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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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DOE run like a snow cone stand, but Course Choice fraudulent enrollments looking like a major scandal

Posted in BESE, Education, Layoffs, Public Records, Transparency, Vouchers on May 16, 2013| 11 Comments »

Could it possibly get any worse for Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White?

For that matter, could the State of Louisiana possibly do any worse than John White as education superintendent?

Good questions both. The answers are, in order:

That remains to be seen, and

Probably not.

There are so many things going on with the Department of Education (DOE), not the least of which is the breaking story of what appears to be the fraudulent enrollment of more than 1,100 students in two north Louisiana parishes in Course Choice classes without their knowledge and the close association of the chairman of the course choice provider company to former President George W. Bush and recent Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Folks, this is a huge story.

More about that later, but first a few others:

• Voucher funding knocked down by the courts;

• Confidential files on teachers evaluations leaked to the media;

• Personal information on Louisiana students provided and then, presumably revoked, to a data base “parking garage” operated by Rupert Murdock and Bill Gates;

• Mass layoffs by DOE even as it advertises for yet another six-figure unclassified appointment;

• Rejection of the Minimum Foundation Program formula by the State Senate;

• A legislative bill to reorganize DOE even as White moves forward with doing just that without benefit of the bill’s passage;

• Attempts to tweak the Value Added Model for teacher evaluations, lending ample evidence that the entire methodology was flawed from the outset;

DOE is the single agency that is responsible for the expenditure of more funds—federal and state—than any other state agency and for the education of hundreds of thousands of Louisiana children.

And it’s being run like a snow cone stand.

And that snow cone stand is being run by a gaggle of highly overpaid, grossly under-qualified preppies who have somehow convinced themselves that six-weeks of Teach for America courses and/or a six-weekend course spread over 10 months translates to solid credentials that qualify them to run roughshod over people who have obtained full-blown college degrees, many of those advanced degrees, and who have dedicated their entire professional lives to educating children.

And on top of everything else, White just can’t seem to be able to resist embellishing facts or simply plucking them out of thin air. He seems to forget that while he is certainly entitled to his own opinion, he is not entitled to his own facts.

Case in point:

Last week, immediately after the Louisiana Supreme Court ruling upholding the lower court’s decision that the funding formula for school vouchers was unconstitutional, White was quoted thusly:

“On the most important aspect of the law, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of families (that, folks, is what is known as spin). 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, and we will work with the legislature to find another funding source to keep parents and kids in these schools.

The “93 percent” caught our eye and as we have begun doing with any such utterance by White, we went after documentation. After all, someone once said 87.5 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. Accordingly, we fired off the following public records request:

• Where do the data supporting the 93 percent approval come from? Please be specific and provide all written documentation supporting this claim;

• Are your data from a survey of parents actually conducted in the spring of a particular school year? If so, which year?

• Are students and/or parents who are unhappy and/or who transfer out of a voucher school included in your survey?

• In calculating the 93 percent favorable rate, do you/DOE count all surveys sent out or only those that are returned?

Because of this week’s public records lawsuit settlement that was favorable to LouisianaVoice, DOE actually responded in a timely fashion and with precisely the answer we expected:

“…The Department is not in possession of any public record(s) responsive to the above-written request.”
Go figure.

So, if there are no public records to support his claim, just how did White arrive at that “nearly 93 percent” figure?

Who knows, but hey, it’s not the first time that White has been unable to back up his claims. Remember, he claims that he cancelled the agreement with inBloom to provide personal data on hundreds of thousands of Louisiana students to its data base but when asked for the written communication of cancellation, guess what? “…The Department is not in possession of any public record(s) responsive to the above-written request.”

Anyone detect a trend here?

HB 650 by Jindal old reliable ally Rep. Stephen Carter (R-Baton Rouge) calls for the reorganization of DOE and would give White broad powers in creating new offices—undoubtedly at exorbitant salaries to more under-qualified appointees—for the department.

But White isn’t waiting. The reorganization has already begun.

White has submitted a layoff plan which, if approved, will put 34 civil service (classified) employees out of work. These are the ones, just as in other agencies, who get things done, who show up day in and day out to process paperwork, answer inquiries and generally keep the department afloat. They are also, unlike their appointive supervisors, qualified.

The layoff plan was submitted ostensibly to save $3.4 million for fiscal year 2013-2014.

Yet, DOE is currently advertising online to fill an unclassified (appointive) position, almost certainly at a six-figure salary, for the position of Chief of Staff, Office of Portfolio.

