Louisiana Voice

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mercedes Schneider is a teacher in St. Tammany Parish with a background as a statistician and researcher. She has tried on numerous occasions to ellicit a response from John White and the Louisiana Department of Education about what she says are misleading data relative to Louisiana’s high school graduation rates.

By MERCEDES SCHNEIDER

Recently, I had an email from Barbara Leader, reporter for the Monroe News-Star, requesting that I call her. She wrote that she had lost my number and wanted to talk to me. I had conversed and exchanged a series of emails with Ms. Leader twice before, both times about inflation in the 2012 Louisiana school performance scores. Both times the “promised” story loomed on a nonexistent horizon. Here was Horizon Number Three.

This time was different; my colleague Herb Bassett’s and my writings on score inflation had “gone national”, and I sent the link to Ms. Leader. On Dr. Ravitch’s blog, I responded as follows to a comment asking why this information had not been in the local news: “… the papers are skittish about carrying the story. I have sent to the Advocate, Times-Picayune, and Monroe News-Star. Sometimes I get a message initially of interest, then silence.” So, when Ms. Leader contacted me, I thought perhaps this might be the time for a local article. Sometimes it takes “going national” to “go local.”

She phoned during my break (I teach public school), and as I took that call, I was surprised to hear her ask me more than once (and I paraphrase), “Would you be willing to go to a BESE meeting?” This question baffled me; I expected she might first ask if I had been to a BESE meeting with my concerns. In fact I had, in October, and it cost me one of only three personal days I have per year. I was able to speak for about 20 seconds on Value Added Modeling (VAM) issues (“I’m sorry, but that item is not on our agenda today.”) and for three minutes about the misuse of the ACT as a gauge of teacher performance (“Thank you for your comments, and let me tell you why we’re going to go through with this anyway.”) I briefly mentioned my efforts to formally contact John White and BESE via email with my detailed concerns over school performance score measurement issues, VAM instability, and faulty investment of one million dollars into Teach for America (TFA). I told Ms. Leader that there was no real conversation about any of these issues; if I heard anything from White, it was a justifying of his position, nothing more.

(As an aside, let me add that when I write of BESE, I am referring to the established, nine-to-two voting that is characteristic of BESE as a body, one that is pro-corporate-takeover-of-education and anti-traditional-teacher-and school. I am not referring to Ms. Lottie Beebe and Ms. Carolyn Hill. Ms.Beebe has been extremely helpful in aiding my quest to dispense information, including arranging public speaking venues for me, such as the Louisiana Association of Parish Textbook Administrators [LAPTA] annual conference in November.)

A second reason for my surprise at Ms. Leader’s push to have me attend BESE was that I had long before sent my work to Ms. Leader, including my letters to BESE, and she did not ask if I had heard from White/BESE. I told her that since I had used one of my personal days to attend a BESE meeting, I would not use another. She said she might have follow-up questions and would contact me by phone that evening if she did. She said she would talk to her boss about having the article appear in tomorrow’s paper.

No follow-up call. No article. No surprise.

I think it is time for me to write my own account of my interactions with John White and BESE as such are connected to my work on exposing measurement and analysis flaws in “reform” research. Given that White and LDOE try so hard to operate in unanswerable secrecy, and given that the BESE majority is no more that a White/LDOE rubber stamp, I thought it valuable to publicize my interactions with these agencies.

The Louisiana school performance scores have serious problems. This is not my opinion; it is an easily-documented fact. In particular, the 2012 high school/combination school scores are inflated. I discussed such info on the phone with Barbara Leader in late October. At that time, the evidence I had was based upon my informal examination of a column of data called the “transitional baseline.” Ms. Leader said she needed time to investigate this and would be in touch. I sat on this information for weeks in an effort to give Ms. Leader time. I finally called and emailed to see if she had decided not to pursue the story. I received no response; so, I counted myself as released from any obligation, and I moved forward.

I emailed John White and asked only one question: Who calculated the scores? He sent as an answer, “DOE’s Division of Assessment and Accountability.” I sent another email clarifying that I wanted to know exactly who calculated the scores, their names, please. No response.

I decided to write a letter to John White and BESE in which I demonstrated via three different calculations the bias in the high/combination school scores. I received one response, an email from Lottie Beebe, in which she copied me as part of her forwarding my work to a number of people: “FYI…. Please feel free to share with your legislative colleagues. … Don’t you think some should seriously question what is happening in La? … Does one embrace the information provided by one who is a statistician or a politician?”
I appreciate Lottie Beebe.

