James Bowman is officially listed as the Chief Information Officer for the Louisiana Department of Education (DOE).
At $148,000 a year, he ostensibly presides over information technology for DOE.
He may even be the one responsible for redesigning the department’s web page to make it all but impossible to navigate. So much the better to keep the public uninformed about the machinations of DOE.
LouisianaVoice made its initial public information request pursuant to a curious Bowman email way back on March 10 but DOE did not get around to responding until Wednesday of this week. Our request read, in part:
• Pursuant to the Public Records Act of Louisiana (R.S. 44:1 et seq.), I respectfully request the following information:
• Emails sent by James Bowman the week of March 4-7, 2013 relative to directing staff not to attend BESE meeting.
The email was sent by Bowman on March 7 to Dave Elder, Carol Mosley and James McMahon of DOE and read:
• If you have staff that normally attends these meetings, pls advise that they should not attend tomorrow.
Inquiring minds, of course, want to know. Accordingly, we fired off an email to James Bowman, Chief Information Officer for the Louisiana Department of Education, in which we sought…well, information. Our email read thusly:
• What was the reasoning behind your email of March 7 to Dave Elder, Carol Mosley and James McMahon in which you directed them to advise their staff members that “they should not attend” the March 8 BESE meeting?
Bowman opened our email at 6:12 p.m. Wednesday but by 10 p.m. had not responded.
…So much for the information part of his title. Apparently that does not extend to the great unwashed.
For what it’s worth, we were unable to ascertain the exact job titles and salaries of Mosley or McMahon, but Elder was a former information technology director for DOE who has since retired.
As for that mysterious March 8 meeting, the agenda appeared rather routine:
• Academic Goals and Instructional Improvement;
• Administration and finance;
• Educator Effectiveness;
• Policy Information.
We can’t help but wonder if that BESE meeting may have held a clue to DOE’s agreement to provide sensitive student information to a huge computer data base controlled by Fox News honcho Rupert Murdoch—thus the directive to bar certain DOE staff members from attending the meeting.
What might have been buried in that “policy information” item? Or “academic goals and instructional improvement?”
Paranoid? Hell yes.
Louisiana Voice 
Maybe he does not deal with work related issues after work hours. See if he answers in the morning.
Sadly, this is the directive to the rank and file LDOE. They are not to attend the BESE meetings. This actually started under the reign of Pastorek and has continued under the current regime. Under Cecil Picard, staff were encouraged to attend so they could be informed. Obviously that is not the current directive or intent. Only the few LDOE- majority out-of-state elite- are to be informed. The majority of the IT staff are already gone- including Dave Elder. Therefore, since that (and many other sections in the LDOE) have been gutted, the LDOE is becoming a prime target for more privatizing. Remember dismantling of LDOE was the goal of Chas Roemer’s Daddy! Took quite a few years, but sadly it is coming to fruition. Good luck, Louisiana schoolchildren!
Tom I would question civil service director Shannon Templet about the salary discrepancies for these positions. You can go from agency to agency and there will be a different excuse for paying people doing the same job different salaries and different pay scales. Most of these people have bogus job descriptions also. She is just as evil as her boss and a liar also!
The administration wants to do their nefarious deeds with as few witnesses as possible. The effort they put into covering up their actions and to control information are phenomenal. If only they could put the same amount of time into developing plans and actions that actually would help the people of this state there would be no need to control or limit information sharing.
If you are a taxpayer or especially if you are a parent of school children, you should familiarize yourself with the Rupert Murdoch owned company that gathers information on students to share NOT just with school officials,, but to share with for-profit, private companies for NON-educational purposes. It’s the next big money-maker for the fat-cats and violates every privacy concern we ever had. Check out these articles: First from Washington Post: http://wapo.st/WGX7FV Note in the article, one example of how this info can be accessed and used against your child: private companies can access the database and use info to determine if your kid should be employed or not hired. Second article from Reuters: http://reut.rs/WoTdRS Note this article says Louisiana will be entering all your child’s info into the database, and private, for-profit companies who sell educational products are mouth-watering at the prospect. As one parent stated for the article: This information will be abused. Well of course the info will be abused….and used to make money, and used to hinder your child’s chances to get a job, or to get credit, or perhaps in court. Why citizens & parents would allow this is beyond me. They just are not paying attention. School children for sale.
As I have said for many years, “Big business will enslave you faster, more insidiously, and more permanently than big government ever could.” Everyone talks about how intrusive, in your face, and controlling “big brother government” is well you have seen nothing yet and because it is bidness/capitolism they can do it without you knowing.
We are seeing this at just about every state agency and department.
Rank and file employees are prevented from having any working knowledge of what their agencies are actually doing.
In many cases, the Jindal appointed, six figure salary head has gotten rid of the higher level, experienced employees that actually knew what they were doing and how their departments were supposed to operate.
Those employees have been replaced with cronies who will keep their eyes closed to the moral and ethical (and possible criminal?) actions of their department heads.
Bobby’s approval ratings have moved to the lower 30’s for his clandestine attitude toward the open meetings law and other transparency issues within his administration. You would think that others serving at his pleasure would catch on to the fact that he will throw them under the bus once the general public reacts as they did over his tax swap plan.
How did the citizens of his state let things get so out of hand? Are we all so tied to capitalism that we let an anti-education BESE Board just walk in to the poorly constructed education building?
Here is an interesting tidbit – Stephen Osborn who is White’s appointee as Assistant Superintendent who is over federal programs for Louisiana has stated that state law trumps overrides or trumps public law…..hmmmmmm…has he ever taken a Social Studies course?
Is this how Hitler came to power over the people of Germany? Sounds familiar.
Has anyone heard what information will be collected on teachers? I had heard the database would include students and teacher information.