Louisiana Voice

More information about the 14-minute telephone conversation between Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White and State Rep. Alan Seabaugh (R-Shreveport) is emerging that reveals a concerted but complicated effort by White to placate Seabaugh’s demand that evaluation scores be adjusted upward for three teachers at South Highlands Elementary School.

Even as he was attempting to surreptitiously help three teachers in his House district, Seabaugh was trying unsuccessfully to push a bill through this year’s legislature that would have prohibited the payroll deduction of union dues for public employees.

HB-552 was aimed at teachers unions like the Louisiana Federation of Teachers for successfully challenging Gov. Bobby Jindal’s education reform bills of 2012. It was defeated by a single vote with Rep. Jerome “Dee” Richard (I-Thibodaux) casting the deciding vote.

The information, provided by a source with intimate knowledge of the details of the events, shows that Seabaugh took an active part in trying to implement changes on behalf of the three teachers through repeated contacts with White.

White, in order to appease the lawmaker, soon began talking and messaging within DOE about a “Seabaugh Solution” so openly that Seabaugh apparently felt compelled to tell White that he did not want his named associated with the solution.

The chronology of events was detailed in a two-page document provided LouisianaVoice by the confidential source.

Last Wednesday, LouisianaVoice reported on the 14-minute conversation between Seabaugh and White that was recorded by an employee who White had apparently asked to participate on a speaker phone to answer any questions that Seabaugh might have that White could not address.

Seabaugh is said to have initiated the conversation with White after he was contacted by three of his constituents—teachers at South Highlands Elementary in his Shreveport district. The teachers were unhappy with poor evaluations and Seabaugh attempted to persuade White to try to help those specific individuals. White apparently attempted to accommodate the lawmaker even as he complained to him in that telephone conversation that he felt like a “ping pong ball” being bounced between the governor’s office, Seabaugh and Chas Roemer, President of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Because LouisianaVoice obtained several emails about the Value Added Model (VAM, also known within DOE as Compass) that were written around October of 2012, it was estimated that the telephone conversation between Seabaugh and White occurred around that time. The sequence of events outlined in the latest document reinforces the accuracy of that estimation.

In October of 2012, the source said, a teacher at South Highlands made a data request of DOE in which she wanted to know why she had received an ineffective rating. “A report was produced that showed that her 2011-2012 students’ average scaled score for the content that she teaches declined when compared to those same students’ average scaled score for the previous year.” The document added that “Her students performed worse than other students in the same grade and content in Caddo Parish or the state (as a whole).”

The document said White “began talking (and) messaging about a ‘Seabaugh Solution’ when he was asked about the fix for these teachers.” When people found out about the fix that would accommodate those three teachers, they became angry at Seabaugh and contacted his office (to) make sure he was aware of their ire. “Seabaugh told John White that he did not want his name associated with the solution,” the source said. “White made it clear to his staff that they should not use the term ‘Seabaugh Solution’ anymore.”

The document said many fixes were tried, “but none of them captured all the three South Highlands teachers. “For one teacher, one of her students who was in Mastery in third grade was now in Approaching Basic in her fourth grade class.”

Baton Rouge Advocate reporter Will Sentell apparently heard rumors of the attempt and requested an interview with White, according to the letter to LouisianaVoice. This created the problem for White of how to provide the report to Sentell without it being seen as coming directly from DOE.

“A meeting was held in which (DOE general counsel) Joan Hunt was present,” the document said. “Others at the meeting had copies of the report…and it was obvious to those who read (it) that these three teachers are ineffective teachers.” Those in the meeting “agreed unanimously that these teachers were ineffective but (they) could not come out and say it openly (because of Seabaugh’s involvement in the attempts to adjust their evaluations). Hunt said that her child is gifted and she would not want her child to be in that school with those teachers,” the source said.

As a solution, it was decided to use an intermediary to provide Sentell with the requested report. The intermediary was instructed to say she had obtained the information through a data request from DOE—apparently so that it could not be traced directly back to White. During the interview, White even asked Sentell where he got the report, the document said.

During the course of his interview with Sentell, White confided “in an off-the-record remark” that the three teachers were ineffective and that Seabaugh was “pushing hard” to fix it.

“At the start of the new year (supposedly January 2013), the focus was on finding a fix for these teachers because White had gone around saying that there would be a fix for teachers instructing high achieving students,” the source said. “Several of the fixes (attempted) could not be used because (they) would not cover all three teachers. This indicates how bad those teachers really are.”

“Other fixes were discarded because Hannah Dietsch (Assistant Superintendent overseeing teacher evaluations at $130,000 per year) was afraid they would have ‘messaging’ problems,” the document said, adding that the criteria for the fixes were:

• It had to capture all three teachers;

• It had to be done at the ‘back end’ of the model (in the calculations);

• It had to be simple to message.

The original model has a ceiling built into it that prevents students from being predicted to achieve a score that is higher than the test itself. The highest a student can score in the LEAP/iLEAP is 500. The ceiling is different for each content area. It may be around 485 for English Language Arts (ELA). That would give a teacher a plus-15 for every student who scores a perfect score of 500 on the test.

When coming up with the numerous fixes, the letter said it was suggested to White that if a student scored 485, that teacher would automatically get a plus-15 instead of a zero. If a student scored 490, that teacher would automatically get a plus-15 for that student instead of a plus-10.

“White did not like that suggestion and ‘chewed off the ass’ of the person who suggested it,” the source said. That was the part in the (recording) where one employee whispered to another about a suggested fix that White did not like—but later agreed to in his telephone conversation with Seabaugh.

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