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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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What is real reason for LSU Board’s obsession with secrecy? (Hint: it’s got nothing to do with protecting the candidates)

Posted in Boards, Contract, Contracts, Courts, Education, Governor's Office, Higher Education, LSU, Public Records, Transparency on May 12, 2013| 18 Comments »

Sometimes you just have to peel back the layers to see what really lies beneath the surface of political decisions.

And nothing in the state of Louisiana is more political than the method in which F. King Alexander was chosen as the next president of Louisiana’s flagship university.

To put it as succinctly as possible, the entire charade was a crock.

And that, unfortunately, is the sorry state of affairs that higher education in general and LSU in particular finds itself in today.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, the LSU Board of Supervisors and attorney Jimmy Faircloth simply have no shame. That group of power brokers—power abusers, really—feels so secure, so insulated, so detached from the voters, students and alumni of LSU that they have arbitrarily decided that court decisions be damned, they can do as they please.

Apparently it’s not enough that higher education has seen its budget slashed by 80 percent during this governor’s reign of terror.

Jindal, the Board and Faircloth are so cocky that they obviously believe that not even a court order handed down by a Baton Rouge district judge can dislodge the names of the candidates for the LSU presidency for which one F. King Alexander was eventually chosen.

And to be sure, the credentials of Alexander, questionable at best, have to leave one wondering: is this the best a well-paid Dallas search firm could do? No, really, is F. King Alexander really the most qualified person in all of America this firm could find to lead Louisiana State University? If so, one must also question the credentials of the search firm, R. William Funk and Associates which was paid $120,000 plus expenses to come up with a man whose highest academic achievement was that of assistant professor.

Perhaps Funk and Associates is better suited to recruiting managers for Popeye’s Fried Chicken.

But then again, perhaps not. Maybe Funk and Associates scoured the country in search of someone willing and ready to walk into this political graveyard called LSU. After all, who in his right mind would want to come to this state where higher education has been decimated, disparaged and dismantled by a governor who over his five-plus years in office, has not displayed the faintest hint of fiscal responsibility or moral conscience and who is accountable only to campaign contributors and aspirations—delusions, if you will—of higher office?

It might be appropriate at this juncture to itemize the list of transgressions, omissions, power abuses, acts of corruption, contracts, appointments, campaign contributions, lies and blunders by Jindal and associates but frankly, it would take too much space. Perhaps another time.

For now, let us concentrate on LSU.

Let us ask ourselves why the LSU Board of Supervisors—and Jindal; after all, the board members would wet their collective pants where they sit before they’d go to the bathroom without the governor’s permission—are so hell-bent on keeping the list of candidates a deep dark secret.

The argument presented by the board through Faircloth—who, by the way, is 0-for-however many times he has been to court on the administration’s behalf (we long ago lost track as the losses mounted)—is that Funk initially identified 100 potential candidates before winnowing the field down to 35. The curriculum vitae and other data were placed on a secure website for members of the search committee to review.

From that number came a final group of “six or seven” who were “worthy of more intensive interviews.” In the end, King was the only candidate recommended to the full board by the search committee.

How convenient. How absurd.

Compare that to 1977 or so when I happened to be serving as managing editor of the Ruston Daily Leader. Long-time Grambling State University President R.W.E. Jones announced his retirement and the Board of Trustees for Colleges and Universities began taking applications for Jones’s successor. Every step of the way, Bill Junkin, the equivalent to today’s commissioner of higher education, and Trustees Financial Committee Chairman Gordon Flores kept the media abreast of each and every applicant (qualified applicants, by the way) all the way up to the selection of a new president.

There was the announcement in 2009 of all five candidates to be interviewed for the presidency of Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. They were identified by name, their current positions, and their qualifications for the position—something woefully missing from the LSU selection process.

Or take the more recent case involving the selection of a successor to Louisiana Tech University President Dan Reneau. The names and a brief biography of each candidate who had requested to be included in the selection process was published in all the area newspapers. When the selection committee had narrowed the candidate list to two, those individuals appeared in an open public forum. They addressed the public and availed themselves to questions from not only the Tech faculty, but the public at large.

This should have been the method employed in the selection of the new president of the state’s largest university, public or private. The difference, of course, was that the LSU president was chosen by Jindal’s hand-picked Board of Supervisors, the crème de la crème of political campaign contributors while the Tech president was chosen by the University of Louisiana System Board of Supervisors.

The LSU Board, however, used the oh-so-very-lame excuse that to release the names of applicants could inflict career damage to those who were not selected. Hogwash. What tripe. The very purpose of establishing a career track in higher education or any other field is to advance one’s career and you can’t advance your career without attempting to move up. And you can’t move up without making applications.

