“Course providers had to pass an intensive four-step selection process.”
—Department of Education’s Course Choice Overview and Fact Sheet.
“Doomsday scenario for us is that a kid takes a course, gets a scholarship and then walks on to (sic) campus and NCAA will not clear him and the scholarship is in jeopardy.”
—September email from Department of Education Director Ken Bradford to Superintendent of Education John White.
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Another day, another embarrassing SNAFU on the part of John White and his dysfunctional Louisiana Department of Education.
For that matter, you may have to include our favorite Department of Education (DOE) administrator, Lefty Lefkowith, when handing out the stink weed bouquets for the department’s infamous course choice program.
That’s the program Lefkowith was being paid $146,000 a year to set up and run between his weekly commute to and from Los Angeles.
Now, thanks to the superb digging of the Monroe News Star’s Barbara Leader, we learn that athletic scholarship for Louisiana university students may be in jeopardy because the NCAA has not approved 17 of the 19 course choice providers for Louisiana college athletes.
Uh-oh. Just another day of putting out brush fires at DOE. Remember New Living Word School in Ruston? That was the school initially approved by DOE for 315 vouchers last year despite the fact it had no classrooms, no desks and insufficient staff.
Of course, if you read the department’s Course Choice Overview and Fact Sheet, you read on the very first page that “Course providers had to pass an intensive four-step selection process.”
House Concurrent Resolution 153 by Rep. Patrick Jefferson (D-Homer) and Sens. Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe) and Francis Thompson (D-Delhi) during the 2013 legislative session urged the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) “to study issues relative to the enrollment of students by course providers and the approval of course providers…”
That resolution noted that the DOE website “states that course providers must ‘pass an intensive four-step selection process’…”
Despite that four-step process and DOE’s “rigorous review” which began in August of 2012, Leader said an email last month from DOE Director Ken Bradford to White indicated that 17 of the 19 listed providers were not NCAA-approved. http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20131018/NEWS01/310180037
Course Choice, overseen at one time by Lefkowith, who works only four days a week at a salary of $146,000, allows high school students who attend a C, D or F-ranked school to enroll in online courses from state-approved private providers if their schools do not offer courses needed for them to graduate.
White told Leader on Friday that virtual classes offered by providers are often used by athletes to complete high school academic requirements. Eligibility problems have never arisen in the past, he said.
That was then. This is now.
Bradford, in his email, said, “Just wanted to put this on your radar. The Choice Academic team is working with our providers to ensure they get approval/authorized with the NCAA for their core offerings. Doomsday scenario for us is that a kid takes a course, gets a scholarship and then walks on to (sic) campus and NCAA will not clear him and the scholarship is in jeopardy.”
Somehow, John White, BESE and doomsday scenario just seem to go together.
Not to diminish the damage this would inflict on affected players, but if this little crisis du jour ends up costing the eligibility of key LSU players or worse yet (in the hearts and minds of Tiger football fans, anyway), causes LSU to forfeit any or all of its wins, the fecal matter will surely hit the oscillating air redistribution device. And the collateral damage might even be felt up on the fourth floor of the State Capitol.
Posted in BESE, Education, Legislature, Legislators | 12 Comments »
The following is a press release by State Treasurer John Kenney. LouisianaVoice presents it here as a guest column that we feel underscores the concerns expressed in our Sept. 29 post entitled False prophets, false profits—and false reasons to privatize LSU Hospital System (or trolling for more Medicaid dollars)
The reason advanced by the Jindal Administration for privatizing Louisiana’s charity hospitals is that a private hospital like Lafayette General or Ochsner, for example, can manage a hospital more efficiently, and therefore cheaper, than the state.
That’s why I was taken aback when the chairman of the private entity taking over the Shreveport state hospital testified before the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget that the private contractor’s costs to run the Shreveport facility will be the same as the state’s. Where, then, will the Jindal Administration’s promised annual savings of $150 million come from if not from achieving operational efficiencies?
Dig deeper into the details and it becomes apparent that the planned “savings” won’t result from lower costs but from getting more money from the federal government through an accounting change. This won’t make the charity hospitals or Louisiana’s Medicaid program, which pays for the hospitals, more efficient. It will just make them more expensive, fueled by additional federal (American taxpayer) money.
