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Archive for August, 2011

Every candidate needs a theme song to jumpstart campaign

Posted in Uncategorized on August 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »

As political gaffes go, it has to be one of the worst in the storied history of American presidential campaigns, one from which it is almost certain to be difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

Michele Bachmann, whose tour bus is equipped with external speakers, pulled up to a campaign stop in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on Tuesday, August 16 the same way she does at every campaign stop: to the pounding beat of Elvis Presley’s version of Promised Land.

But the Newsweek cover girl from Minnesota wasn’t content with just entertaining the crowd with the Elvis version of the Chuck Berry hit. She decided to give a shout out to Elvis. And what a shout it was:

“Before we get started, let’s all say, ‘Happy Birthday’ to Elvis Presley today!” she exhorted the crowd of 16 onlookers who promptly broke out in stony, perplexed silence.

Elvis was born on Jan. 8, 1935. He died on Aug. 16, 1977. Bachmann was wishing the man happy birthday on the 34th anniversary of his death.

We can’t wait to see what she does on Nov. 22. (Cue the Marilyn Monroe tape.)

Bachmann won the Iowa caucus but she still has a long, uphill fight against a bevy of Republican presidential wannabes. She cannot afford to offend those 73,482 Elvis impersonators and she’s going to need every one of the votes of those 286 Elvis fans out there in America’s heartland.

The Elvis shtick does seem to work for her, however, but it’s really nothing new. Remember John McCain’s Take a Chance on Me (Abba) and Johnny Be Goode (Chuck Berry)? Or Hillary Clinton’s Blue Sky (Big Head Todd and the Monsters)?

And what K Street lobbyist worth his salt doesn’t know the words to Signed, Sealed, Delivered (Stevie Wonder)?

So with that in mind, we’ve come up with some suggestions for theme songs for the other candidates clamoring for voters’ attention, votes, and most of all, campaign contributions. For some candidates, it was impossible to choose just one song, so we offer a choice:

• Michele Bachmann: Yakety Yak (The Coasters), Think (Aretha Franklin);

• Tim Pawlenty: Gone (Ferlin Husky), I’m Movin’ On (Hank Snow);

• Newt Gingrich: Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen), Do Wacka Do (Roger Miller);

• Ron Paul: The Impossible Dream (Pick an artist);

• Rick Perry: Bad to the Bone (George Thorogood), I Won’t Back Down (Tom Petty);

• Mitt Romney: It’s Over (Roy Orbison), Against the Wind (Bob Seger);

• Sarah Palin: North to Alaska (Johnny Horton), You Talk Too Much (Joe Jones);

• Rudy Giuliani: New York, New York (Frank Sinatra);

• Paul Ryan: Crazy (Patsy Cline), Witchcraft (Frank Sinatra);

• Barack Obama, 2008: A Change Gonna Come (Sam Cooke);

• Barack Obama, 2012: Won’t Get Fooled Again (The Who);

• Buddy Roemer: I’m A Nut (Roger Miller), Theme from Rocky (Bill Conti)

• Bobby Jindal: Who Are You? (The Who);

• The American People: This Land Is Your Land (Woody Guthrie)

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Education, Notable Quotables on August 14, 2011| 1 Comment »

“We don’t live in a Leave it to Beaver, Bill Cosby world. This is reality.”

—East Feliciana Parish School Board member and former Clinton High School coach Ben Cupit, on justifying the board’s decision to define a minimum “C” average as a 1.5 instead of the customary 2.0 in order that students might meet the Louisiana High School Athletic Association’s “C” requirement for participation in high school sports.

(Precisely, coach. That’s why reality is going to be tough on these kids in a few years after the cheers have died down.)

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East Feliciana, other systems sell out academics for sports

Posted in Education, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators on August 14, 2011| 2 Comments »

BATON ROUGE (CNS)—LouisianaVoice has regularly taken the Recovery School District (RSD) to task for its creative data on school performance that puts RSD in a favorable light compared to public school systems. We have consistently offered the opinion that the Jindal administration’s intent is to make sacrificial lambs of public education in favor of wholesale privatization of education, even if it means cooking the statistics a little.

