Posted in BESE, Education, Governor's Office, Notable Quotables, Public Records on May 5, 2013| 3 Comments »
“This story is pure innuendo and drama—a fiction—under the guise of investigative reporting.”
—Superintendent of Education, in a Jan. 25 email to Southern Education Desk reporter Sue Lincoln, who was preparing a story on skewed data on student test scores released by White’s Department of Education.
“He (White) told me to ‘Check with people over you to be sure this is the right thing to do.'”
—Reporter Sue Lincoln, on a conversation with White over her story about student test score data.
Posted in BESE, Contract, Contracts, Education, Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Teague, Vouchers on May 5, 2013| 15 Comments »
Blind, unquestioning loyalty has long been a prerequisite for serving in the administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Any administrator, of course, expects his appointees to be loyal, and rightfully so. There’s no argument at any level with that basic principle of employment, whether one works for a bicycle shop or the President.
Generally, though, an intelligent CEO will seek candid input from subordinates—even if that input differs from his management philosophy. The free exchange of ideas is, after all, the foundation for growth and progress in any organization.
Except with the Jindal administration.
At least a dozen firings/demotions have documented the belief that if you don’t drink the Jindal Kool-Aid, if you so much as give a flickering thought to dissent, you will be teagued.
Teagued, of course, is the term born of Jindal’s firing of state employees from rank and file workers to state board members to university presidents and cabinet officials and of the demotions of at least four legislators from their committee assignments.
To this point, the firings and demotions have been limited to state employees and legislators.
No longer.
Now there may reason to believe the Jindal retaliation team has reached into the private sector and the perpetrator is none other than Superintendent of Education John White.
The latest victim may be Sue Lincoln, formerly a reporter for Louisiana Public Broadcasting (LPB), and a veteran of 35-years’ reporting experience.
Lincoln, who lives in Baton Rouge, is careful not to say outright that White had her fired, but the evidence is pretty convincing.
The Southern Education Desk, headquartered in Atlanta, GA., is funded by a multi-million dollar grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and reports on education news from five states—Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana. While Lincoln worked for LPB as a reporter for the Southern Education Desk, her salary was paid from the grant.
It is, or was, a two-year grant administered through Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) and involved eight stations—five National Public Radio and three Public Broadcast System television stations. They included WLPB-TV and WRKF Radio, both Baton Rouge stations.
Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) President Chas Roemer feigned surprise and/or ignorance of reports of manipulations of student test scores by the Department of Education (DOE) during a Senate Education Committee hearing last week but the truth is Lincoln first reported on the department’s suppression of data as early as February 12.
It was that report that most probably ended her reporting tenure with LPB and the Southern Education Desk.
The report cited studies by Mercedes Schneider, Ph.D., a teacher in St. Tammany Parish which called into question dramatic jumps of up to 25 points in high school standardized test scores.
Lincoln noted that Herb Bassett, who holds a master’s degree in mathematics and who teaches in LaSalle Parish, also saw major discrepancies in statistics released by DOE. Bassett is the same one who at last week’s Senate Education Committee accused DOE and White of releasing fraudulent data.
It was that data about which Roemer denied any knowledge but promised he’d “look into it.”
Immediately after we posted Roemer’s denial, Schneider emailed LouisianaVoice to say, “I have a document that proves he (Roemer) is lying.”
She promptly followed that email with a copy of a letter she sent to White and BESE members (including Roemer) on Dec. 1, 2012 in which she called attention to what she said was “scoring bias” in the 2012 school performance scores. (We will elaborate more on the contents to that and other documents in subsequent posts as our coverage of this growing story continues.)
White apparently turned up the heat on Lincoln and her bosses in Atlanta in an effort to kill the story.
He first told Lincoln the story was “too complicated for television” and that “Even the New York Times doesn’t have enough ink and paper to do it justice,” Lincoln said. “He accused me of sucking up to Diane Ravitch.” Ravitch is research professor of education at New York University and a leading opponent of current education reform trends.
“He told me to ‘check with people over you to be sure this is the right thing to do,’” Lincoln said
A series of emails between Lincoln and White is even more revealing.
At 1:28 p.m. on Jan. 23, as White prepared for a weekend in New Orleans with his wife (She has never moved to Louisiana from their New York home, which should say something about White’s long-range plans for remaining in Louisiana), Lincoln emailed him:
“John, thank you for your call and the copy of the letter you sent out. After conferring with my editors here and in Atlanta, they want me to go ahead with the story. Please don’t let it affect your evening with your wife, but I will be coming down to N.O. to interview you at 10 tomorrow morning.
“I’ll give you a statement instead,” White tersely replied six minutes later.
As Lincoln delved further into the questionable data, she sought a comment from White who, instead of addressing the apparent problem, went on the attack.
Two days later, at 8:51 a.m. on Jan. 25, Lincoln emailed White: “Due to an electrical fire at LPB Wednesday night (Jan. 23), we were without video-editing capability for the majority of the day Thursday. As a result, the airing of my story on the 2012 SPS (school performance scores) analysis has been pushed back to Feb. 1.
