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π-yush sued over constitutionality of contingency revenue in state budget, use of one-time funds for recurring expenses

Posted in Budget, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Revenue on January 15, 2013| 12 Comments »

Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell punted, Gov. Piyush Jindal wouldn’t listen and State Treasurer John Kennedy…well, he is, after all the state treasurer.

The three statewide Republican officeholders were named defendants in a lawsuit filed by two Republican state representatives on Tuesday. One of those was Cameron Henry of Metairie who Jindal had bounced from his vice-chairmanship of the powerful House Appropriations Committee in November after Henry voted for a motion by Rep. Katrina Jackson (D-Monroe) that the administration opposed.

Rep. Joe Harrison also was removed from the Appropriations Committee in the showdown vote in which the administration came perilously close to losing its move to award the third party administration contract for the Office of Group Benefits.

The other plaintiff in Tuesday’s lawsuit was Rep. Kirk Talbot of River Ridge.

Reached for comment, Talbot said the suit simply seeks a declaratory judgment on three major issues with which he, Henry and other legislators disagree with Piyush.

“We are not seeking an injunction,” he said. “We’re not trying to shut state government down. We are simply seeking a ruling on the constitutionality of the governor’s submitting an executive budget with contingency revenue and the spending of one-time money on recurring expenses.”

He said last year’s budget contained contingency expenditures. “That would be, for example, the inclusion of anticipated revenue for the sale of prisons or state hospitals. If the sales don’t materialize (they didn’t in the 2011 session), then we have a problem, a financial shortfall.”

Likewise, he said the suit is also seeking a decision on the requirement under state law that the governor’s executive budget “shall not exceed the official of the Revenue Estimating Conference (REC)” estimates and also per state law, appropriations from the state general fund and dedicated funds in the final, enacted bills comprising the state budget “shall not exceed the official forecast in effect at the time the appropriations are made.”

The official revenue forecast for fiscal year 2012-2013 at the time House Bill 1 was passed, as issued by the REC on April 24, 2012, reflected just over $8.1 billion in state general fund revenue available for appropriation.

Instead, the amount actually appropriated in HB1 was $8.34 billion, thus exceeding the REC estimate and the constitutionally-mandated appropriation limit by $240 million, the suit says.

The REC is required by law to meet at least four times per year—by Oct. 15, Jan. 1, the third Monday in March and Aug. 15 subsequent to final adjournment of the regular session. State law requires the REC to establish, by Oct. 15 of each year, an official revenue forecast for the ensuing fiscal year, that runs from July 1 to the following June 30.

State law requires that legislative enactment of the state budget must conform with a subsequent revised forecast issued by the REC by the third Monday in March.

“The REC did not meet by Oct. 15, 2011, by the third Monday of 2012, by Aug. 15, 2012 after adjournment of the 2012 regular session, or by Oct. 15, 2012, as required by law,” the petition says.

The Jindal budget also included $35 million in contingency revenue from the anticipated sale of New Orleans Adolescent Hospital and HB 822 directed State Treasurer John Kennedy to transfer $35 million of the proceeds from the sale or lease of the facility to the Overcollections Fund.

After numerous delays, the Jindal administration finally released the appraisals on the hospital property in November. That appraisal showed the property worth, at most, $20.9 million.

Rep. Neil Abramson (D-New Orleans) has questioned how the Jindal administration arrived at a $35 million estimate. “I was surprised to see the money in the budget at all because that property’s in my district and no one had ever said anything to me,” he said.

Welcome to the real world, Mr. Abramson. That the way the Jindalistas do business.

“…There is no reasonable basis for expecting the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital to, in fact, sell or lease for $35 million during the 2012-2013 fiscal year,” the lawsuit said. “As such, appropriations of those funds are, in fact, prohibited contingent appropriations.”

Henry, reminded that Piyush had already demoted him once, jokingly feigned innocence at first. “This is all Talbot’s fault,” he said. “I thought I was signing up to buy Girl Scout cookies. Next thing I know, I’m a plaintiff in a lawsuit.”

He quickly turned serious, however.

“We first sought a legal opinion from the attorney general and he told us he would not render an opinion on the constitutionality because that was a matter for the courts.

Gov. Jindal forced us to do this. He thinks he is right and we think we’re right. If we are ultimately found to be right, we can avoid a repeat of the practices that have put us in such a fiscal dilemma,” he said.