It wasn’t exactly a secret that Nick Saban, then at Michigan State, wanted to come to LSU and openly applied for the position. Nor was unknown that he was ready to move on to the Miami Dolphins a few years later. Last year, just about everyone knew Louisiana Tech’s Sonny Dykes would be moving on as had his predecessor Derek Dooley.

But to settle on a candidate who had advanced up the career ladder to only the level of assistant professor before succeeding his (ahem) father to the presidency of Murray State as if he were some kind of prince suddenly elevated to the throne? And then to the presidency of California State at Long Beach by virtue of his political connections to the then-chancellor of the University of California System? To that, we can only say, hmmm.

We will be taking a closer look at Alexander’s qualifications in the coming days.

Could the secrecy around the selection of King possibly have anything to do with the fact that a close relative of U.S. Sen. David Vitter had expressed an interest in the position—and possibly submitted an application? It’s well-established that there is no love lost between Jindal and the state’s junior senator, particularly from Jindal’s end of the relationship. (Remember how Jindal threw money at favored legislative and BESE candidates but steadfastly refused to endorse Vitter for re-election because he felt it “inappropriate” to interject himself into a state campaign?)

Or could it be that King was the choice all along and Jindal wanted desperately to conceal the inconvenient truth that there were, in fact, other more qualified candidates but who were unacceptable to this ego-driven governor?

One thing is for certain: Jindal, for whatever reason, desperately does not want the public—voters, students, LSU alumni or legislators—to know. And don’t think for a nano-second that the decision to resist releasing the names was that of the board. That’s laughable.

And stacking the board with supporters who contributed more than $175,000 to his various political campaigns can ensure the cooperation of board members long on loyalty but extremely short on honor, openness, transparency and accountability—the very selling points of one Bobby Jindal, who long ago eclipsed the late Dudley LeBlanc of patent medicine Hadacol fame as the foremost practitioner in Louisiana’s grand history of snake oil salesmen.

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White, Seabaugh conversation reveals agreement to ‘tweak’ DOE’s VAM plan; White whines about his ‘ping pong’ status

Posted in BESE, Education, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators on May 8, 2013| 20 Comments »

A 14-minute telephone conversation that was recorded by an employee of the Louisiana Department of Education (DOE) has revealed a plan hatched between State Superintendent John White and State Rep. Alan Seabaugh (R-Shreveport) to “tweak” DOE’s Value Added Model (VAM) teacher evaluation plan in a way to keep changes from being public or necessitating policy change with the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

The date of the recorded conversation is unclear but a flurry of emails within DOE in mid-October of 2012 and again in mid-March of this year centered around changes to the VAM plan so the telephone conversation most probably took place a few days prior to the October interoffice communications.

After White agreed to make changes in the VAM—also known at the DOE as Compass—as suggested by Seabaugh, the employee who recorded the conversation over a speaker phone was heard to whisper to a co-worker that White “chewed my ass out” after she had earlier made similar suggestions to tweak VAM.

White is heard opening the dialog by telling Seabaugh, “I truly made a mistake in the way I communicated it. I owe you an apology.” It was unclear what White has communicated to Seabaugh that warranted an apology.

Seabaugh is heard telling White that Brigitte Nieland a vice president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) sent Seabaugh a lengthy email “telling me how horrible I was because of this whole thing of exempting some teachers and not others.”

Nieland is vice president of Workforce Development and Research for LABI as well as director of the Education and Workforce Development Council.

He told White that LABI had been prepared to go to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and campaign against the proposal. “I don’t love LABI,” he said. “They endorsed my opponent the first two times I ran so I will never change a position I have because LABI is on the other side. But in this particular case I don’t think it’s necessary to fight.”

Seabaugh’s complaint was apparently that if a student’s score dropped from, say a target score of 430 to 420, he should not be given a score of minus 10 but simply a zero so long as his newer score kept him in either Advanced or Mastery classification. That way, said Seabaugh, “It won’t count against the teacher if he went back a little.”

Seabaugh said he was not trying to exempt anyone from the VAM evaluation, “just tweaking the way you calculate the numbers. Why not, if you stay within the top two categories, you just get a zero. You’re not doing away with the system…and you’re not exempting anyone or creating some kind of other category.”

At one point White suggested creating a policy that keeps data but does not always use the data in the evaluation.

“I don’t believe you can get it past BESE, so why not write it in such a way as we can get it passed?” Seabaugh responded.

“I’m going to feel out the board on that,” White said. “I think we can get it past BESE. I may ask your help on that but I think we can get it past BESE.”