Nothing has occurred to alter that opinion, but a friend and regular reader recently called attention to the action of a Baton Rouge-area school board that would appear to fly in the face of the professed mission of public education. We had to plead ignorance because we had been so focused on the big picture we lost sight of what went on right under our noses.

So we did some checking of our own.

Sadly, it is impossible to defend the decision of the East Feliciana Parish School Board earlier this month to crater to the interest of interscholastic athletics at the cost of academic standards.

Since Moby Dick was a guppy, anywhere one went in this country, the minimum “C” grade standard has always been a 2.0 on a 4.0 scale.

Not in East Feliciana, however.

In the not-too-distant past, athletes in Louisiana high schools were considered academically eligible with a 1.5 or better.

State Rep. Rickey Hardy (D-Lafayette) has been trying for years to increase the minimum requirement for sports eligibility to 2.0. He even managed to get the Louisiana High School Athletic Association (LHSAA) to consider phasing in tougher standards. At last year’s state convention a proposal was introduced to require at least a 1.75 for the 2011-2012 school year and 2.0 next year.

“I’m certainly satisfied with phasing it in,” Hardy said last year. He first introduced the 2.0 legislation as far back as 2008. He noted that Texas and Mississippi have already raised the minimum GPA to 2.0.

But not in East Feliciana.

Before any bouquets are pinned on the LHSAA, which has been content with the 1.5 status quo for three decades, it should be noted that while passing a compromise minimum “C” average requirement, the association failed to define “C,” leaving that determination to individual school boards. In athletic parlance, LHSAA punted.

With apologies to former president Bill Clinton, it depends on what your definition of “C” is.

The East Feliciana Parish School Board saw its opening. Gotta have a “C” average to play? No problem. We’ll just lower the bar. Instead of a 2.0 that even Mississippi recognizes as the minimum standard for a “C” grade, let’s just make it a 1.5.

Give proper credit to board member Rhonda Mathews who attempted to set 2.0 as the minimum requirement. She was supported by fellow board members Melvin Hollins, Mitch Harrell, Debra Spurlock-Haynes and Broderick Brooks.

Blocking the higher standard, however, were Olivia Harris, Henry Howell V, Ben Cupit, Paul Kent, Michael Bradford, Richard Terrell and Rufus Nesbitt.

Cupit, a former Clinton High School coach, said state officials who criticized the move would better serve public school children in Louisiana if they fully funded school systems instead of passing unfunded mandates to the local school systems.

East Feliciana Superintendent Douglas Beauchamp said the board voted in 2002 to gradually raise the requirement from 1.5 to 2.0 by the 2004-2005 school year but the new requirements apparently did not get passed down to the school level during subsequent changes in coaching staffs and central office and school administrators.

Beauchamp was quoted as saying that the lower requirements would have little effect in East Feliciana since most students in the parish were not college material.

Wait. What? Not college material? Is that really his call?

Beauchamp said 30 school superintendents across the state responded to his survey on grade-point requirements. Of those 30, he said 25 districts also allow participation in athletics and other extracurricular activities with a 1.5 average.

So there you have it. The LHSAA punted, the East Feliciana Parish School Board fumbled. And while LHSAA’s dereliction is shameful, the East Feliciana Parish School Board’s actions are shameless. And it has at least 25 other school districts in its corner to provide moral support for the wisdom–or folly– of its actions.

At least 26 of Louisiana’s local school systems, perhaps more, see fit to look the other way in the interest of allowing underachievers to pursue athletics over academics. These kids will be able to explain a pick or a press in basketball. They will know the difference between a 4-5 and a 5-4 defense in football. They will be able to run fast, hit hard and shoot baskets with deadly accuracy.

But will they ever be able to diagram a sentence? Will they know the difference between an adverb and an adjective? Will they be able to identify the three branches of government? Will they be able to even balance a checkbook after the glory days of high school sports are long since forgotten and no one can remember their uniform number or even what sport they played?