The lawsuit has been assigned to 19th Judicial District Court Judge Tim Kelley who is married to Jindal’s one-time commissioner of administration Angéle Davis.

Kelley, in another lawsuit, ruled in December that Jindal’s school voucher program unconstitutionally diverted public funds to private and parochial schools. That ruling is presently under appeal.

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Dispute in Winn Parish over 55,000-acre hunting lodge reads like a Grisham novel with cast of Mike Foster, Dick Cheney and imprisoned former Winn sheriff Bodie Little

Posted in Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, Legislature, Legislators, Politicians, Public Records, Revenue on January 15, 2013| 16 Comments »

A wrongful arrest lawsuit filed in 8th Judicial District Court in Winnfield names as defendants a former Louisiana Wildlife Commission chairman and a Department of Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries agent but the litigation is only the latest in an ongoing dispute whose roots go far deeper into the lush pine forests of Winn, Caldwell and LaSalle parishes.

Wyndel Earl Gough (pronounced “Goff”) and Gary L. Hatten filed the lawsuit on Jan. 10, naming William “Bill” Busbice of Broussard, former chairman of the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission during the administration of former Gov. Mike Foster, as one of the defendants.

Also named were Terry Carr, identified as an overseer or manager of Busbice’s Deer Management Assistance Program (DMAP) land, and wildlife agent Rusty Perry after Gough and Hatten were arrested by Perry in December of 2010 for illegally hunting deer on DMAP land without Busbice’s permission.

It was not until April of 2012, however, that a bill of information was issued by the district attorney charging the two with one count each. On Oct. 24, those charges were formally dismissed by the district attorney’s office.

Both Gough and Hatten deny ever having hunted on DMAP property.

Busbice began purchasing some 55,000 acres in the three parishes, mostly in Winn, after Louisiana-Pacific shut down its operations at Urania in 2002. Louisiana-Pacific initially sold the forest land to Barrs & Glawson Investments of Atlanta, GA, to Roy O. Martin Lumber Co. and to Martin-Urania Corp. for $74 million. Barrs & Glawson re-sold tracts totaling 50,383 acres in Winn, 6,068 acres in LaSalle and 4,800 in Caldwell to Six-C Properties, headed by Busbice.

Since purchasing the land, Busbice has erected eight-foot fencing around the property and constructed a hunting lodge on the land that caters to high rollers who don’t mind ponying up a few thousand dollars for the privilege to hunt deer.

Six-C subsequently donated 1,500 acres of the land to Make A Wish Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to granting wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions.

Additional property owners in the area, including other members of the Gough family, claim that Busbice’s fencing in 55,000 acres in the three parishes, mostly in Winn, has deprived them of their hunting rights.

One of those, Michael Atkins, sued Busbice and his company, Six-C Properties, after Busbice erected a fence completely surrounding 10 acres of land owned by Atkins. His lawsuit, which he won at the trial court level but which was overturned in part on appeal, contended that the fence not only prevented him from hunting but also blocked access to his property.

The latest lawsuit, however, goes back more than a decade and involves principals other than Busbice and the two plaintiffs.

Names that have surfaced in what has become a conspiracy-laden story include imprisoned former Winn Parish Tax Assessor A.D. “Bodie” Little, former Gov. Mike Foster and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Landowners, including the Goughs, maintain that Foster hosted Cheney on a hunting trip in 2002 and shortly afterwards a federal grant came through Foster’s administration which was used to purchase the land which eventually came under the control of Busbice and Six-C.

Efforts by LouisianaVoice to confirm that allegation have been unsuccessful, though an entry of more than $87.86 million was included on page 29 in Foster’s fiscal year 2003-2004 executive budget under the column heading of Federal Funds.

Marty Milner, fiscal officer for the Office of Facility Planning and Control, said in a 2008 email to investigator Art Walker that he had found the $87.86 million but some projects were funded through the Department of the Military and the Department of Transportation and Development but his office did not handle the accounting for those departments. Accordingly, he said, he was unable to determine the disposition of the money.

Michael Gough, one of the landowners in the area, likened the Six-C hunting camp to the state’s arrangement with the White Lake Preservation in Vermilion Parish. In that case, BP donated the 71,000-acre preserve to the state but retained mineral rights on the property—and received millions of dollars in tax breaks.

Foster, governor at the time, negotiated the deal with BP and subsequently appointed a board comprised of private citizens to manage the property.