Further into the conversation, White expressed exasperation at being a go-between. “There’s a disconnect,” he said. “To be honest, I’m a messenger between you, Chas (BESE President Chas Roemer) and the board. All the while, the governor’s office is saying, ‘Trust me, trust me, trust me. You gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this.’ And I get it. But people have a helluva lot harder time believing me that there’s a real issue than they do out of the governor’s office of from you. I’m a little concerned about playing ping pong. The assumption on the board (BESE) is that I’m just doing the governor’s bidding on some favor that he’s cashing in on. I don’t want to be crass about it; I’ll stand up for it and I have. But I think it might take a little bit more than me to try and convince them it’s the right policy because they’re being hit on the other side pretty hard.”

Seabaugh brought the conversation back to tweaking the VAM so as not to penalize teachers for student’s shortcomings. “If you fall but stay within your category, call it a zero. But if you improve, count it as a plus—give teachers credit for success but not giving negative marks for failures.”

“If we did it within the formula, we could establish some type criteria within a reasonable number,” White replied.

“Tweaking the formula was my initial suggestion,” Seabaugh agreed, “not addressing it legislatively.”

“I didn’t want to open the formula up to such scrutiny (unintelligible),” White said.

“I don’t care how you fix it,” Seabaugh said, adding that teachers had been calling his office and sending him emails and that they were “absolutely livid.”

“I wish I had given the procedure more thought,” White said. “I can get it corrected. I want to make sure it’s possible without publicly (unintelligible). I’ll take the consequences. If there’s any cover I can get you with the teachers, I’m happy to do it. This strikes me as a way out of all these boxes without (unintelligible).”

“That sounds like a good solution,” Seabaugh said as the two ended their conversation.

The recorder was left on after the conversation ended and the staff member, a female employee who White had on a third line to answer questions whispered to a co-worker, “I suggested that we tweak this model and it doesn’t have to be policy and he (White) chewed my ass out. Are you freaking kidding me?”

The conversation between the two staffers was interrupted when White called. “I think he has created an out for us that I’d not totally focused on before,” he told the employee. “I hate to do it, but I need all hands on deck on this. I want minimal impact and an ability to bury it without…yeah, that’s the way to do it.”

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in BESE, Courts, Education, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables, Vouchers on May 7, 2013| 13 Comments »

“The Scholarship Program will continue…and we will work with the Legislature to find another funding source to keep parents and kids in these schools.”

—State Superintendent of Education John White, in a prepared statement in response to the Louisiana Supreme Court’s 6-1 decision that using funds from the Minimum Foundation Program to fund vouchers for private and virtual schools is unconstitutional.

“Diverting dollars from our already struggling school districts to private school vouchers for a select few students is wrong.”

—State Sen. Karen Carter Peterson (D-New Orleans), state chairperson of the Louisiana Democratic Party, commenting on the State Supreme Court’s decision that taking MFP funds to finance vouchers is unconstitutional.

“This decision was not only predictable, but it was predicted. The governor appeared to have complete disdain for the law while he was chasing a vice presidential nomination.”

—State Rep. John Bel Edwards (D-Amite), commenting on Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision on voucher financing.

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Supreme Court squelches voucher funding; how are those course choice providers gonna ‘sell’ the free classes now?

Posted in BESE, Courts, Education, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Vouchers on May 7, 2013| 16 Comments »

Tuesday’s ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court that taking money from the state’s Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) is unconstitutional has thrown a monkey wrench into the plans by the Jindal administration to suck state funding from local school districts to pay for vouchers for private and virtual schools.

The ruling, by a convincing 6-1 majority, also may send more than 40 course providers in the proposed Course Choice program scurrying to find new ways to attract students (read dollars) now that the carrot of free admission may have been removed.

Anyone who still believes that the Louisiana Department of Education’s (DOE) Course Choice program is about educating Louisiana’s school children, and not about the money might wish to take a look at three advertisements currently running on Craigslist.

Actually, only one ad is necessary because the three are identical except for the locations of employment—Central Louisiana, Baton Rouge and Lafayette.

Despite a state district court ruling that found the funding method for Course Choice unconstitutional, Gov. Bobby Jindal and Superintendent of Education John White plunged ahead by allowing more than 40 course choice providers to begin marketing campaigns to attract students.

Forty-two course providers were approved to offer some 1500 online, blended and face-to-face courses through the Course Choice program. Providers included K-12, Inc., Florida Virtual School, Sylvan, five public school districts and every public college and university in Louisiana.