“Because of this delay, I have to ask again—would you consider going on camera to make a statement?”
Four minutes later, at 8:55 a.m., White, apparently not having read Lincoln’s email asking for an on-camera statement, wrote: “Your source knowingly distorts facts in print, but you are using her as a source on the very issue about which she distorts facts.
“This story is pure innuendo and drama—a fiction—under the guise of investigative reporting.”
Then, 19 minutes later, at 9:14, White, sent another email saying, “Sue, take a look at what your source has written here. First she lies about my experience working in schools. But more than that, she goes out of our (sic) way to assert that my administration created this formula regarding graduation rate bonus points and such.”
Finally, at 9:29 a.m., 38 minutes after Lincoln asked him to appear on camera, White responded: “No thanks. If reported accurately, this is a story of a formula and a calculation by way of that formula. The number and the formula can speak for themselves.”
“I can’t say for certain that the story is the reason I’m no longer reporting for the Southern Education Desk,” Lincoln said. The grant is currently under consideration for renewal but LPB informed Lincoln they were “going in a different direction” should the renewal be approved.
WRKF was not a partner in the initial grant, but has asked to become a partner if there is a third year of funding.
“The Southern Education Desk managing editor at GPB was unfailingly supportive of doing investigative stories,” Lincoln says. “And he was insistent that there needed to be a ‘firewall’ between the financial and political concerns of LPB management and what Southern Education Desk reporters covered.”
So why would LPB crater to White’s demands?
First, there is the factor of Course Choice providers. Described by DOE as “an innovative educational program that provides Louisiana students with access to thousands of high-quality academic and career-oriented courses,” the program simply allows practically any provider to offer online courses to students—on the state’s tab. Not only may just about anyone, private or public sector, offer courses, but they also are free to charge just about whatever they want.
Bottom line: there’s big money for Course Choice providers.
One of the approved providers is Louisiana Public Broadcasting.
Follow the money.
Second, LPB has a contract with the Iberville Parish School Board to provide certain curriculum and instruction to the parish system. Elvis Cavalier is the Iberville curriculum director, or Chief Academic Officer. He also serves as Director of Academies, also known as principal of the little-known Math, Science and Arts (MSA) Academy.
Little is known about the school because it flies under the radar. It does not exist for all practical purposes. It is not listed among Louisiana public schools and its student scores are not reported to DOE or to the federal government.
Known informally as a “shadow school,” scores for its 1200 students are spread out among the other public schools in Iberville Parish. This allows Iberville School Superintendent Ed Cancienne to boast—and he does—that Iberville’s performance score “has grown.” He neglects to add that that growth is primarily the result of infused scores from the “non-existent” MSA Academy.
Lincoln said she began investigating that story and her editors at LPB kept telling her to get additional information. “When I’d get that, they’d want more. It kept on that way until I was finally informed there would be no story,” she said.
Follow the money.
“I can’t prove that I was terminated because of pressure or implied threats from White regarding the Course Choice program or because of the shadow school story,” Lincoln said.
“All I can do is connect the dots.”
Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Public Records, Recovery School District, RFP, Request for Proposals, RSD, Transparency, Vouchers on May 1, 2013| 17 Comments »
The vote was a foregone conclusion; the minds were made up long before the Senate Education Committee members cast their votes to kill SB 41 by Sen. Bob Kostelka (R-Monroe).
The vote that killed the bill was anti-climactic at best. The testimony of a band director and self-proclaimed “highly qualified” math teacher, however, provided the bombshell that Superintendent John White and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) would rather you not know.
His testimony evoked memories of Michelle Rhee’s tumultuous reign in Washington, D.C. and of more recent events in Atlanta.
It was purely academic that only two of the eight committee members would vote in favor of sending the bill to make the Louisiana Superintendent of Education position elective again after nearly two decades of having an appointive superintendent.
And one of those two votes in favor—that of Sen. Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe) was purely for show because (a) he knew the result well in advance, so his vote would not affect the outcome and (b) about 75 percent of those attending the committee meeting were from Ouachita Parish—and they all supported the bill. Walsworth, if nothing else, is at least capable of reading a room.
Walsworth, you may remember, was the senator who last year made a complete ass of himself during a committee hearing on science vs. creationism. A teacher was testifying about how her science students were growing cultures in her classroom when Walsworth asked the stupefyingly inane question of whether the cultures could produce humans.
This is your senator, Ouachita Parish. Be proud.
But enough of Walworth’s political pandering and asinine questions; Herb Bassett of nearby Grayson was the real story because his testimony placed charges on the table that heretofore have only been whispered about in the halls of the Claiborne Building.
Where others within the Department of Education (DOE) have alluded privately to data suppression and manipulation of school performance scores that artificially inflated graduation rates, Bassett, a band director who said he was “highly qualified” to teach math, publicly charged White, BESE and DOE of misrepresenting test scores and then covering up the lie by removing the data from the Louisiana Believes website. “This is data suppression,” Bassett said.
He said he was asked by his principal last October to look into his school’s score so that it could be improved in the future. “My subsequent research revealed deceit, distortion, manipulation of scores and data suppression,” he said.