Thanks to Ms. Beebe’s forwarded email, Mike Deshotels of the Louisiana Educator blog asked me to write a guest spot based upon this first letter to White BESE. A colleague of mine sent John White an email asking him to respond to this blog. In the blog, I mention that White did not respond to my request for the name(s) of those who calculated the school performance scores and that I suspected by now he knew of me and of my professional credentials. So, he directed Dr. Jennifer Baird, an employee of DOE, to send a response. However, Dr. Baird’s so-called response addressed none of the concerns I had regarding the presence of scoring bias or the potentially damaging outcomes of such bias. Instead, Dr. Baird proceeded only justify DOE’s position. There was no hint of concern that DOE error could harm schools and lead to fiscal misappropriation and certainly no expressed desire to right any psychometric wrongs.

Before I continue writing about Jennifer Baird, I need to mention here what I observed about John White from the Molly Horstman incident. Molly Horstman, a TFAer with two years of teaching experience and an expired teaching certificate, was listed on the DOE website as the Director of COMPASS, the teacher evaluation system, for the state of Louisiana. Her identification as Director of COMPASS is documented in this professional meeting bio. Once Horstman’s position and lack of credentials were publicized, John White lied in an email to one of my colleagues as he wrote, “So you know, Molly is not the head of the teacher evaluation process.” It turns out Horstman’s “replacement,” (?) the “real” director, is Hannah Dietsch. However, like Molly Horstman, Ms. Dietsch has only a few years in the classroom: Three years in Baltimore. Dietsch did earn a master’s in education from Harvard, which sounds impressive, but I question any graduate program that will accept a student into a master’s program in school leadership when such a person is currently experiencing only her third year of teaching. The credential becomes a veneer for lack of a solid teaching career, much less the extensive evaluation experience required to lead a state evaluation program.

Regardless of her title, Horstman continues to pull 77k as a DOE “fellow.”

Now back to White’s having Dr. Jennifer Baird respond to my scoring bias letter. In her email to me, she signed her name “Ph.D.” but indicated no title or field. I found this suspect; so, I looked up her dissertation to see if her field is statistics or measurement. Based on her dissertation title, I determined that Baird’s Ph.D. is perhaps educational leadership and/or policy. Thus, like Hannah Dietsch, Jennifer Baird holds a credential but cannot function as an expert given the situation at hand: psychometric inconsistency.

I noticed also that Baird copied her email to a four people: White, Jessica (Tucker) Baghian (and here) Kunjan Narechania, and Erin Bendily. Between the four of them, I was able to determine that, at most, they have nine years of classroom teaching experience. None has training in statistics or measurement. Including White’s 275K salary, this group earns $650k.

Along with a forward of Baird’s email, I sent a second letter to White/BESE. In this letter, I confront White for having someone not qualified to respond to my concerns send an email. I also point out additional information regarding manipulation of the grad index and mislabeling of a column of 2012 data. No response.

Next, I wrote a review of the limitations of Noell’s TFA study and sent it on December 8 in an email to White/BESE. The Noell TFA study has been used as support for the “superiority” of minimally-trained, temporary TFAers. In fact, in October, White/BESE approved spending a million dollars on TFA. However, the Noell TFA study shows no significant results for TFAers outperforming teachers in general. The data quality is suspect, and discussion of the results is slanted.

The same day, December 8, I had an email from Lottie Beebe: “Awesome job! Thank you for providing the ‘rest of the story’!” The next day, December 9, I received email responses within 15 minutes of each other from two other BESE members. The second was a canned acknowledgment from Jindal- appointee Connie Bradford: “Thank you for your email. Your concerns are noted.”

The first response that day came from Jindal-appointee and Board President Penny Dastugue: “I would appreciate it if you would remove penny.dastugue@la.gov from your email list and instead send to sbese@la.gov.” In no uncertain terms, Penny Dastugue, a public servant, was telling me, her constituent, that she no longer wished to receive business pertinent to BESE at her publicized BESE email address and instead desired that I send my concerns, concerns that apparently she had no intent of reading, to an old, generic, BESE email address. On the morning of December 12, I sent this email regarding Dastugue’s response to Will Sentell of the Baton Rouge Advocate.

(Not long after, Sentell printed a slanted article lauding most of BESE for following Jindal’s plan; in the article, he writes, “Now White is expected to get a positive evaluation in January when he goes through his first formal evaluation from the panel.” The evaluation hasn’t happened, yet the outcome is “expected.” Sentell also blocked comments to this article. No opposition allowed.)

