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Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category

More sordid details emerging in apparent fraudulent Course Choice registrations in three northwest Louisiana parishes

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Public Records, Transparency on May 20, 2013| 28 Comments »

It’s not always writer’s block when you have trouble putting your thoughts into something resembling comprehensible form.

In the case of the Louisiana Department of Education’s (DOE) Course Choice program, the players are so intertwined as to be considered downright incestuous.

It’s not enough that the State Supreme Court has ruled that Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) funds cannot be used to pay the tuition for Course Choice. Superintendent of Education John White has given every indication that he fully intends to plunge ahead with Course Choice and vouchers.

The depth of the apparent fraud is already emerging, even before Course Choice is really up and running, at a staggering rate sufficient to alert every investigative agency in Baton Rouge, from the local district attorney to state Attorney General and Legislative Auditor’s office to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

So where are they?

No, it’s not writer’s block. This convoluted mess called Course Choice can best be described as a cluster fart (okay, we cleaned that up a bit).

We just posted a story last week about FastPath, that Austin, Texas, firm headed by Rod Paige, former Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. FastPath, it has been learned, signed up 1100 students from Caddo and Webster parishes for Course Choice courses without the knowledge or consent of the students or their parents.

One of those registering for courses in Webster Parish was a parent and “at least one was a Severe Profound child,” said a spokesperson for the Webster School Board. “The recruiters went down the street knocking on doors,” he said.

Some of the courses for students allegedly signed up for in Webster included math courses entitled Single Variable Equations, Two Variable Equations, Number Line Inequalities, Applied Linear Equations 1 and 2, Quadratic Formula, Quadratic X-Intercepts, Trinomial Factoring and Graphs to Linear Inequalities.

Now, LouisianaVoice has learned that another 64 were signed up for course choice courses in Bossier Parish. Fifty-two of those were signed up by FastPath and Smart Start but a few others were signed up by other providers approved by DOE, namely K-12, Inc., Advanced Academics, APEX Learning and Education Solutions.

Smart Start is the company that we reported last week was running ads in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Central Louisiana for sales reps to earn up to $75,000 within six months by signing up students for course choice courses.

The ads have since been taken down but we subsequently learned that FastPath was running a similar ad for sales reps for the Monroe area.

All 64 applications were rejected by Bossier Parish. Of the 34 signed by Smart Start, all attempted to register for Precision Math and Reading Acceleration courses. One student who was not even enrolled in a Bossier Parish school attempted to register for two courses. The student identified his/her school as the Life Skills Center as the school he/she is presently attending. The Life Skills Center is closed.

Two students, a brother and sister from another parish attempted to register for four courses through Haughton High School.

One first grade student had someone attempt to register her in two courses—high school Latin and high school English. Her legal guardian did not enroll her through Course Choice and has no consistent computer access.

Another student attempted to register for two courses considered “academically inappropriate,” according to a Bossier Parish spokesperson.

Following our initial story last week, David Callaway, chief compliance officer for FastPath sent us an email that said everything was on the up and up with his company.

But judging from the track record of its CEO, Rod Paige, no one should be surprised if things aren’t completely on the level. While he was serving as Secretary of Education under the younger Bush, a major scandal erupted when it was learned that while he headed up the Houston Independent School District, the fifth largest district in the nation, the district falsified its dropout statistics.

In his response, Callaway said, “We have a strict protocol that all of our representatives follow, and they are paid a flat hourly rate for their work ($16 per hour, according to FastPath’s ad). As part of this protocol, parents are ALWAYS present during enrollment. All or our representatives wear identifying badges and we take immediate action to address all legitimate concerns. Parents enroll in significant numbers because our program works. Over 95 percent of parents report an increase in their child’s grades in multiple subjects.”

We fired off a second email asking him to quantify his 95 percent claim via a written document. We have not heard back from him.

“Before a student’s enrollment is completed,” he said, “it is approved by a guidance counselor to ensure it is academically appropriate.”

The Bossier Parish spokesperson, however, said the only way the local school board becomes aware of enrollees is by logging onto the DOE dashboard through the Course Choice website. For all intents and purposes, the local guidance counselors are out of the loop on Course Choice registrations until well after the fact.

Callaway said FastPath does not receive full tuition from the state for students “unless our program results in significant gains on the LEAP/iLEAP.”

The actual agreement between FastPath and DOE, however, is not quite that strict. FastPath, as with all course choice providers, charges $700 to $1250 in tuition and like all providers, receives 50 percent of that ($350 to $625) up front. Only 10 percent of the final 50 percent (or 5 percent of the overall tuition) is contingent upon students’ showing only an increase, not a “significant” increase. Thus, if a FastPath student failed to show gains, FastPath would lose only $62.50 of a total tuition of $1250 or $35 of a $700 tuition.