“In mid-December, I sent you a report documenting the gross inflation of the high school performance scores. The Department covered up the inflation by intentionally mislabeling an important column of data in the initial public release of the scores.”
Bassett clarified that statement later, saying he sent his findings to all 144 state legislators and every school district superintendent and that he received an acknowledgement from the legislative assistant to Sen. Conrad Appel (R-Metairie), chairman of the committee, that Appel had received his report.
“The data, the Transition Baselines, showed that the GEE (Graduation Exit Exam)—which was being phased out—and the new EOC (End of Course) tests were mis-calibrated by 7.5 points. That’s half a letter grade,” Bassett said. “Had it been correctly labeled, the inflation would have been obvious—at least to me.”
Meanwhile, he said, BESE was given a different version of the scores with the Transition Baselines correctly labeled. “This shows intent to deceive,” he said.
LouisianaVoice has received information from several sources inside DOE that corroborate Bassett’s claim but because of DOE’s refusal to provide requested records, little has been written about the claimed deception.
He later provided LouisianaVoice with a copy of the report that he sent to legislators and local school superintendents. We will be expanding on that report in subsequent posts.
Bassett further cited what he claimed was manipulation of scores.
“At Mr. White’s first BESE meeting as State Superintendent, the department recommended a graduation index formula change. The change ensured that scores would only go up or stay the same. This raised the average score another four points.
“Thanks to the Transition Baselines, the switching to the EOC did not affect the growth scores but this (the graduation index formula change) did. There are at least 20 schools that would not have earned top gains status without it. That’s over $160,000 in those big checks passed out in PR campaigns,” he said in reference to recent teacher bonuses passed out by DOE as performance awards.
“And the graduation rate data set that I used to compute this has been removed from the Louisiana Believes website (the DOE website). That is data suppression.”
Bassett said he made a five-minute video explaining the problems with the 2011 and 2012 DOE reports on the Value Added Model (VAM), also known as COMPASS, the department’s teacher evaluation program. He said the problems he found “clearly contradict DOE’s current claim that VAM is stable. “This inconvenient data have been suppressed,” he said.
He said LEAP and iLEAP data files that contain the actual numbers of students at each achievement level have been removed. “Only percentage data are given,” he said. “Meanwhile, the new School Assessment System will award bonus points based on the number or percent—whichever is greater—of non-proficient students who surpass their VAM targets. This biased system more generously awards points to schools with over 100 non-proficient students. Without the (actual) numbers, we will not know which schools disproportionately benefit from it.
“Most of the data I used are gone from the new website,” he said.
He said that White is asking “that we believe that VAM has miraculously become stable since the reports by its creators have disappeared.”
Though Bassett did not elaborate on the latter point, LouisianaVoice also has received information that the creators of VAM later became concerned at the direction the program was taking and sent several emails expressing that apprehension to superiors who ignored the messages.
BESE president Chas Roemer (R-Baton Rouge) was called to the witness table and asked about Bassett’s charges. Roemer said he had heard nothing about Bassett’s claims, but that he would “look into it.”
It would difficult to imagine that the president of BESE would know nothing of claims of manipulation of data by White and DOE in light of cheating scandals in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. In Atlanta, former superintendent Beverly Hall and several public school staff members were recently indicted in an alleged scheme to cheat on Georgia state tests, including the erasure of students’ incorrect answers and replacing them with correct answers.
A similar scandal brought down the administration of former Washington, D.C. superintendent Michelle Rhee, once the national poster child of school reform.
With the negative publicity those two cheating scandals have received, one would think that the president of a state education board would be aware of any hint of a similar event on his watch.
Roemer was asked to look into Bassett’s allegations and to report back to the committee.
If anyone reading this cares to wager that Roemer will ever report back to the committee members, that the committee will ever follow up on Bassett’s embarrassing charges, or that White or BESE will ever take corrective measures, we know several skeptics who will cover the bet—and give you odds.
Posted in BESE, Budget, Charters, Civil Service, Education, Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, Layoffs, Recovery School District, RSD on April 28, 2013| 10 Comments »
The announcement has already gone out in the Department of Education (DOE) and on Monday, an official layoff plan will be presented to the Louisiana Civil Service Commission.
We hope the commissioners will consider the fate of affected employees who have families to support and mortgages, tuition, and car notes to pay before approving the plan in the same routine manner as with recent layoff plans.
That, after all, is the most damning aspect of this entire administration: the fact that human lives are affected adversely in the name of greed, power and ego. They are people who have names and faces. They have human emotions just like the rest of us. They go to work, come home and mow the lawn. They fish on weekends and perhaps coach their kids in softball, baseball and soccer. They sit beside us at church and in the movie theater.
They grew up believing that if they studied hard in school, made good grades, acted as responsible citizens and worked hard at their jobs, they would realize the American dream of a home, a family, and the opportunity for their children to do better than they.