Another controversy surrounding the Six-C property arose in 2008 when a group of Winn Parish taxpayers filed suit against then-assessor Bodie, claiming that the increase in their taxes was a direct result of their opposition to Bodie’s election as sheriff.

Bodie was sentenced to a 13-year federal prison term last August for drug possession with intent to distribute.

An Alexandria Town Talk investigation revealed that several of Bodie’s friends benefitted from under-assessments. Among those was Six-C, which was the beneficiary of an assessment that was $351,800 low, according to one local resident.

Under the $20 per acre forestland value, Six-C was billed $98,601 on its Winn Parish properties, then consisting of 31,600 acres. Winn Parish resident Grady McFarland, however, said Six-C should have paid taxes based on an $88.90 per acre value, or $450,410.

Almost as an afterthought to the whole affair, Glenn Austin, district conservationist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, accompanied Michael Gough on a tour of several locations around the boundary of Six-C property to inspect where “flood flaps,” made from old conveyor belts, were stretched across the bottom of the fence where it crossed streams and creeks in the area.

The flaps, installed to prevent wildlife from escaping, impeded the water flow, causing flooding and erosion. “There was sediment deposited within the channel banks at almost every location,” Austin said. “This increase in sediment load and increased turbidity in the water channels could be degrading the water quality” within the streams, he added.

Austin told Gough that if the area was deemed to be a wetland, then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would have regulatory authority over the area.

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π-yush, White push yet another national ‘report’ lauding LA education reform: Oops! Part of study gives state an ‘F’ grade

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, BESE, Education, Governor's Office on January 13, 2013| 6 Comments »

Undaunted by an earlier revelation that a somewhat suspect national study that gave Louisiana high marks for its education policies was less than candid, State Education Superintendent John White continues trying to change his frog—otherwise known as Americal Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-inspired and Teach for America (TFA)-executed education reform—into a prince by touting yet another national ranking that appears at first blush to show that Louisiana’s overall ranking leapt from 23rd to 15th over the last year.

What White conveniently neglected to report via his Department of Education propaganda arm Louisiana Believes is that same study, done by Quality Counts for Education Week magazine, gave Louisiana an F for public education achievement for the third consecutive year.

White may have neglected to report that little tidbit, but Baton Rouge Advocate reporter Will Sentell was inquisitive enough to look past Piyush’s burnished version of the report’s contents.

That may have been because only a week before a report was issued by StudentsFirst, an organization founded by Michelle Rhee, whose professional reputation has come under a cloud of controversy for suspicious scoring gains at Washington, D.C. schools during her tenure as chancellor, which ranked Louisiana first in the nation in educational policies that prioritize the interest of children.

The StudentsFirst study was debunked almost immediately when the New York Times pointed out that it focused purely on state laws and policies and “did not take into account student test scores.” Test scores are tantamount to the educational Bible for Piyush, White, et al. Test scores make up the centerpiece of the entire Piyush education reform package.

The StudentsFirst report may have been tempered both by the cheating scandal and by an almost simultaneous report by the U.S. Department of Education that shows Louisiana ranked sixth from the bottom in its public high school graduation rate—even despite White’s apparent efforts to color those statistics pretty (see Mercedes Schneider’s blog post of Jan. 12 on LouisianaVoice).

StudentsFirst has poured money into the campaigns of four of Jindal’s hand-picked Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) members—$5,000 each to Holly Boffy, James Garvey, Kira Orange Jones and Roemer.

When LouisianaVoice reported other campaign contributions in an earlier post, Boffy bristled at the perceived suggestion that campaign contributions influenced her December vote to approve Course Choice applicants when in fact we never once intimated that her vote was bought—or even rented, for that matter.

The fact remains, however, that each of five board members, including Boffy, just happened to vote to approve applications from two applicants who combined to contribute $41,000 to the BESE members: Jay Guillot of Ruston ($5,000), James Garvey of Metairie ($5,000), Boffy of Youngsville ($6,000), Chas Roemer of Baton Rouge ($10,000) and Kira Orange Jones of New Orleans ($15,000).

We’re just sayin’…

It is certainly interesting to see how Gov. Piyush Jindal and White cherry-pick the categories on which the state scored well while ignoring the F for public education achievement.