Some penalty.

Now here’s where it begins to get a bit muddled and we’re probably going to have to develop an organizational, or flow chart to illustrate just how tight this little cadre really is.

First, we should point out that FastPath has two sister companies, Tutors with Computers and Read and Succeed, both of which have numerous complaints registered against them for deceptive practices.

That, however, has not deterred one Eric Nadelstern, Ed.D., from offering ringing endorsements of both companies. Nadelstern has been called “The great apologist for everything Joel Klein did for a decade.”

Nadelstern was Klein’s Deputy Chancellor for Academics in New York and was John White’s boss there.

Oddly enough, he appears on the web pages of both Tutors with Computers and Read and Succeed with identical blurbs with only the company’s name changed: “(Name of company) delivers outstanding products and services that effectively raise reading and math proficiency,” his endorsements say.

The DOE official responsible for coordinating all the course choice programs is one David “Lefty” Lefkowith, the frequent flyer who commutes to and from his home in Los Angeles for a $146,000 per year salary.

Travel records released to LouisianaVoice as part of the settlement terms of our recent public records lawsuit against DOE reveal that Lefty was reimbursed $860 for traveling to Austin, Texas, on Feb. 17-18 to meet with officers of Agilix Labs regarding Course Choice registration.

So just who is Agilix Labs? It’s a company that thus far has managed to fly under our radar but which we now know has a contract with DOE to help develop its Course Choice platform. We’ve not been able to determine the amount of that contract but we have made a public records request for the document.

Agilix announced in a Feb. 27 news release that it had created “one of the first educational applications to tap into the emerging InBloom data standard (IBDS).”

The news released continued by saying, IBDS was designed by its creators at Shared Learning Cooperative (SLC) to standardize access to myriad disparate forms of student, school, course and other educational data across platforms. Supported with $100 million from the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and others, InBloom supports data needs of states, districts, nonprofits and corporations promoting personalized learning.”

What?

“We had to look at the issue of how to interface with all these systems to provide the broadest possible access to our customers,” said Agilix CEO Curt Allen. “After much analysis, we settled on adopting the rapidly emerging InBloom standard. That choice means that any school district or state that supports IBDS can leverage Agilix Honeycomb technology.

“John White, Superintendent of Louisiana schools, says, ‘By connecting to IBDS, Agilix opens a lot of doors for our Course Choice product not only for registration but also for detailed analysis of student performance. We expect this will assist greatly in tracking and reporting results of Course Choice adoption to state authorities,’” the news release said.

So there you have it. The circle is complete. After all the guarantees that data provided to InBloom would not be shared, we have Agilix, contracted by the state, saying otherwise.

We have White’s former boss endorsing two shady companies affiliated with a course choice provider (FastPath) from the same city as Agilix (Austin) that is signing up students in three northwest Louisiana parishes without the knowledge or consent of the students or parents.

And Agilix is joined at the hip with InBloom to whom White was going to provide sensitive personal data on some 700,000 Louisiana school students to “park” the information in its “data garage.” White has since said he cancelled the agreement with InBloom but in response to our public records request has denied the existence of any document verifying any such cancellation. Nor has he ever produced a contract or memorandum of understanding with InBloom to provide the data in the first place.

And coordinating the entire Course Choice racket is a nomad who jets in from Los Angeles for a four-day work week before heading back to the West Coast every Thursday—a nomad with his own questionable past of working with the now defunct Enron and the Jeb Bush administration in Florida in an unsuccessful effort to corner the market on drinking water there.

What could possibly go wrong here?

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Course Choice provider who enrolled 1100 students without their knowledge tied to Bush, Romney, Tex. dropout scandal

Posted in BESE, Contract, Contracts, Education, Ethics, Public Records, Transparency on May 16, 2013| 31 Comments »

More than 1100 students in the parishes of Caddo and Webster have signed up for course choice programs with a provider whose chairman with close ties to former President George W. Bush and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

An outfit named FastPath Learning of Austin, Texas, has somehow managed to obtain student information to sign up the students without the knowledge of the student or of their parents.

If true, that’s fraud, pure and simple—and a blatant violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

And the chairman of the board for FastPath? None other than Dr. Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education during President George W. Bush’s first term and a member of Mitt Romney’s Education Policy Advisory Group during last year’s presidential campaign.