That may be the way it’s turning out for some, but for the most part, state workers today are living with the same fears of insecurity as the rest of us. The administration of Bobby Jindal is doing everything in its power, through a compliant and pitifully weak legislature, to thin the herd, as it were, of the most vulnerable state employees—those with no one to speak on their behalf—by firing thousands of decent, hard-working employees and gutting the retirement of those who remain.
And what about the private citizen, those who do not work for the state? Yes, you have a dog in this hunt, too, whether you know it or not, whether or not you are willing to pull yourself away from Duck Dynasty or American Idol long enough to get involved.
It is your children whose public education is being destroyed before your very eyes. It is their tuition costs that are soaring because Gov. Bobby Jindal, perhaps the weakest—and at the same time, most power hungry and ambitious—governor this state has seen for at least 100 years insists on keeping taxes low for his constituents and corporate entities who contribute heavily to his campaigns. Altogether, tax breaks, exemptions and incentives have been handed to these supporters on a silver platter to the tune of some $5 billion a year in breaks.
It is the state that suffers at Jindal’s bumbling, self-righteous refusals to accept federal Medicaid funds, broadband internet funds, federal funds for a passenger rail line between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and federal funds for early childhood development.
His reason? He doesn’t like to accept federal funds with the strings that are attached. Well, he certainly accepts massive federal funding to pay for hundreds of contracts awarded by DOE when it fits his agenda. He has no problem accepting billions in federal highway funding dollars. And despite his protestations to the contrary, he had no problem accepting federal stimulus money to dole out to local governments at Protestant churches during his first term of office.
By the way, does anyone happen to know the number of churches he has visited since his re-election?
None.
Zero.
Nil.
Nada.
Zilch.
Yea, not one.
He also has had no problem with accepting hurricane relief funds. Of course, he probably would have been ridden out of the state on a rail had he declined those funds at a time they were so desperately needed. But the Road Home Program, run by his appointees, has a less than stellar record in administering hundreds of millions of federal funds as evidenced by a recent audit that found that more than $100 million may have been misspent.
So now we’re looking at a significant layoff at DOE. The notice went out to DOE employees on Friday (that’s when news releases that cast the administration in a bad light are most likely to be issued).
Early word is some three dozen employees will get the axe, to become effective on May 30.
“This layoff is being proposed due to a reduction of state funds of $3.4 million in the Operating Budget for fiscal year 2013-2014.
But wait. They’re trying to save $3.4 million?
A printout of DOE employees reveals a list of fairly hefty salaries of unclassified (appointed) employees in both DOE and the Recovery School District (RSD).
There are 54 employees of DOE and RSD who earn $100,000 or more per year for a total payroll of $6.7 million.
The breakdown shows there are 32 RSD unclassified employees earning a total of $3.66 million and 22 DOE unclassified employees earning $100,000 or more with a total payroll of another $3 million.
And that is just those making more than $100,000. There are 86 who make $90,000 or more in both DOE and RSD and only six of those are classified employees—all in DOE.
Let’s take a look at some of the individuals, their job titles and salaries.
Recovery School District:
• Neeta Boddapati—Administrator, Other Pupil: $95,000;
• Clara Bradford—Clerical Other Special Programs: $95,000;
• Ronald Bordelon—Administrator, Chief Officers: $150,000;
• Edwin Compass—Director: $125,000;
• Nicole Diamantes—Administrator, Other Special Programs: $105,000;
• Patrick Dobard—RSD Superintendent: $225,000;
• Gabriela Fighetti—Administrator, Regular Programs: $117,000;
• James Ford—Administrative Superintendent: $145,000;
• Lona Hankins—Director: $131,000;
• Helen Molpus—Administrative Chief, Officers: $115,000;
• Dana Peterson—Administrative Superintendent: $125,000;
Bear in mind that even with all the high salaries and impressive sounding titles that go with them, the RSD has an abysmal record:
• All 15 direct-run RSD schools were assigned a letter grade of “D” or “F.” compared to only one of the five (20 percent) Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) direct-run schools.
• Of the 42 charter RSD schools, 33 (79 percent) received a “D” or “F” compared to none of the 11 charter schools run by the OPSB.
• Of the 5422 students attending direct-run RSD schools, 100 percent received a “D” or “F.”
• Of the RSD students attending charter schools, 15,040 (76 percent) attend schools with grades of “D” or “F.”
DOE—State Activities:
• Erin Bendily—Deputy Superintendent: $140,000;
• Nicholas Bolt—Fellow: $105,000;
• James Bowman—Director: $148,000;
• Kenneth Bradford—Director: $110,000;
• Hannah Dietsch—Assistant Superintendent: $130,000;
• Howard Drake—Liaison Officer: $160,000;
• Joan Hunt—Executive Counsel: $125,000;
• Gary Jones—Executive Officer: $145,000;
• Kerry Laster—Executive Officer: $155,000;
• David “Lefty” Lefkowith—Director: $146,000;
• Kunjan Narechania—Chief of Staff: $145,000;
• Stephen Osborn—Assistant Superintendent: $125,000;
• Elizabeth Scioneaux—Deputy Superintendent: $132,800;
• Jill Slack—Director: $124,000;
• Gayle Sloan—Liaison Officer: $160,000;
• Melissa Stilley—Liaison Officer: $135,000;
• Francis Touchet—Liaison Officer: $130,000;
• John White—Superintendent: $275,000;
• Heather Cope—Director: $125,000.