But never let it be said that LouisianaVoice is not fair (objective? Certainly not. Fair? emphatically yes). So here are the areas on which Louisiana scored well:

• Transitions and Alignment (We’re still not sure what “Alignment” is; we’re assuming it has nothing to do with automobiles. For that matter, we aren’t too sure what “Transitions” means, though we do know what a transmission is): 92.9, up from 82.1 for an A;

• School Finance Analysis: 75.3, up from 74.7 for a C.

At this point, the Louisiana Believes “news” release says (drum roll, please), “The scores in remaining categories—Standards, Assessments and Accountability and The Teaching Profession—are based on the state’s score from the 2012 report.

Wait. What? Remaining categories? But what about that public education achievement category? Did you forget that? Oh well, never mind. Here are the scores for the “remaining categories”:

• Standards, Assessment and Accountability: 97.2, for a B;

• The Teaching Profession: 72.5 (11th in the nation), for a C.

Of course, the teaching profession, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is the one area that Piyush and White have in their crosshairs. It’s the teaching profession they have consistently demonized from Day One of their so-called “education reform” efforts and yet Louisiana’s teachers, according to the very report that Jindal and White are now waving about, are ranked 11th in the nation.

Piyush said in a prepared statement (remember, the man does NOT sit for interviews in his home state; those are reserved for Fox News, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times as he rehearses for the national stage by throwing the National Republican Party under the bus) that the Quality Counts report illustrates that Louisiana’s education system “has gone from almost rock-bottom to number 15 in the country.”

Well, Piyush, we’re not sure in which parallel universe you reside, but if that truly is the case, you must realize that it all took place before your frilly, designed-to-benefit-your-contributors reform measures actually were implemented.

Could it be that the New Living Word School in Ruston, for example, with its lack of teachers, desks, books and classrooms, managed to pull off this dramatic surge in the natonal rankings in the past four months with its 150 vouchers approved by the Department of Education?

Or could this be just another bogus study to which the administration is clinging for some semblance of vindication in the weeks leading up to the 2013 legislative session?

After all the Piyush administration’s hyperbole over the StudentsFirst report, we are now loath to accept anything at face value that he or White distributes at Press Release Central, otherwise known as the Capitol press corps.

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π-yush eliminates Early Childhood Mental Health Support Services, commandeers $2.8 million in federal funding

Posted in Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, Health Care, State Agencies on January 8, 2013| 12 Comments »

Piyush strikes again.

This time, the victims are low-income children under the age of 6 who are considered at-risk of developing social, emotional or developmental problems—and 76 state employees who will lose their jobs—while Piyush redirects federal funding for the program to other areas of the state’s budget.

Remember approximately 15 months ago, when Gov. Piyush Jindal announced that he would not seek a $60 million federal grant in early childhood education funding for the state because, he said, the state’s system for early childhood education is “inefficient” and mired in bureaucracy? “We need to streamline the governance structure, funding streams and quality standards in our early childhood system,” he said at the time.

Now, Jindal’s latest move is to terminate the Early Childhood Supports and Services mental health program that provides assessment, counseling and case management to young children in low-income families in the parishes of Orleans, East Baton Rouge, Terrebonne, Lafayette, St. Tammany, and Ouachita.

And it should come as no surprise that he would justify this latest budgetary cut by falling back on the old reliable claim that the program is “inefficient.”

In terms of standard measures of child health and well-being, Louisiana has been ranked 49th or 50th for each of the past 15 years.

Research has demonstrated that poverty is the single greatest threat to a child’s well-being and the percentage of children living in poverty in Louisiana is 27 percent, 50 percent higher than the national average of 18 percent.

Louisiana has experienced minimal success in providing services for the early childhood period. Some of the services cited as essential for helping these children are access to medical care, mental health and social-emotional development, early care and education, parenting education and family support, according to the Maternal and Child Health Bureau’s State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (SECCS) grant (known in Louisiana as BrightStart).

Instead, Jindal has chosen to disembowel the program, effective Feb. 1, explaining that children with intensive needs can seek help from pediatricians, family resource centers or nonprofit groups.
Program proponents, however, have expressed concern that the program’s termination will result in children receiving medication but having to go on waiting lists for therapy or going without altogether.

What’s more, Piyush plans to take the $2.8 million in federal funding the program is scheduled to receive over the next five months and use it elsewhere in the state’s $25 billion budget.