Paige, it should be noted, also once served as superintendent of Houston’s schools and during his tenure there, he became mired in an ugly scandal when it was learned that the Houston system, seventh largest in the nation, had falsified its dropout statistics.

Course Choice, which is under the supervision of Department of Education (DOE) Deputy Superintendent of Portfolio Dave “Lefty” Lefkowith, is a DOE program whereby Louisiana public school students are allowed to sign up for online computer courses offered by providers approved by DOE.

Lefkowith, who once worked with Enron and with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, commutes from his home in Los Angeles and is paid $146,000 per year by DOE.

Tuition for the courses ranges from $700 to $1,275 each and providers get one-half of their tuition fees up front upon registering students for courses. The second half is paid when a student successfully completes a course and the course providers have full autonomy in making the determination of when—or if—a student completes a course. The incentive to the provider, of course, is to have as many students as possible “complete” the courses.

Fox, welcome to the hen house.

The tuition is free to the student with the state picking up the tab. Students also receive a free iPad upon registering. There was no word if the 1,100 students who were unknowingly registered received iPads.

Students are allowed to take up to five classes outside their home school at taxpayer expense.

Students and parents in the two parishes say they never requested nor approved the registering of the students for the courses. One student was registered for a class he had already successfully completed in the classroom—with an A grade.

State Superintendent of Education John White, asked about the apparent lack of oversight, said Course Choice providers underwent a “rigorous” four-part approval process before being allowed to offer classes and that checks and balances are in place to insure that students do not end up in an academically unsound course.

Really?

On Wednesday, White announced DOE would attempt to finance the Course Choice program through its own resources following last week’s Louisiana Supreme Court ruling upholding a lower court decision that the method of using Minimum Foundation Program funds to pay for the vouchers was unconstitutional.

White said that more than 3,000 courses have been chosen thus far at an average cost of $700 each, a total of $2.1 million. Registration will remain open through August, he said.

The revelation of the 1,100 registrations which, if true, could be construed as fraud and theft could also involve a violation of the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) since FastPath would necessarily require certain student information, including names, addresses, social security numbers, etc., in order to register the students.

The question then becomes just who provided that information to FastPath? There are already questions about White’s leaking information about evaluations of three Caddo Parish elementary teachers through an intermediary to the Baton Rouge Advocate last October.

That intermediary was Rayne Martin, a former employer of DOE who currently serves as executive director of Stand for Children Louisiana.

In the wake of the flap over the negative evaluations of the teachers, the Advocate published a letter to the editor which defended the Value Added Model used by DOE to evaluate the teachers and which even cited statistics from the leaked document.

Turns out that letter was written by Monica Candal, policy and data analyst for Stand for Children Louisiana, leaving one to wonder about the connection between White and Stand for Children.

Who knew?

Louisiana Voice attempted to contact FastPath by telephone. An automated message told us to press 1 if we were a student already enrolled in FastPath or to press 2 for “all other inquiries.”

We pressed 2 and got another automated message that said, “We’re sorry we are unable to answer your call at this time.” So we called back and pressed 1 and got an automated message that said (take a deep breath and count to 10), “We’re sorry we are unable to answer your call at this time.” This was at 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, so it wasn’t because they close during lunch.

Next, we went online and clicked on “Contact us” and several boxes popped up on our computer screen asking for our name, our organization, our email address and the city and state from which we were emailing them. Strangely, it did not request our telephone number, though we would have been happy to provide that as well.

The following note was typed into the message box:

“This is for Compliance Officer David Callaway:

How did FastPath obtain the information (names, schools, home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, etc.) on the 1100 students in Caddo and Webster parishes who were signed up for your Course Choice courses without, the students and parents claim, their knowledge or consent?

It would appear that you would have to be in possession of certain information in order to enroll these students and I simply want to know who provided that data to you.

Thanks.”

A few minutes after we sent the message, we received a computer-generated message in our email in-box that said, “Thanks for contacting us! We’ll get back to you soon.”

Does anyone care to take odds on whether or not we’ll ever hear back from them?

The leaks would seem to validate concerns about a recent agreement, since cancelled because of a public outcry, to furnish personal information on some 700,000 Louisiana school children to a data bank run by White’s former boss Joel Klein, now with inBloom, a data storage company (or data “parking garage,” to use White’s terminology) run by NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch.

inBloom had offered no guarantees that the data could not be accessed by hackers and in fact, an unrelated privacy breach on Bloomberg News occurred when reporters extracted subscribers’ private information to break news stories. That breach would seem to lend credence to security concerns about inBloom.