If John White sincerely wished to save $3.4 million, he could probably do with fewer liaison officers, directors and “fellows,” whatever that is.
White has deliberately brought in a bevy of highly-paid, appointees whose credentials, like those of Lefkowith, might have little to do with education and more to do with political loyalty.
But then, White was himself brought in by Jindal to do the governor’s bidding—even before his official appointment.
Jindal’s first attempt at installing White was rejected by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and he was not officially appointed superintendent until after a new board took office in January of 2012. But that did not stop White—and Jindal—from moving forward with their agenda.
In December of 2011, with Ollie Tyler ostensibly serving as acting superintendent, personnel changes were in the offing in the department when White announced to the staff members involved in the proposed changes, “Nothing gets done until I say so.”
That’s confidence.
That’s arrogance.
That’s the way things are done in this administration. Disregard of the law has become the order of the day.
Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, BESE, Budget, Education on April 26, 2013| 33 Comments »
EDITOR’S NOTE: LouisianaVoice traditionally addresses state political events as they occur. Our posts generally run between 1,000 and 1,500 words in length. Recently, however, attorney Nancy Picard, a Metairie law firm partner, submitted the following 4,000-word essay that examines the complicated, confusing and controversial odyssey of Louisiana public education policy since Hurricane Katrina. We found her research to be so thorough and the topic so timely, that we felt it imperative that we run her essay, despite its length, with only minimal editing.
Following is her guest column:
Louisiana’s Great Education Giveaway
By NANCY PICARD
A writer recently hailed federal and state education reform as a new civil rights movement. But the word reform, which means “the improvement . . . of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory,” can hardly be applied to the recent changes in educational law. Most of these changes are not for the better. Instead, they create a separate and wholly unequal educational system masquerading as choice, which serves to destabilize and discredit public schools in the name of improvement and to make state funds accessible to a wide range of individuals and corporations with little or no oversight.
This article examines recent legislation that dramatically expanded state takeover of schools after Hurricane Katrina, shows how the changes are contrary to educational research on effective schools, and points to some examples of schools and programs gone awry under this new regime.
The First Steps: The State Changes the Educational Landscape
Before Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Legislature adopted the No Child Left Behind testing regimen and statutes allowing for the establishment of charter schools. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires states to develop and assess basic skills of all students at select grade levels in order for those school districts to receive federal funding.
Schools must make adequate yearly progress in test scores or face serious consequences, including being publicly labeled a school “in need of improvement,” being required to replace school staff, being turned into a charter school, or being run by a private company or the state office of education.
The Louisiana Legislature had also established the Recovery School District (RSD) to take over five schools run by the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) based on their poor test scores. Immediately following Hurricane Katrina, before the RSD takeover of these schools could be evaluated, state officials pushed for much more sweeping changes.
The Great Takeover: The New Orleans Public Schools in Post-Katrina Louisiana
The 2005-06 school year had begun and 59,000 students were attending OPSB schools; it had an operating budget of $418 million and employed more than 7,000 employees. Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. On September 27, 2005, State School Superintendent Cecil Picard wrote to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) requesting federal policy waivers and federal funding for charter schools. Governor Blanco signed an Executive Order suspending provisions of Title 17 that would have prevented the rapid expansion of charter schools.
After Katrina, the OPSB located available teachers and planned to re-open 52 schools, but state officials did not support this plan. Instead, the Louisiana Legislature enacted Act 35, which provided for automatic transfer of failing schools to the RSD where the school was in a district deemed academically in crisis.
Academically in crisis was defined as any local system in which more than 30 schools are academically unacceptable or more than 50% of its students attend schools that are academically unacceptable. Whereas in August 2005, a School Performance Score (SPS) of 60 was designated passing, after Hurricane Katrina, the passing score increased to 87.5. What had been considered a passing score was now deemed unacceptable. As a result of Act 35, and the changing SPS standard, the RSD took over 102 of the 126 OPSB schools, bringing the RSD total from five before Katrina to 107 schools after. The SPS reverted to 60 again in 2010.
Despite available certified OPSB teachers, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) advertised nationally for teachers, and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) approved a contract with Teach For America (TFA) to train and place 125 TFA members in under-resourced public schools in Greater New Orleans and Southern Louisiana.
Although the state had represented to the DOE that it needed funds to pay salaries and benefits of out-of-work school employees, and received more than $500 million to do so, none of the money was used to pay OPSB teachers. Instead, the funds were diverted to the RSD, while the state actively recruited out-of-state employees, offering signing bonuses and housing allowances as high as $17,500.
By the end of that year, OPSB was operating only five schools and nine charters, and because the money follows the child, OPSB was without funds to pay teachers. All OPSB employees were notified that they would be terminated, and would not be allowed to transfer to the charters.