Even worse, Janet Ketcham, executive director of the McMains Children’s Developmental Center in Baton Rouge will now have to scrap plans for a grant for her center. She said she was contending for a grant to collaborate with Early Childhood Support and Services in order to make it easier for parents get their children into speech therapy programs.

“Now I have to withdraw the grant,” she said.

But the biggest irony of all?

At the same time that Piyush was announcing the dismantling of early childhood services, he was jumping on another bandwagon, albeit somewhat late.

While services to address social, emotional and developmental problems were being eliminated, Piyush was announcing the formation of a study committee on school safety nearly a month after the Dec. 14 massacre of 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

And this is the same governor, remember, who turned his back on a $60 million for early childhood education funding. His official mouthpiece, Kyle Plotkin, said that three separate departments had done a thorough analysis of the grant and determined that it was “the exact opposite approach our state should take to help our kids.”

Fully one-third of the children in Louisiana are living in poverty and applying for a $60 million grant for early childhood education was deemed the opposite approach the state should take to help these kids.

Such is the mindset of this administration.

And we still have three years to go.

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1st in education reform? π-yush, John White release glowing report from Michelle Rhee’s less-than-credible StudentsFirst

Posted in BESE, Education, Governor's Office on January 8, 2013| 11 Comments »

As an indication of just how desperate Gov. Piyush Jindal, State Education Superintendent John White and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President (BESE) Chas Roemer are to put a good face on their much-ballyhooed education reform, one need only read the glowing “news” story picked up by Press Release Central and dutifully reported by media outlets across the state on Monday.

The story (if one wishes to call it that), issued by Louisiana Believes, the Glass-is-half-full propaganda arm of John White’s Department of Education (DOE), sounded the news like the proverbial trumpet in Revelations that Louisiana ranks first in the nation for educational policies that prioritize the interests of children, according to a report by StudentsFirst, an organization founded by Michelle Rhee, who has come under withering criticism for suspicious scoring gains at Washington, D.C., schools during her tenure as chancellor.

The New York Times made an interesting point about the Rhee report:

“The ratings, which focused purely on state laws and policies, did not take into account student test scores.”

That prompted Mercedes Schneider, who has been tracking statistical analyses of Louisiana’s propensity to fudge school data, to comment wryly on the blog of Diane Ravitch, a leading authority on education issues, “Ironic, ain’t it?”

Ravitch, on her blog, said, “Rhee wants teachers to be evaluated and fired by test scores; she wants schools to be closed by test scores. But when she ranked the states, she didn’t look at test scores. If she had, her number-one state—Louisiana—would have been at the bottom of her rankings.”

And when one peels back the layers on Rhee’s metaphorical onion, it’s easy to see that the organization compiling those rankings, StudentsFirst, has a stake in the outcome—a very big stake. It has a dog in this hunt, as it were.

Also on Monday, the U.S. Department of Education may have thrown a damper on Piyush’s premature party with its own news release that shows Louisiana not faring so well in high school graduation statistics.

Louisiana, the U.S. DOE said in lobbing its own stink bomb, ranked sixth from the bottom in public high school graduation rate.

The state’s graduation rate of 71 percent is higher only than Alaska, Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada and the District of Columbia. The D.C. graduation rate of 59 percent was lowest in the nation, followed by Nevada’s 62 percent. Iowa leads the nation at 88 percent.

The Louisiana Legislature passed legislation in 2009 mandating that the state’s graduation rate should be 80 percent by 2014, which means Jindal, White, Roemer, et al have their work cut out for them.

It also means that StudentsFirst report is mostly hogwash and the decision to release it reveals an administration desperate to prop up a failing policy heading into the 2013 legislative session.

StudentsFirst has poured money into the campaigns of four of Jindal’s hand-picked BESE members who support Jindal and White—$5,000 each to Holly Boffy, James Garvey, Kira Orange Jones and Roemer.

In addition, StudentsFirst received $5,000 from Future PAC, the political action committee of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber of Commerce. Future PAC in turn chipped in an additional $5,000 to Roemer’s campaign fund.

Future PAC also contributed $5,000 to the Alliance for Better Classrooms (ABC) which also received $27,000 from various Jindal/White/Roemer supporters, including Baton Rouge Business Report Publisher Rolfe McCollister ($2,000).

As a curious aside, in tracking the various campaign contributions and expenditures, LouisianaVoice discovered Innovative Advertising in Covington, a firm that caters almost exclusively to Republicans in its political advertising campaigns.

