquiries and generally keep the department afloat. They are also, unlike their appointive supervisors, qualified.

The layoff plan was submitted ostensibly to save $3.4 million for fiscal year 2013-2014.

Yet, DOE is currently advertising online to fill an unclassified (appointive) position, almost certainly at a six-figure salary, for the position of Chief of Staff, Office of Portfolio.

If the Office of Portfolio rings a bell, that would be our old friend Dave “Lefty” Lefkowith, the $146,000 per year commuter (between Los Angeles and Baton Rouge), the director (or deputy superintendent, depending on which day of the week it is) of the Office of Portfolio. The new hire (or in-house appointee, more likely) would be Lefty’s right hand (yes, we meant to do that).

Turns out the Office of Portfolio is in charge of filling up all those course choice online courses—even, it seems, if students don’t know they’re enrolled.

Course choice providers get about whatever they wish to charge in “tuition,” some of them setting the bar at $1200. They get half of that upon the successful enrollment of the student, no matter if he or she completes the course. The student can sign up, participate for say, a week, drop out and the provider still gets $600. And it is the provider who decides whether or not the student has successfully completed the course, which would qualify the provider with the other half of the tuition.

Fox, welcome to the henhouse.

Now it turns out that more than 1100 students in the parishes of Caddo and Webster have signed up for course choice programs—but they didn’t know it.

An outfit named FastPath Learning of Austin, Texas, has somehow managed to obtain student information to sign up the students without the knowledge of the student or of their parents.

If true, that’s fraud, pure and simple—and a blatant violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

And the chairman of the board for FastPath is Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education during President George W. Bush’s first term and a member of Mitt Romney’s Education Policy Advisory Group during last year’s presidential campaign.

Paige, it should be noted, also once served as superintendent of Houston’s schools and during his tenure there, he became mired in an ugly scandal when it was learned that the Houston system, seventh largest in the nation, had falsified its dropout statistics.

Fox, henhouse.

The question here, then, is: just where did FastPath get the student information needed to arbitrarily enroll 1,100 students? It would seem highly unlikely that it came from the local school boards.

White, asked about the apparent lack of oversight, said Course Choice providers underwent a “rigorous” four-part approval process before being allowed to offer classes and that checks and balances are in place to insure that students do not end up in an academically unsound course.

Really?

What flavor snow cone would you like?

It should come as no surprise that recent stories like this has prompted a witch hunt at DOE. To even the most casual LouisianaVoice reader, it should be obvious that we have sources within DOE.

The ongoing efforts to find leaks would rival the White House Plumbers of those nostalgic Nixon years. Personal printers have been removed so that documents must be printed at a central location more easily monitored. IT personnel have been called in to review emails.

Seems to us, security would be better served with efforts to attempt to learn who provided FastPath with personal data on 1,100 students.

But our sources are not stupid. Most of them are actually former employees who either retired or quit in disgust but who had the foresight to download incriminating documents on computer flash drives which were then passed on to us.

And then there’s that Joan Hunt email SNAFU:

We recently made a public records request and Hunt, the DOE general counsel, responded by sending an email to DOE attorney Willa LeBlanc and Troy Hebert, director of the Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control. It’s not certain if Hebert was mistakenly copied instead of another DOE attorney named Troy Humphrey, but the message simply said, “Troy, we need to reply and say that.”

But Hunt inadvertently copied us into that reply.

Naturally, we wanted to know what that reply was supposed to say. So we sent a public records request asking for copies of all emails between Hunt, LeBlanc, Hebert and White to which Hunt responded on Wednesday:

“No documents. Attorney-client privilege.”

Well, Troy Hebert is not a client of the DOE legal staff; he works under the Department of Revenue and he’s not an attorney, so attorney-client privilege is out the window and we feel entitled to any communication that has us as a subject that has been discussed with someone other than an attorney.

We fired off a response to Hunt that we may well be back in court seeking a contempt ruling and monetary damages.

Finally, there’s this, suggested by a friend and regular reader:

Inasmuch as White is so frantic to track down the source of the leaks and since those leaks were provided on a few flash drives provided by former DOE employees, perhaps it would be appropriate to show up at the next Board of Elementary and Secondary (BESE) meeting with a few hundred lapel pins to hand out.

The pens would be in the shape of a computer flash drive and would have inscribed on them (again, at the suggestion of a reader), “Louisiana Believes LouisianaVoice,” thus commemorating in our own humble way the DOE web page that now calls itself Louisiana Believes.

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