Sentell printed no article based on the Dastugue email, but I found it quite the coincidence that that very evening, I had an email response from White via Beth Gleason, an employee of DOE and researcher who worked with Noell on the unstable 2011 VAM study. I also found it interesting that Noell did not respond regarding his own work. Gleason did not write this TFA study. Her comments are a weak defense. White refers to Gleason’s email as a “point by point response.” Not true. Gleason did not respond to all of my concerns. Especially telling was what she chose not to comment on, including the confounding presence of experienced, traditionally trained teachers in the room with some TFAers. And what of that small TFA data set? From a national group that has been around for decades? Glreason glosses over this inconsistency. As one TFAer notes, “TFA has a lot of people who leave because they get burned out.” It is a matter of research ethics to note how self-selection out of TFA affects available data.

That evening, I responded to Gleason’s comments and attached my comments to the original email from White. I noticed that White had chosen to copy this email to BESE members using email addresses other than their BESE addresses. Included on the list was Dastugue’s personal email. Why would White conduct BESE business on email accounts outside of the la.gov accounts assigned to BESE and publicized on BESE’s website? The Jindal administration’s use of personal email accounts to conduct state business had just been made public. Like my Dastugue forward, Sentell also chose to sit on this one.

I received no follow-up response to my comments on Gleason. However, one of my colleagues has continued to press White for a response to my documented evidence of scoring bias. He responded in an email to the effect that he is excused from the issue since BESE guidelines were set before his arrival—a lie, since part of the bias is due to his changing the rules and contributing to the inflated high school scores. White also uses the Advocate article as supposed evidence that the scores are really good—a continued lie pointed out in the comments section—and that he has “delivered what he has promised,” so to speak, by bringing in the ACT test. My colleague Herb Bassett points out White’s lying via White’s manipulation of the grad index in a follow-up post.

That pretty much brings me to the present day. I intent to keep writing, my next planned piece being a paper on the aforementioned TFA “success” study and Gleason’s comments (and noncomments). White likes to say what he does is “for the children.” What White does is more aptly described as “to the children—and teachers—and communities.”

All the more reason to write.

–Mercedes K. Schneider, Ph.D.
Public school teacher and trained, experienced statistician and researcher
St, Tammany Parish, Louisiana

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Just how far is Piyush Jindal willing to go to completely undermine Louisiana’s low- and middle-income citizens—and local governmental entities? Apparently, there are no limits.

First it was the Office of Risk Management that he privatized. That affected about 150 employees, cost the state $75 million and within a year, state insurance claims were being processed not by the original company, not by its immediate successor, but by a third company from New York. Of course, the move did provide jobs for those setting up the claims—somewhere in Tennessee.

Then there was outsourcing of the Office of Group Benefits, which cost another 177 state employees their jobs. This time, about 226,000 state employees, retirees and their dependents stand to be affected by that move should health insurance premiums increase.

Jindal also closed two state prisons and Southeast Louisiana State Hospital in Mandeville, costing hundreds more their jobs. Close on the heels of that move, he announced plans to “partnership” the operations of several state hospitals in New Orleans, Lafayette, Houma, Alexandria, Monroe and Shreveport. More jobs lost.

That move, for the first time, impacted others besides state employees: the state’s working poor who depend on the hospitals for health care. Those numbers are difficult to calculate.

Last month, it was learned that the Department of Revenue and Taxation plans to close all of its satellite offices except for New Orleans. Employees in Shreveport, Monroe Alexandria, Lake Charles and Lafayette got the word just before Christmas that they would be losing their jobs.

This week, it was the Early Childhood Mental Health Support Services that got the axe, meaning another 76 jobs lost.

Thus far, the damage has mostly been restricted to state employees but on Thursday came news that will affect every living, breathing soul in Louisiana.

In a state with 17.7 percent of its citizens living in poverty (fifth-highest poverty rate in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau), Jindal is proposing scrapping individual and corporate income taxes in favor of a 75 percent increase in state sales taxes—from 4 to 7 cents.

Sales taxes are already considered regressive as opposed to income taxes but for a state with that percentage of low-income families, the state’s poor would be particularly hard-hit by their having to pay increased taxes on the purchases of necessities.

Baton Rouge political blogger Bob Mann, who worked for three U.S. senators and former Gov. Kathleen Blanco and who now holds the Manship Chair at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU and who is also director of the school’s Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs, perhaps said it best on his blog Something Like the Truth on Thursday http://bobmannblog.com/2013/01/10/jindals-new-revenue-plan-impose-crushing-tax-increases-on-the-poor/#more-1666:

“…A 100 percent income tax cut would be a fantastic boon to those better-off taxpayers and a giant, punishing tax increase on the poor. Perhaps they (rich and poor) all pay the same rate, but they certainly will not be paying the same percentage of their incomes in state taxes under the Jindal plan.