Recent stories by LouisianaVoice have prompted a witch hunt at DOE in an effort to determine the source of recent stories. Personal printers have been removed so that documents must now be printed at a central location more easily monitored. IT personnel have been called in to review emails.

It seems to us, security—and Louisiana taxpayers—would somehow be better served through efforts to attempt to learn who provided FastPath with personal data on 1,100 students signed up for courses without their knowledge or consent.

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White’s release of evaluation data on Shreveport teachers to Advocate reporter was in direct violation of 2010 state law

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Legislature, Legislators, Public Records, Transparency on May 14, 2013| 12 Comments »

Superintendent of Education John White may have placed himself and the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) in legal jeopardy when he made a confidential report on three teachers at a Shreveport elementary school available to a Baton Rouge Advocate reporter in apparent violation of a 2010 state law.

White, who released the report on the Value Added Model (VAM) scores for the Shreveport school through an intermediary, may also have endangered his $275,000-a-year job by releasing confidential information to reporter Will Sentell last October in direct contravention of Act 54 of 2010.

The sequence of events began when State Rep. Alan Seabaugh (R-Shreveport) and White collaborated to tweak the VAM in order to improve the evaluations of three teachers at one of Shreveport’s better elementary schools.

Sentell quoted Seabaugh in the Advocate last Oct. 6 as saying, “You literally have the most successful teachers in the state being told that they are highly ineffective. This is nothing short of ridiculous.”

Sentell said the focus was on preliminary data for South Highlands Elementary Magnet School in Shreveport, where, despite the school’s being the top-rated elementary school in the state, three of its fourth-grade teachers were rated as “highly ineffective.”

Sentell’s story followed an interview with White but not before a detailed report on the three teachers was pulled together comparing fourth grade scores of South Highlands to those of “School X,” which in reality, was Westdale Elementary Magnet School in Baton Rouge.

In order to avoid Sentell’s learning that the report came from LDOE at his direction, White called on Rayne Martin, executive director of Stand for Children Louisiana, to serve as an intermediary and to tell Sentell that she had obtained the report through a data request. Martin previously worked in a number of capacities in LDOE, including chief of innovation—whatever that might have entailed.

When Sentell told White in the interview that he had a copy of a report that indicated the teachers had students whose average scores showed a significant drop from third to fourth grade, White, feigning innocence, asked Sentell where he obtained the report. White subsequently confided to Sentell in an off-the-record remark that the three teachers were ineffective and that Seabaugh was pushing hard to “fix it” for them.

One of the provisions of Act 54 says, “Copies of evaluation results and any documentation related thereto of any school employee may be retained by the local (school) board, the board (Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education), or the department and, if retained, are confidential, do not constitute a public record” and shall not be released or shown to any individual except:

• To the evaluated school employee or his designated representative;

• To authorized school system officers and employees for all personnel matter, including employment, application, and for any hearing, which relates to personnel matters, which includes the authorized representative of any school or school system, public or private, to which employee has made application for employment.

The act says the superintendent of education “shall make available to the public the data specified by law as may be useful for conducting statistical analyses and evaluations of educational personnel but shall not reveal information pertaining to the evaluation report of a particular employee” (Emphasis ours).

By releasing the data comparing the fourth-grade results of South Highlands with those of Westdale, White inadvertently revealed information “pertaining to the evaluation report of a particular employee” since South Highlands had only three fourth grade teachers and the detailed report provided comparisons on average scaled scores from 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 school years for each content that the three teachers instructed in fourth grade.

Emails received by LouisianaVoice from a former LDOE employee contained dozens of documents pertaining to VAM, Seabaugh and inter-departmental emails contained a copy of a file labeled, “Document for Rayne,” which was the report given to Sentell by Martin.

It was that report that through the process of elimination necessarily identified the three South Highlands teachers.

Act 54 lays out no criminal or civil penalties for violations of the sections that prohibit the public release of information to anyone other than authorized personnel.

But by violating that provision of the act, White may have invited litigation for damages from the three South Highlands teachers who could claim that their professional reputations have been damaged not only by a flawed evaluation system but by the subsequent actions by White that made their identities public.

Such litigation would be extremely difficult to defend. The only option for White now is to man up and take responsibility for his reckless, inconsiderate actions.

He must resign.

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Break out the hip waders: Rep. Seabaugh’s surreptitious involvement in VAM ‘fix’ scheme gets deeper and deeper

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Public Records, Transparency on May 13, 2013| 25 Comments »

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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Senate Education Committee vote was a foregone conclusion; charges of DOE test data fraud was huge political bombshell

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.

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