That shouldn’t be too difficult considering there is no cost to the student and students get a free iPad, provided White and Jindal can devise some plan to get past that pesky court ruling last Nov. 30 that said Minimum Foundation Program funds could not be taken from local school districts to finance state-approved vouchers.

An online blurb by Evergreen Education Group of Durango, Colo., a private consulting firm, says that as of March 2013, eligible Louisiana students “now have the opportunity to select their own online and face-to-face courses from a wide range of private providers through the Course Choice program.”

“Act 2 (of the 2012 Legislature) presents a shift in direction for virtual schooling in Louisiana, whose Department of Education has offered supplemental online courses through its Louisiana Virtual School (LVS),” the Evergreen posting says.

Another approved provider is SmartStart Virtual Academy (SVA), a division of SmartStart Education of Raleigh, N.C., the organization that placed the Craigslist ads for sales reps for its course choice curriculum.

That’s right; sales reps, not teachers.

You won’t find the word “teachers” anywhere in the ad and the only reference to education is the line that reads: “Help change the landscape of public education in Louisiana.”

Change the landscape. Nothing about improving education. That wasn’t even an afterthought. It’s all about the money.

“…SVA has been authorized to offer FREE (emphasis theirs) courses to high school students in the state of Louisiana for graduation credit.

“SmartStart Virtual Academy is hiring outside sales representatives to sell these FREE courses to high school students and their parents,” it says.

So, how do you sell something that’s free and how does SVA profit from something that’s free?

Because (drum roll, please)…it’s not free. You, the taxpayers of Louisiana were in line to pay for the courses. Local school boards were in line to take a financial hit of $1200 per student that was to have been taken from the local MFP allocation. That’s your tax money, folks.

It was to be a win-win situation, of course, for all those course choice providers because they were to get one-half their tuition up front, no matter whether the student finished or not (and most do not). The remaining 50 percent would be paid upon the student’s successful completion of the course.

And the determination of “successful completion” would have been left entirely to the discretion of the providers, who are not required to keep attendance records.

Until Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling, that is.

“A motivated candidate (sales rep) could easily make $75,000 (or more) within the next six months,” the pie-in-the-sky ad says. “This is not an exaggeration, but rather a realistic target for the right candidate.”

The “right candidates” must have a tablet (iPad, Kindle Fire, etc.) with a data plan (which would be reimbursed after sales quotas are met).

The “right candidates” must be 18 years of age or older and must have reliable transportation so that they might be able to go door-to-door in high-poverty areas and sell parents on the concept of free courses, free internet, and a free iPad for their children.

And, oh yes, the “right candidates” must be able to pass a background check (no felonies within the past seven years). Felony convictions of eight or more years before apparently will be disregarded when hiring such highly skilled professionals.

But now, with Tuesday’s State Supreme Court ruling, Jindal, White, et al, are going to have to find another way to fund these vouchers for virtual schools, etc.

And it’s going to be interesting to see how many “course providers” become “ex-course providers” when they cut and run after seeing the Golden Goose slain by the state high court.

White, ever the loyal Broad Academy and Teach for America alumnus, kept a stiff upper lip in the wake of the ruling which in reality is a devastating setback for the administration.

“On the most important aspect of the law, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of families,” he said in a prepared statement. “The Scholarship Program will continue, and thousands of Louisiana families will continue to have the final say in where to send their children to school.”

“Nearly 93 percent of Scholarship families report that they love their school.”

We can only hope that 93 percent is not representative of the supporters who turned out at one recent rally in support of vouchers. One of the supporters who identified herself as the mother of a voucher student and who was holding a sign of support for the vouchers was in reality a DOE student worker recruited for the purpose of drumming up support for the department.

Yes, Mr. White, the voucher program may well continue. The Supreme Court, after all, did not address the constitutionality of vouchers. That was never the issue; robbing local school districts to pay for the vouchers was the only issue in question and the Supreme Court certainly made its position clear on that.

“We will work with the legislature to find another funding source to keep parents and kids in these schools.”

“Work with the legislature?”

Right now, the legislature does not appear to be in the mood to work with the administration. As one legislator said to Department of Revenue executive counsel Tim Barfield when he complained on Monday that lawmakers left the administration “out of the loop” after coming up with its own tax reform package: “Now you know how we’ve been feeling.”

“Another funding source?”

We know you’re from New York, Mr. White, so we’ll assume that you may not know that down here in the Deep South, we refer to such pseudo-bravado as whistling past the graveyard.

Oh, and by the way, don’t bother trying to blow smoke up our togas. We still remember the brash statements of this administration after the state district court ruling of last November: “A wrong-headed decision.” “We will prevail on appeal.”

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