If the Office of Portfolio rings a bell, that would be our old friend Dave “Lefty” Lefkowith, the $146,000 per year commuter (between Los Angeles and Baton Rouge), the director (or deputy superintendent, depending on which day of the week it is) of the Office of Portfolio. The new hire (or in-house appointee, more likely) would be Lefty’s right hand (yes, we meant to do that).

Turns out the Office of Portfolio is in charge of filling up all those course choice online courses—even, it seems, if students don’t know they’re enrolled.

Course choice providers get about whatever they wish to charge in “tuition,” some of them setting the bar at $1200. They get half of that upon the successful enrollment of the student, no matter if he or she completes the course. The student can sign up, participate for say, a week, drop out and the provider still gets $600. And it is the provider who decides whether or not the student has successfully completed the course, which would qualify the provider with the other half of the tuition.

Fox, welcome to the henhouse.

Now it turns out that more than 1100 students in the parishes of Caddo and Webster have signed up for course choice programs—but they didn’t know it.

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 is 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.

Fox, henhouse.

The question here, then, is: just where did FastPath get the student information needed to arbitrarily enroll 1,100 students? It would seem highly unlikely that it came from the local school boards.

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?

What flavor snow cone would you like?

It should come as no surprise that recent stories like this has prompted a witch hunt at DOE. To even the most casual LouisianaVoice reader, it should be obvious that we have sources within DOE.

The ongoing efforts to find leaks would rival the White House Plumbers of those nostalgic Nixon years. Personal printers have been removed so that documents must be printed at a central location more easily monitored. IT personnel have been called in to review emails.

Seems to us, security would be better served with efforts to attempt to learn who provided FastPath with personal data on 1,100 students.

But our sources are not stupid. Most of them are actually former employees who either retired or quit in disgust but who had the foresight to download incriminating documents on computer flash drives which were then passed on to us.

And then there’s that Joan Hunt email SNAFU:

We recently made a public records request and Hunt, the DOE general counsel, responded by sending an email to DOE attorney Willa LeBlanc and Troy Hebert, director of the Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control. It’s not certain if Hebert was mistakenly copied instead of another DOE attorney named Troy Humphrey, but the message simply said, “Troy, we need to reply and say that.”

But Hunt inadvertently copied us into that reply.

Naturally, we wanted to know what that reply was supposed to say. So we sent a public records request asking for copies of all emails between Hunt, LeBlanc, Hebert and White to which Hunt responded on Wednesday:

“No documents. Attorney-client privilege.”

Well, Troy Hebert is not a client of the DOE legal staff; he works under the Department of Revenue and he’s not an attorney, so attorney-client privilege is out the window and we feel entitled to any communication that has us as a subject that has been discussed with someone other than an attorney.

We fired off a response to Hunt that we may well be back in court seeking a contempt ruling and monetary damages.

Finally, there’s this, suggested by a friend and regular reader:

Inasmuch as White is so frantic to track down the source of the leaks and since those leaks were provided on a few flash drives provided by former DOE employees, perhaps it would be appropriate to show up at the next Board of Elementary and Secondary (BESE) meeting with a few hundred lapel pins to hand out.

The pens would be in the shape of a computer flash drive and would have inscribed on them (again, at the suggestion of a reader), “Louisiana Believes LouisianaVoice,” thus commemorating in our own humble way the DOE web page that now calls itself Louisiana Believes.

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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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DOE agrees to pay legal costs and late fees for not producing records in settlement of LouisianaVoice’s public records suit

Posted in BESE, Education, Governor's Office, Public Records, Transparency on May 13, 2013| 50 Comments »

We tried repeatedly to warn the Louisiana Department of Education (DOE) and Education Superintendent John White:

• Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2013 7:55 PM
To: john.white@la.gov; joan.hunt@la.gov
Subject: PUBLIC RECORDS REQUEST

I should not have to remind you that you are answerable to the people of this state whether or not you like it, whether or not you like me personally, or whether or not these records cast you in a bad light. The fact is, you have no recourse but to comply with the laws of the State of Louisiana—or suffer financial penalties as a result of litigation.

• Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2013 7:55 PM
To: john.white@la.gov; joan.hunt@la.gov
Subject: FIRST FOLLOWUP ON PUBLIC RECORDS REQUEST (COPIED TO ATTORNEY J. ARTHUR SMITH)

Should you attempt to prevent disclosure of any of the documents requested by any method, including a claim of deliberative process, or by saying the records do not exist and I subsequently come into possession of these documents (as I most certainly will, though it may take time), I will pursue all legal means available to me against the department, John White and any other individual who takes part in such a ruse.

• Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 11:42 AM
To: john.white@la.gov; joan.hunt@la.gov; troy.humphrey@la.gov; ‘jason.hannaman@la.gov’
Subject: PUBLIC RECORDS REQUEST

Pursuant to the Public Records Act of Louisiana (R.S. 44:1 et seq.), I respectfully request the following information:

Please provide me the opportunity to review each of the multiple layoff plans submitted to Civil Service by the Louisiana Department of Education that are currently awaiting consideration by the Civil Service Commission.

Also, remember there is no such thing as a “three-day” deadline to produce records; they are to be provided immediately under statute, subject to penalties of $100 per day and the meter is already running on several other requests.

• Sent: Monday, May 06, 2013 4:25 PM
To: joan.hunt@la.gov; troy.humphrey@la.gov; john.white@la.gov
Subject: PUBLIC RECORD REQUEST

I would remind you that the Louisiana public records laws are quite specific about the time you are allowed to respond to this request. There is no “three day waiting period” as some believe. Please do not try to delay release of these public records.

On most occasions, it is generally accepted that one should be a gracious winner by exhibiting the customary display of humility and sportsmanship.

This is not one of those times.

Repeated attempts at obtaining what are clearly public records from White and his DOE have met with obstacles and frustrations ranging from denials that requested records exist to interminable—and illegal—delays to simply having our requests ignored.

There were other similar requests likes the ones listed above, accompanied by similar warnings of potential legal action—many others.

Finally, our patience worn thin, LouisianaVoice filed suit a couple of weeks ago.

What followed was, in the approximate order:

• The setting of a trial date of Monday, May 13 (today) by 19th Judicial District Judge Janice Clark;

• A flurry of responses to numerous long overdue records requests from DOE as if to say late compliance equated to full compliance (it doesn’t);

• A status conference last Friday (May 10) at which Judge Clark made known her intent to enforce the letter of the law regarding the state’s public records laws;

• DOE’s sudden show of repentance and an offer to settle the matter out of court;

• A final settlement approved by Judge Clark in court on Monday.

The lawsuit was a no-brainer from the get-go. The public records law is quite specific as to what is public record and the responsibilities of the custodian of the record(s) to make said record(s) available upon the appearance of any Louisiana citizen 18 years of age or older so requesting any public record(s).

Should a record not be available or in use at the time of the request, the custodian must notify the person making the request in writing as to when, within three days, the record shall be available for inspection.

The Division of Administration (DOA) on one of our recent visits was apparently not so clear on that point. A spokesperson for DOA assured LouisianaVoice that it had three days to make the record available. Not so. Take note of that, Kristy Nichols (Commissioner of Administration) and DOA legal counsel David Boggs; it may come up again.

The custodian must make the record(s) available for inspection and may charge up to 25 cents per page for any copies the requestor may want. The requestor, however, is not required to purchase copies he/she does not want. Moreover, should the requestor possess a portable scanner, he/she is free to copy as many pages as he/she likes into his/her scanner at no charge (First Commerce Title Co., Inc. v. Martin, Second Circuit Court of Appeal, 2005). The legal eagles in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s office might wish to make note of that so they don’t repeat that mistake.

And just in case you might be wondering, here are the terms of our settlement with White and DOE:

• The Department of Education must make available by close of business on Friday, May 17, 2013, all outstanding requests for public records from LouisianaVoice and Tom Aswell, including a list of DOE employees who are alumni of the New Teacher Project, Teach for America and/or the Eli Broad Academy—information DOE previously said it did not have;

• DOE must pay all court costs incurred by LouisianaVoice and Tom Aswell;

• DOE must pay the attorney fees for J. Arthur Smith, legal counsel for LouisianaVoice and Tom Aswell;

• DOE must pay $100 per day for each day that it was late in responding to each request for public records made by LouisianaVoice and Tom Aswell.

Altogether, the attorney fees, court costs and $100 fines come to about $6300.

That’s $6300 of your money the Louisiana Department of Education and John White could have saved state taxpayers simply by complying with the state’s public records laws.

We can’t help it. Sometimes you earn the right to gloat and be a little smug, sportsmanship and protocal be damned.

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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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