A Taste for Money and Power
The post-Katrina takeover of New Orleans schools gave the state a taste of funds formerly controlled by the OPSB and whetted its appetite for more. Since 2005, the RSD has continued to expand into low economic areas throughout the state. As of the 2011-12 school year, the RSD directly oversees schools in Orleans, East Baton Rouge, Caddo, St. Helena, and Pointe Coupe Parishes.
Especially disturbing is the St. Helena case where the RSD took over the middle school and refused to return it to local control despite failing to achieve the gains of St. Helena‘s locally-controlled elementary and high schools.14 Twenty more schools throughout the state are currently at risk of being taken over by the RSD.
The RSD, which started in part to keep underperforming schools from falling through the cracks in an overburdened school system, has now grown to a statewide school district with all the same challenges but without local input.
Moreover, in the last two years, the legislature has imposed more draconian requirements on public schools and teachers, while making more funding available to individuals and non-public schools without the same mandates or accountability standards. Rather than help public schools improve, the changes have the effect of discrediting them. For example, legislation changed the procedures for evaluating public school teachers, effective for 2012-13, requiring that 50 percent of a teacher‘s evaluation be based on evidence of growth in student achievement using a value added (VA) assessment model.
Then, on March 23, 2012, at the end of a grueling session, the Louisiana Legislature rushed the passage of two more bills—Acts 1 and 2—with little time allotted for examination or debate. Act 1 only grants tenure to teachers who attain a highly effective evaluation rating for five out of six years, and removes tenure already granted for any year that the teacher is evaluated as ineffective.
Act 1 substitutes a hearing before the local school board with a hearing before a panel comprised of a teacher, a principal and a superintendent designee that must take place within seven days, and after the formerly tenured teacher is terminated. Now, although the new evaluation procedure has never even been fully implemented, teachers may be terminated based on either low student test scores or a disgruntled principal‘s evaluation despite previous years of stellar performance or extenuating circumstances.
Act 2 imposed sweeping changes to education funding, the state‘s charter school system, and the responsibilities of BESE. The Act provided for zero interest loans to charter schools and scholarships for students to attend non-public schools. These scholarships are provided in part from the MFP, previously used exclusively for public education.
Act 2 created independent charter authorizers empowered to authorize charter schools, further removing state and local oversight from the chartering process. Charter schools, not the parish school board, are responsible for directly administering their own budgets.
Finally, Act 2 increased BESE‘s responsibilities exponentially. BESE can now transfer any school in the state to the RSD under certain conditions and is now responsible for overseeing all school boards, charter boards, charter authorizers, online educators, and home-school educators, concentrating power in the hands of one state authority, removed from local control.
The Reckoning: Measuring Education Legislation against the Research
Educational research does not support the changes being implemented with such haste. Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, initially supported NCLB, but now criticizes the draconian penalties imposed on schools for failing to reach unrealistic goals.
She also explains why the promise of charter schools has not been fulfilled. Most studies of charter schools show that they vary widely in quality and reflect no more gains than public schools. Further, as compared to neighboring public schools, charters enroll fewer disabled and disadvantaged students. Their higher graduation rates often reflect very high attrition due to “counseling out” the lowest performing students. The students who are hardest to educate are left to regular public schools, which makes comparisons between the two sectors unfair. This is not a model for public education, which must educate all children.
In their most recent book, Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan, experts on the subject of school reform, summarize the research on successful versus failed school reform efforts.25 Among the failed ―solutions they identify the following ―silver bullets:
• Closing down all the bad schools fails because the vast majority of students end up in other non-performing schools now farther from home.
• Importing ―smart and inexpensive teachers fails because most of these teachers move on after a few years, leaving instability in schools that need stability most.
• Replacing principals whose schools have poor testing results fails because it leaves poverty-stricken schools with more short-term leadership which, again, leads to more instability.
• Relentless timelines for continuous yearly improvement in test scores fails because such improvements are simply unsustainable.
• Focusing on charter schools fails because though exceptional charters change a few lives others rely on ―skim[ming] the best students and teachers from the top, and leav[ing] out students with the most challenging disabilities, or have no system to support students when they get into trouble.
• Performance-based evaluation of teachers fails because it uses measurements of students‘ growth purportedly to reward the best teachers and get rid of the ―worst based on the fallacies that we can solve our problems by substituting bad people with good ones and by over-relying on a narrow range of performance measures.
These ―silver bullets make for ―slick political promises but are based on incorrect assumptions about what directs sustainable school change; and yet they have all been enshrined in Louisiana. For example, the idea of rewarding and terminating teachers based only upon student test results is based on the false assumption that measuring students‘ gains on test scores reflects teachers‘ effectiveness.
But research shows that gains in student achievement are influenced by many factors besides the teacher. A teacher may have very high scores with one class and not another or in one year and not another, regardless of teaching techniques, or show higher scores but be less effective in attaining long-run achievement.
So a teacher, for example, could prepare students for a single year-end test, but neglect areas which would better prepare students for the next grade level. Veteran teachers have been dismissed based on scores who have also been voted teacher of the year and rated as exceeding expectations by supervisors. When teachers cannot identify the relationship between what they do in the classroom and their ratings, they become frustrated and demoralized.