The firm’s web page boasts victories for Republican candidates in North Carolina, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana.

The Alliance for Better Classrooms spent more than $272,000 with Innovative Advertising in 2011 alone and the Republican Party of Louisiana spent another $359,000 with Innovative in 2007 through 2011.

But back to the administration’s touting of the StudentsFirst report.

“This report confirms that Louisiana is now leading the nation in education reform,” Jindal pontificated.

“The report’s findings validate the courage and boldness of Louisiana’s policy makers, voters and educators,” added White in an effort to outshine his boss in perfunctory rhetoric.

Not to be outdone, Roemer chimed in: “We are moving forward in education in this state and contrary to what the status quo wants us to believe, the majority of Louisiana people are excited to see real reform at last.”

Sadly, none of those statements is accurate. The report confirms nothing and it validates nothing and it’s highly doubtful if the people of this state are truly excited at what this administration passes off as reform. The courts certainly are not as three separate courts have knocked down various aspects of the education reform measures.

The Louisiana Believes release noted that the report praises Louisiana’s teacher evaluation system; the state’s tying layoff and tenure to teacher performance; awarding tenure only to “highly effective” teaching in five out of six years and the potential to revoke tenure after one year of ineffective teaching; the state’s charter school program; publicly-funded scholarships (part of which was struck down by a Baton Rouge court); letter grades for schools and for “setting the standard” for state level intervention through the Recovery School District.

The news release described StudentsFirst as a “grassroots movement formed in 2010 in response to an increasing demand for a better education system in the U.S.

But the most ludicrous aspect of the news release remains its source: StudentsFirst.

Rhee, before founding StudentsFirst, served as head of the Washington, D.C. school system from 2007 to 2010, when she and her boss, Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, both lost their jobs when Fenty was defeated for re-election.

During her tenure, student test scores improved dramatically but plummeted in 2011, particularly at one of the city’s award-winning schools after the principal tightened security on test score grading after accidentally discovering three school staff members late at night sitting in a room strewn with more than 200 test booklets.

Students had just completed a midyear practice version of the city’s annual standardized test and one of the adults was at a desk, holding an eraser with the other two sat at a table with open booklets before them.

One of Rhee’s more notable moves was converting the D.C. system’s annual standardized test into a barometer for teachers and principals meaning for the first time, their jobs and pay depended upon students’ scores increasing.

The district’s scores did increase, making a quantum jump, but in 2011, USA Today published an investigation that cast doubt on the validity of the test scores and about the effectiveness of Rhee’s reforms.

The newspaper story revealed an unusual number of wrong-to-right erasures on students’ answer sheets at more than 100 D.C. schools between 2008 and 2010.

The centerpiece of Rhee’s reform movement was Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus. Under her watch, the school went from being deemed in need of improvement to one of the district’s “shining stars.” In 2006, only 10 percent of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on standardized tests mandated under the federal No Child Left Behind Law. Two years later, 58 percent achieved that level and the school showed similar improvement in reading.

Rhee rewarded Noyes’ staff twice in three years—in 2008 and again in 2010—by handing out $8,000 bonuses to each teacher and $10,000 to the principal.

During that same three-year span, however, most of Noyes’ classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on the tests, with most of the erasures being that wrong answers were changed to correct ones.

In all, 103 public schools—more than half the D.C. schools—had erasure rates exceeding D.C. averages. In 2007-2008, six of eight classrooms taking tests at Noyes were flagged for the high rate of wrong-to-right erasure rates. The same pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-2010 school years, when 80 percent of classrooms at the school were flagged by the CTB/McGraw-Hill testing company.

For the 2009 reading test, one Noyes seventh grade classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasure rates, according to the USA Today story.

Thus, the chancellor of District of Columbia public schools presided over one of the biggest student test score cheating scandals in the nation and subsequently was forced out in 2010 only to establish the StudentsFirst grassroots movement “to mobilize parents, teachers, students, administrators and citizens throughout the country and to channel their energy to produce meaningful results on both the local and national level.” (Wonder if all that is on the organization’s letterhead?)

And now we are being asked to believe Jindal and White when they regurgitate a highly suspect report churned out by Michelle Rhee.

If still not convinced of the StudentsFirst shenanigans, you may wish to watch Frontline on LPB tonight (Tuesday) at 9 p.m.

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