Here’s how the new financial strategy will work: Medicaid, which is government health insurance for the poor, is a federal-state program. The states run it but the feds put up most of the money. In Louisiana, for every $1 in state taxpayer money we contribute, the feds contribute $2. The more money we put up, the more money the federal government contributes.
Under the Charity Hospital privatization, the state will “lease” the charity hospitals to private hospitals, which then will be responsible for treating our low-income and uninsured citizens. The state will pay the private hospitals to do this with large amounts of federal money from our Medicaid program. The private hospitals will then return some of those federal dollars to the state as “lease payments.” The federal dollars paid to the state as “lease payments” now become new state dollars, which the state can use to draw down even more federal money.
This accounting maneuver is undeniably clever. The question is whether it is legal. It must be approved by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Louisiana’s track record with CMS is not good. CMS has previously rejected similar financing strategies designed to leverage federal money. In the early 1990s, for example, Louisiana and other states adopted financing strategies such as “provider taxes,” “provider donations,” and “intergovernmental transfers,” designed to launder federal Medicaid funds into state funds in order to draw down more federal funds. CMS and Congress spurned them all. (The Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital Payment Program: Background and Issues, The Urban Institute, No. A-14, October 1997). http://www.urban.org/publications/307025.html
In fact, Louisiana was more aggressive than most states in trying to leverage federal dollars. Our health care budget grew from $1.6 billion in 1988 to $4.48 billion in 1993, of which 90% was federal funds. The amount of money actually contributed by the state during this period declined from $595 million to $462 million. (Washington Post, Jan. 31, 1994, page A9).
When CMS and Congress stepped in to stop what then-Congressman Bob Livingston called Louisiana’s “abuse” of Medicaid financing, and, in Livingston’s words, the “unjustified and unwarranted benefits” came to an end (The Advocate, Feb. 6, 1997, page 1A). Newly-elected Gov. Mike Foster was faced with a $1 billion deficit in the health care budget. To clean up the mess, Foster appointed Bobby Jindal as DHH Secretary, who sought special relief from Congress. As The Advocate newspaper editorialized, “Louisiana pleaded guilty as charged, threw itself on the mercy of the court and got off easy,” because “the state for years ran a scam using ‘loopholes and accounting gimmicks’ to justify fantastic increases in federal payments.” (The Advocate, April 29, 1996).
Perhaps this time is different. Perhaps CMS will view the new “lease payments” being used to obtain additional federal money more favorably han the strategies CMS has rejected in the past.
One thing’s for certain, though. We need to find out. The state should seek CMS review of its new strategy immediately—not “soon” as DHH has promised—but now. Until then, our entire state health care delivery system for more than two million of our people is at financial risk.
Posted in Contract, Contracts, Guest Columnist, Health Care, Higher Education, LSU, Privatization | 7 Comments »
It has become so easy to catch Superintendent of Education John White in a lie that the exercise has also become boring.
The latest fabrication to come out of the Department of Education (DOE) was a simultaneous falsehood delivered to both LouisianaVoice and Crazy Crawfish and we’re both calling him out on it—simultaneously.
On Sunday, Oct. 14, LouisianaVoice submitted a public records request to White at 7:08 p.m. and a read receipt showed that he opened our email at 11:32 p.m. that same day.
Our request was straightforward enough, asking that White provide us with “all documents which indicate which employees, including your executive staff, in the Louisiana Department of Education have or will receive pay increases.”
A simple request to be sure and one with which it should have easy to comply.
Instead, the response we received on Monday, Oct. 14, was a lie, pure and simple.
“Our public information office has requested that I inform you that the Department is not in possession of any public records responsive to your request,” said the letter from department legal counsel Troy Humphrey.
That was a lie, as we learned from a similar request made to the Department of Civil Service. More about that later.
Fellow blogger Jason France, aka the Crazy Crawfish, http://crazycrawfish.wordpress.com/ has encountered similar difficulty getting straight answers from White and called the superintendent out on Wednesday.
Crazy Crawfish reprinted a Sept. 27 memorandum from White to DOE personnel in which White said budgetary constraints forced him to implement a hiring freeze after Oct. 7. He also said the department “will not provide performance adjustments (raises) this year.”