“Poor families spend the vast majority of their income on necessities. In Louisiana, according to a recent study by the Corporation for Enterprise Development, poor families pay an average of 10.4 percent of their income in local and state taxes, mostly sales taxes. A 75 percent increase in their sales taxes would be devastating to many of those families.

“Take, on the other hand, the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who pay only 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes—half the rate of the poor. Those wealthy families pay a far small percentage of their income in sales taxes.”

Piyush, as is his custom, refused interview requests, choosing instead to ensconce himself on the fourth floor of the State Capitol and sending out his lackeys to regurgitate his prepared statements.
In this case, the prepared statement said, “Eliminating personal income taxes will put more money back into the pockets of Louisiana families and will change a complex tax code into a more simple system that will make Louisiana more attractive to companies who want to invest here and create jobs.”

That was essentially the same thing he said when he signed off on the repeal of the Stelly tax plan in 2008. At the time, he said the repeal would save single filers $500 per year and those filing joint returns would save $1,000. What he did not say was a single filer would have to earn as much as $90,000 per year to save $500 and joint filers would have to earn more than $150,000 a year to save $1,000.

The 2008 median household income for Louisiana was $43,733. In 2011, it was $40,599, according to the Census Bureau.

In reality, the Stelly Plan repeal ended up costing the state $300 million per year.

He neglected to mention in that prepared statement that the elimination of corporate income taxes would not “put more money back into the pockets of Louisiana families,” but probably would put more money back into the pockets of corporations already draining the state with tax incentives, rebates, and exemptions to the tune of about $1.8 billion per year, according to the Louisiana Department of Revenue and Taxation.

For the current fiscal year, personal income taxes are projected to generate $2.58 billion and sales taxes another $2.59 billion. By comparison, corporate income taxes will produce only about $340 million after those $1.8 billion in exemptions.

Unconfirmed reports indicated that Jindal is also proposing the abolishment of severance taxes on oil and gas. That source alone produced $266 million in revenues to the state in the last quarter of 2012, a rate of more than $1 billion per year.

Jindal, in a meeting with legislative leaders that also included Revenue Secretary Tim Barfield (who doubles as the agency’s general counsel as justification of his salary that is double that of his predecessor) and Jindal Chief of Staff Paul Rainwater, passed around a sheet of paper containing his proposed sales tax exemptions but the legislators were not allowed to keep the list.

Piyush also tossed out the idea of a new cigarette tax of more than a dollar a pack.

That’s more than a little ironic given that in 2011, Jindal vetoed the renewal of a 4-cent cigarette tax, claiming at the time that it was tantamount to a new tax, forcing the legislature to pass a constitutional amendment to reinstate the tax.

Former Rep. Vic Stelly (R-Lake Charles), who initially authored the tax plan that bore his name, was contacted in Gulf Shores, AL, Thursday and his initial response was to question how the state will make up lost revenue with a sales tax “unless the tax is 30 or 40 percent.”

He said studies to replace the federal income tax revealed it would be necessary to institute a national sales tax of about 23 percent to offset the income tax revenue. “That’s on top of state and local sales taxes,” he said, adding that any figures the administration comes up with would probably be unrealistic.

State Rep. Joe Harrison (R-Napoleonville) described himself as out of the governor’s inner circle and expressed doubts about rushing through such a radical change in the state’s tax structure.

“We did that with (education) vouchers and pension reform without properly assessing the adverse effects,” he said. “I call it the ‘Custer theory.’ Gen. Custer rushed down the hill thinking he was going to mop up at Little Big Horn. Instead, he ended up wondering where all those Indians came from. I would hope that we would back off and look at this in, say, a special session so that we could give the issue a thorough airing.”

State Rep. Rogers Pope (R-Denham Springs), a retired Livingston Parish school superintendent, viewed the effects of the increase from the standpoint of local governments.

“School boards, police juries and municipalities live and die by sales taxes and in most cases, those taxes are renewable. We currently have a 10 percent sales tax in Livingston parish—7 percent local and 3 per cent state. If the governor’s proposal passes, that’s 13 percent sales tax and when those local tax propositions come up for renewal, the voters just aren’t going to go for it.”

Pope said he has no idea what Piyush is trying to do. “I’m not sure even he knows,” he said.

That sentiment was echoed by readers of the Baton Rouge Advocate.

“Jindal would not comment because he refuses to be accountable as he expects of everyone else,” one wrote.

Another reader wrote, “And how will we replace $3 billion annually. I’m going to guess cut health care, especially for the poor, cut higher education even further, cut public education, massive layoffs for public sector workers, no more infrastructure projects.”

“Way to care about the little guy,” said a third.

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