The State Giveth: The Push to Privatize
If eliminating teachers based on faulty evaluations is not good for teachers or students, why would such a program be rushed through the legislature with lightning speed? One reason might be that testing is a growing industry, and testing companies exert an influence on legislation. Pearson, the world‘s largest for-profit education business, has a $32 million five-year contract to produce New York‘s standardized tests and a half billion dollar five-year testing contract with Texas.
Meanwhile, closer to home, a Minnesota company, Data Recognition Corp., has more than $93 million in LDOE contracts. Louisiana has a second contract for testing with the California company, Pacific Metrics, for $39.8 million.
This year more than 155,000 public school students in grades eight, nine, and 10 will take new tests—called EXPLORE and PLAN—designed to help students improve their performance on the ACT, a test of college readiness, which now almost all high school juniors will be required to take at state expense.
At least one-third of Louisiana’s entering high school students operate below the basic level in reading, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, and funding for Louisiana‘s colleges and universities has been slashed, but the state is requiring and paying for large numbers of high school students to take college admission tests.
Why?
Testing companies are not the only ones enjoying Louisiana‘s largess. Louisiana currently has 70 contracts worth more than $1 million each and totaling $282 million; most of these contracts go to out-of-state contractors and are monitored by the LDOE.
The RSD entered a $10.5 million contract with an Illinois company, Durham School Services, to provide bus transportation and another $500,000 to a Missouri company, Transpar Group, to design bus routes and provide oversight. In July 2012, Durham sent lay-off notices to about 200 bus drivers and monitors because the RSD owed the company $7.2 million.
Educational service companies are promoted by ideologically driven lobbying organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which gained notoriety for providing the model for Florida’s Stand Your Ground legislation. ALEC has as members some 2000 state legislators and corporate executives. From 2001 through 2010, ALEC companies spent more than $3 million in Louisiana political campaigns, including almost $132,000 to Governor Jindal.
ALEC drafts model bills on topics ranging from privatizing prisons, to toughening voter ID laws, encouraging privately-owned pensions, and opposing environmental regulation. In 2011, the Center for Media and Democracy, released an extensive archive of ALEC‘s model amendments. The model legislation often advances the economic interest of member corporations. For example, the chief executive officer of Data Recognition—a big Louisiana testing contractor—has been a member of ALEC‘s leadership network.
ALEC‘s model education legislation includes privatizing education through vouchers, scholarships, charters, and tax incentives to businesses and individuals that furnish scholarships to private school; increasing public school testing and reporting; increasing access to all facets of education by private entities and corporations; and reducing the influence of democratically-elected local school boards and school districts.
The ALEC model legislation should sound familiar, because it is now Louisiana law.
“Silver Bullets” Line Some Pockets with Gold
Louisiana now funds so many programs that one must question whether those with access are spending it appropriately. These entities include charter schools, private schools with public scholarships or vouchers, and recipients of course providers funding. Some 45 different charter school boards that manage their own budgets now govern what was once overseen by the Orleans Parish School Board.
The proliferation of charter schools and vouchers throughout the state exponentially increases the opportunity for waste, graft, and theft. In 2008-09, the financial manager of a New Orleans charter school embezzled $660,000 from the school.
Nor is it clear who is monitoring the curriculum and the teaching that is taking place in all of these separate entities. For example, a nonprofit organization, Pelican Education Foundation, ran a charter school, Abramson Science & Technology High School in New Orleans East and Kenilworth Service and Technology Charter School in Baton Rouge. The state revoked Pelican‘s charter for Abramson after a number of allegations surfaced about the school:
• that the school was not serving special education students;
• that a teacher provided a more winnable science project to a student in place of the project that the student himself had prepared;
• that the teacher for its Turkish language class, disappeared from the classroom for months; and the school tried to bribe—through an executive of a Turkish-run business associated with the school—an Education Department official who had investigated some of the complaints.
The charter was revoked only after the Times-Picayune pressed for public records.
Pelican appears to have ties with the Cosmos Foundation, the largest charter operator in Texas, and similarly founded by Turkish educators and businessmen, and with Gulen, a movement started by a Turkish religious scholar. Cosmos schools have come under scrutiny for importing teachers from Turkey and favoring Turkish business contractors for everything from large construction to small vendors selling school lunches, uniforms and web design.
In Georgia, publicly financed charter schools tied to the Turkish Gulen movement came under scrutiny when they defaulted on bonds and an audit found the schools had improperly granted hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts to businesses connected to people committed to the Gulen movement.
Because charters are independent entities, students are left in the lurch when things go awry. Schools can be chartered for a five-year period. After year three, depending on student test scores, they may be told that their charters will terminate after year five. News that Sojourner Truth Academy in New Orleans was closing created an exodus of faculty and students. Students were left with the Hobson‘s choice of attending classes without teachers or transferring to other schools that would require them to repeat the year.
