“There are safeguards in place within the Course Choice program but if these behaviors are occurring, we will take steps to ensure it’s either not happening or the behavior is corrected.”
—State Superintendent of Education John White, in addressing news than 1,100 students in Caddo and Webster parishes have been registered for Course Choice courses—without their knowledge or approval. The company, FastPath Learning of Austin, Texas, has as its chairman the former Secretary of Education under former President George W. Bush and who served as an education adviser to recent presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
“This goes back to all of the education reforms that were passed within eight days during last year’s session. This is what you get.”
—State Rep. Gene Reynolds (D-Dubberly), commenting on the apparent lack of oversight of Course Choice providers who get one-half of their tuition upon registering students for Course Choice courses.
Louisiana Voice 
There now seems to be a forest of Bushes involved in swindling the revenues of Louisiana state government. The free enterprise system’s private education systems are most definitely, reeling, on the ropes, and bankrupt if its prophets grovel at the feet of government to find their funding. The Iraq war was similarly privatized to mercenaries and many foreign industries and businesses so that it became a gigantic slush fund of unimaginable resources not subject to accountability. That imbecelic Bush war will have cost(counting the medical costs of returned wounded veterans) 6 TRILLION of our dollars effectively eviscerating our government’s revenues and bankrupting our nation. These snake oil salesmen whipped up that ill-fated fiasco much the same way as Jindal premeditatively whipped up his doomed voucher program with many salvos of teacher bashing as the prelude to this giant Walmartian-like swindle. To me, there is criminality involved in White’s obvious sabotage of public education from the ever increasing demands upon the teachers and principals for inane paper work and testing students so much that there is no time to teach them anything. S-A-B-O-T-A-G-E! Is sabotage still a crime?
To me, any private institution which is so poor and ill construed to need public funding, needs to summarily become a public institution with all of the supervision that that implies.
Dude, that last line actually left a mark. Public institutions are not simply poorly run private institutions and obviously oversight (or adult supervision) is something DOE, needs but doesn’t have despite giving the illusion it’s run for the public.
I agree with everything you say but I must say that I do enjoy your use of the word walmartian. I must borrow it for both adjective and noun purposes. 🙂
In futility and with the 3 minutes afforded, I questioned the course provider section of action two before senate education. Specifically, I asked about a program that would pay 50% of the course fee to providers for what amounted to little more than a list and the remainder when the student completed whatever. However, if nothing more happened than the capturing of a “name” then there was no provisions for getting the taxpayers’ money back.
I remember only silence as the response.
The fact that I noted the problem didn’t make me smart;however, it did suggest that I could read.
This is predictable and sad. The chickens are hatching and roosting.
Our successful challenge of funding of these programs has given our elected leaders an opportunity to either fix thIs mess or to compound the disaster.