Our friend who told us about this travesty has a low opinion of public education in general and an even lower opinion of local school boards in particular. These kinds of decisions only serve to arm him with deadly accurate ammunition.

It is impossible to defend the indefensible or to excuse the inexcusable.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Notable Quotables, Transparency, Vouchers on August 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

“Every method and path is acceptable, including lying to people. You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers.”

—Fethullah Gülen, founder of a widespread charter school system in the U.S., in a 1999 sermon that aired on Turkish television, shortly before being forced to flee the country after being charged with attempting to overthrow the secular Turkish government.

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FBI probe of Gülen may include Abramson, Kenilworth

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Transparency on August 12, 2011| 9 Comments »

There is a common thread that links the Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD), former RSD Superintendent Paul Vallas, RSD-North Superintendent LaVonne Sheffield, Ph.D., and the Fethullah Gülen network of 155 charter schools scattered throughout 28 states, including at least two in Louisiana.

That common thread is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Sheffield, who headed the RSD-North from June 2009 to July 2010, was brought to Baton Rouge by Vallas at a salary of $200,000. She previously worked under Vallas as Chief Accountability Officer for the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) from June of 2004 to July 2008.

She was an unsuccessful candidate for the position of superintendent of East Baton Rouge Parish schools in January of 2009 and was hired as superintendent of the Rockford, Illinois, Public School District later in 2009. She resigned in April of this year halfway through her contract.

While working for Vallas in Philadelphia, an audit by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) determined that nearly $138.4 million in grant funds were either unallowable or inadequately documented. The audit also determined that SDP should return almost $17.7 million in unallowable costs to DOE.

Before that, Sheffield was employed as Chief Academic Officer for the Detroit Public School System from February 2002 to July 2003. While there, she ran up thousands of dollars of charges to her district-issued charge card while on her wedding trip to Las Vegas, records show.

She also worked from December 1993 to May 2000 as Chief of Staff to Cleveland Mayor Michael White and also served as Director of the Department of Port Control and as manager of the $1.4 billion Cleveland Hopkins International Airport expansion project. While there, both she and White were implicated but never charged in an FBI investigation into widespread bribery in the city administration, including the port and airport project.

Both she and Vallas have departed the Louisiana RSD, but the presence of the FBI lingers.

Reports indicate the agency is conducting another investigation, this one into recent revelations about the Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans and the Kenilworth Science and Technology Charter School in Baton Rouge.

Both schools were operated by Pelican Education Foundation in New Orleans until Abramson’s charter was revoked last month. Pelican is affiliated with Atlas Texas Construction and Trading of Houston. Atlas also operates 38 charter schools in several Texas cities through Cosmos Foundation under the auspices of Harmony Public Schools.

Atlas and Cosmos are all linked to Fethullah Gülen and his network of schools that operate under such innocuous names as Magnolia, Sweetwater, Pioneer, Horizon, Noble, Dove, Bluebonnet, Beehive, Truebright, and, of course, Pelican and Harmony.

The federal investigation, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, does not involve links to terrorism, but centers on charges that the organization uses taxpayer money to bring teachers to this country from Turkey and other countries who are members of the religious group and then requires the teachers to kick back up to 60 percent of their salaries to Gülen’s Hizmet movement.

The Gülen-run schools receive taxpayer funding and also receive private financial support, much of it from the Walton Family, owners of Wal-Mart. The Walton Family Foundation, for example, provided $230,000 in funding for Abramson as recently as 2007.

Gülen, who was forced to flee his native Turkey in 1998 after being charged with attempting to overthrow the secular Turkish government, now resides in a mountain fortress in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

He was granted a permanent residency visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability” and as “a leader of award-winning schools for underserved children around the world,” according to his attorneys, even though he does not hold a high school diploma. Now, however, in an effort to ward off investigations, he claims that neither he nor his movement have an affiliation with the charter schools.

The investigations of Gülen and his organization, which federal officials have refused to confirm or deny, are being coordinated by prosecutors in Pennsylvania’s Middle district in Scranton, and involve hundreds of Gülen charter school members nationwide.

Ostensibly, that would include the two Pelican-run schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

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