In its last year, Sojourner Truth lost over 20 faculty members. Student transfers lead to a budget crunch because schools receive per pupil funding. Locked into rental and service contracts, Sojourner Truth made drastic spending cuts. Paper towels in bathrooms became a luxury. Students reported a breakdown in discipline, and de facto free periods because qualified teachers could not be found to teach classes. A college-bound student reported not know[ing] any science or what fine arts is.
According to data published by the LDOE, in 2009-2010, almost 28 percent of the Recovery School District teachers were first year teachers as compared to less than 11 percent statewide. The RSD has been in a constant state of flux since its inception, taking over schools and then turning many into charters, each time with a change of faculty. This constant turnover means instability for students who can least afford it.
Now more public funds will flow not only to charters, but also to private schools. Act 2 expands the Student Scholarship for Educational Excellence Program allowing for 5,000 more students to move public school funding to private schools. This year taxpayers will spend approximately $12 million on vouchers. But while the accountability for public schools and teachers increased, there is little to none for the private schools receiving this public money.
The New Living Word School in Ruston topped of the state‘s voucher list, offering the most voucher seats in 2012-13—315—of any school. It was eventually awarded fewer vouchers after several news articles raised questions about the school. But in the prior school year, New Living Word enrolled only 122 students in a limited facility and taught mainly through DVDs.
Even if it ultimately receives fewer than requested, it will operate mostly with public funds, but still be considered private, with no obligation to hold public meetings to report how funds are spent and no consequences if its students fail to measure up.
Other small schools that were provisionally approved for vouchers have had their approval revoked but only after news reports raised questions about them. For example, the Alexandria Town Talk reported that a small school in Deridder, BeauVer Christian Academy, had experienced financial problems in prior incarnations, including liens and financial judgments. An agent and an officer of the limited liability company were convicted of issuing worthless checks.
In New Orleans, more than 24 private schools take part in the expanded voucher program. According to the Times-Picayune, the schools that enrolled voucher students last school year drew 37 percent of their students through vouchers, and voucher students made up more than 60 percent of the student body at some schools.
Like New Living Word, some will dramatically expand their student bodies through vouchers. For example, Life of Christ Christian Academy has 91 new seats available for vouchers which will more than double the enrollment, almost one-third of whom came from the voucher program last year.
Of the voucher students last year, only 13 percent were at grade level on standardized tests. At Upper Room Bible Church Academy, only 24percent of its voucher students met grade level last year; it could now receive almost $1 million in voucher funds. Yet these schools will not be publicly disparaged with labels of C, D, or failing like public schools based on their test results, so parents may move from one failing school to another, without knowing.
The greatest giveaway of all may be through the Louisiana Course Choice Program, which, according to the LDOE‘s website, will create Course Choice with per-course funding and multiple provider course delivery, creating access to unprecedented educational opportunities for tens of thousands of Louisiana students. It will also create an unprecedented bonanza for individuals to deplete funds that would otherwise go to public schools.
Course providers include business associations, educational entrepreneurs, and online courses. This program will not just serve impoverished students and students in schools rated ineffective, but also the full spectrum of students currently enrolled in Louisiana schools, including non-public and home schooled students.
The per-course tuition was to be taken from the Minimum Foundation Program, with the LDOE transferring funds from the city or parish school system in which the student resides to the authorized course provider. To be clear, these are not extra state funds, but funds allotted to public schools for educating public school students, but being diverted to a variety of course providers for the benefit of home schooled and private school students—until a Baton Rouge district court judge ruled such manipulation of MFP funds unconstitutional.
Conclusion
Highly ranked public schools in Louisiana are those that either have admissions standards limiting who can attend or are located in high income areas; while those ranked at the bottom are those in impoverished areas or areas in which the school population is impoverished because of high middle class attendance at private schools.
“A” and “B” schools did not start out as “failing” or “D” schools and work their way up; they started out with high rankings because of their school populations. There is no evidence that using simplistic measures to test and label schools and teachers helps them improve their delivery of education services to children. On the other hand, considerable evidence suggests that these labels only erode confidence in the schools among the public and the children who attend them and demoralize teachers.
Allowing a few students from impoverished public schools the “choice” to attend a different school does nothing for the vast majority of students remaining except to reduce their funding. Nor is there evidence that the “A” and “B” schools are doing a better job with the students they have, rather than enrolling students who are themselves doing a better job.
All students can learn and succeed and we should all commit to their doing so. But we must recognize that some students—those who live in areas of higher unemployment and crime, whose parents never finished high school, let alone college, and whose parents are working two jobs to pay the light bill—need the dedication and cooperation of all concerned toward educational problem-solving, not political rhetoric and blame.
There are no easy solutions. Unfortunately, political rhetoric has eliminated sound educational theory and testing has been substituted for teaching. Pointing the finger at individual teachers and principals is simplistic and self-defeating as is pointing the finger at one school or another. The teacher is the key but this does not mean that we should focus on getting and rewarding or punishing individual teachers.
We need to dedicate ourselves to extending what is working to the entire system and problem-solving what is not. But tossing around public school funds like so many Mardi Gras beads is irresponsible, short-sighted, and an evasion of our responsibility to educate all citizens.
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