He said he would re-evaluate that decision later to determine if “one-time incentive award(s) to our employees” could be made.
While technically correct, there are no fewer than 43 DOE employees who received pay increases totaling nearly $500,000 (an average of $11,600 each) from September 2012 to October 2013.
What’s more, there were 40 new hires during this same time period totaling $3 million, or $75,000 per new employee.
So how could White say there would be no raises but at the same time bumped the salaries of 43 employees by an average of $11,600—some by as much as $40,000 and more?
Simple. He borrowed a page from the playbook of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
The Department of Civil Service, in providing figures to LouisianaVoice, noted that the majority of the salary increases “are the result of reallocations in career progression group, promotions, or movement from part-time to full-time.”
That’s what Walker did in Wisconsin, according to a story published this week. He created what is classified as “phantom jobs” to boost the salaries of his top aides. He simply shifts employees from one position to another, and back again, giving them healthy pay bumps at each stop along the way, thus circumventing state personnel rules limiting pay increases.
One employee, for example, received an increase of $11,100—from $60,902 to $72,000—when she was promoted from an Education Program Consultant 2 to Education Program Consultant 4.
Another got a $13,000 bump—from $65,200 to $78,200—when promoted from Education Consultant to IT Management Consultant I.
Three others received pay raises of $40,500, $49,400 and $54,200 respectively when they went from, in order, Educational Assistant to Educational Program Consultant 3, from Educational Assistant to Executive Management Officer 1, and from Instructor to Educational Program Consultant 3.
As noted by our friend the Crazy Crawfish, White brought in new hires with such vague titles as “Advisor” ($60,000), “Director” ($90,000), “Consultant” ($95,000) and “Fellow” ($100,000, $95,000 and $70,000). Apparently some fellows are worth more than other fellows.
White also “promoted” one employee from Computer Graph Designer at $39,000 to Public Information Officer 1 at $44,200, an increase of $5,200, and he had a new hire of a Public Information Officer 2 at $50,600.
This from a department that steadfastly refuses to release any public information unless threatened with litigation—with litigation sometimes even becoming necessary.
And keep in mind, these new hires and pay raises disguised as promotions and reassignments came during a time when White claimed it was necessary to lay off dozens of DOE employees.
Crazy Crawfish said it best when he said John White is just not honest.
“Unclassified personnel can be fired at will,” he said. “They should have been the first to go before scores of classified employees were laid off. He was not honest about raises to select employees. He was not honest about being under financial hardship and needing to lay off scores of employees when he can hire dozens more…”
To that we can only refer that that infamous email to the governor’s office in which White said he planned to “take some air out of the room” in upcoming testimony to legislators about the approval of 315 vouchers for New Living Word school in Ruston, a facility lacking in classrooms, textbooks and staff.
That is his M.O. It always has been and, with the backing of Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President Chas Roemer, that’s the way it will be as long as this state is saddled with this albatross of a superintendent.
In short, nothing the man says can be trusted and the time is long past when we should be asking if this is the type person we want in charge of our state education system.
After all, if he will so easily lie about something as basic as pay raises for department employees, why should we expect the truth about school performance scores?
We made that request also and we were told the report is not available.
And it’s only been eight months.
Perhaps he needs time to cook the numbers to support his claims.
Which, of course, would be yet another lie.
Posted in BESE, Education, Public Records | 16 Comments »
“No member of a civil service commission and no officer or employee in the classified service shall participate or engage in political activity; be a candidate for nomination or election to public office except to seek election as the classified state employee serving on the State Civil Service Commission; or be a member of any national, state, or local committee of a political party or faction; make or solicit contributions for any political party, faction, or candidate.”
Article X, Part I, Paragraph 9 (A) of the Louisiana State Constitution.
“No person shall solicit contributions for political purposes from any classified employee or official or use or attempt to use his position in the state or city service to punish or coerce the political action of a classified employee.”
Article X, Part I, Paragraph 9 (B) of the Louisiana State Constitution.
Posted in Campaign Contributions, Civil Service, Governor's Office, Notable Quotables | 6 Comments »
