More and More Testing; Diminising Returns

Most of our non-educator education reformers believe that the primary purpose of K-12 education is to get all students ready for college. The high school Redesign Commission under the direction of previous Superintendent Pastorek several years ago adopted a goal that most students would graduate by completing the college prep Core 4 curriculum. (See my post of 1/29/2010) That's also why State Superintendent John White has decreed that starting this year all 8^th through 11^th graders in public schools will be required to take the ACT (See the Louisiana ESEA Flexibility Request page 54).

 

A few educators have warned that college prep for all is a serious mistake. We believe that not all of our student population can and should be prepared for college. We believe that scheduling all or most students in college prep courses results in a watering down of instruction. When more than half the class is not ready for Algebra, Geometry or Advanced English, the teacher ends up teaching only the minimum needed to get students to pass the end of course tests. As a result the true college prep students do not get the rigorous course content they need and most are bored to death.

 

The non-college bound students are hurt even more by this system. They struggle to get through the Core 4, and some have to take credit recovery courses to try to graduate on time. They have no time to take vocational courses that could allow them to pursue a valuable career. These students barely graduate from high school with no salable skills and very little chance of succeeding in college. Some that attempt college end up dropping out with a huge load of college loans and still no career. The reformers then simply blame teachers and administrators for not pounding square pegs into round holes.

 

The push for college for all has been the policy in Louisiana for several years.

How successful has Louisiana been in preparing all students for college? ACT test averages for all states were released last week for test takers in the 2012 school year. Louisiana students scored an average of 20.3. The Louisiana Department of Education put out a press release claiming improvement for our public school students over last year and a narrowing of the achievement gap. One important item that was not mentioned in the LDOE press release is an analysis by the ACT experts concluding that only 17% of Louisiana students met the benchmarks that would predict success in all major categories of college course work.

 

ACT testing administrators also published a 5 year listing of average scores for each state. The 2012 score for Louisiana students is exactly the same as the average score of 20.3 in 2008. So if one looks at the most recent 5 year period, Louisiana shows no overall increase in the average ACT score. The 5 year period covers the last part of the administration of Paul Pastorek, the non-educator guy who set us on this course.

A complicating factor in using ACT scores to estimate improvement in public education in Louisiana is the fact that scores are averaged for all students taking the test including both public and private school students. It is impossible to know whether a gain in the average is due to public school students or to the fairly large number of private school students taking the test. The State Department of Education however, is claiming that the flimsy one tenth point improvement this year in the overall average means that public schools are improving. I hope that is true, but I would first like to see a breakdown showing separate averages for public and private schools.

I participated in a meeting of the High School Redesign Commission a few months ago, where the group was informed that the State Department of Education will start requiring all high school students to take the ACT and that 25% of the all important School Performance Score will be based on the ACT average score. Some of the Commission members grumbled that this would not give the high schools time to set up special ACT prep courses. But not wanting to seem to be against this latest reform, they dutifully voted to endorse the new testing scheme. So it looks like many more of our teachers will be singing the Test Teacher Song. (Click on the link and you'll see what I mean.) 

It used to be that high schools in addition to producing literate and well rounded citizens would prepare students for either vocational/careerwork or for entry into 4 year colleges. Now the goal has been carefully reshaped by our non-educator reformers so that schools are supposed to produce adults who are College andCareer ready.  The reformers are telling us that if we achieve the goal of college prep, we will also automatically be preparing students for careers that require less than a 4 year college degree. The problem is there are only so many hours in the school day. That's why many school systems have been forced to sacrifice many of their vocational-technical programs to allow more time for the Core 4 curriculum.

No other industrialized country attempts to prepare all its students for college. They know that the modern work force needs skilled and vocational workers just as much as it needs college educated workers. Why do our school reformers insist on doing exactly the opposite of what the most successful countries are doing?

It is ironic that business leaders have been telling the Louisiana Workforce Commission that what they need are skilled workers in many jobs that do not require a college degree. That's why one element of the Jindal reform legislation will now allow high school students to leave their home campus and attend vocational courses by private providers. The problem is most of these kids are not able to go in two directions at one time.

I believe that forcing students who are not suited to, or have no interest in college prep to take such courses is very bad policy. It is discouraging and damaging to the students and guarantees that our public schools will continue to look like failures. For educators it's more and more testing with diminishing returns.

Choice Providers: Private Schools Authorized to Raid MFP

Note to my readers:This is an expansion of my post of July 2, 2012 that alerted you to the new Choice Course Provider system. More information has come to light as a result of the LDOE web page giving detailed information on how the Department plans to proceed with this program.

A new type of private school serving public school students at taxpayer expense was created by Act 2 of 2012. These new private schools will offer “Choice Courses”, a major component of Jindal's attack on our public schools. Choice course providers will be able to recruit students and a portion of their MFP allocation starting with the 2013-14 school year. All students attending public schools rated “C” or below (more than half of public schools) will be targets of these new choice providers. There is also a provision in the law that allows students from B or A schools to take choice courses and raid the MFP funding if such courses are not offered by their home schools. Proposals are now being received by the State Department of Education for choice courses for the 2013-14 school year. BESE will have the authority to approve any courses by private providers that meet state requirements by January 1, 2013. The state will then publish a list of approved choice course providers and the courses they will offer so that students can sign up for the 2013-14 school year.

What type of organizations are expected to be choice course providers? Colleges may offer college credit courses, business organizations may offer technical and vocational courses, large national based for-profit virtual course providers such as Connections Academy and K12 may offer any subject at any grade level in the state approved curriculum, and individual entrepreneurs or teachers may also offer either virtual or on-site courses.

These course providers will operate in direct competition with local school systems but the playing field in this competition will not be a level field. The tuition charged by these choice course providers comes directly from the MFP funding normally allocated to the school district where the student lives. But since choice providers are private, they are not required to use any particular portion of the MFP for actual instruction. Choice course providers can use media advertising to lure students away from public schools and charge the cost to us, the taxpayers. They can capture public school students for all but one hour of instruction each day and there is absolutely nothing local school boards can do about it. In fact school officials are prohibited by law from discouraging students from taking choice courses.

The tuition charged can be up to 90% of the pro-rated MFP allocation for a course even though a choice provider may have a fraction of the state mandated overhead costs of public schools. In the question and answer section of the State Department web page for choice courses, the Department predicts that somehow competition will create a “market price” for choice courses. We don't know if that means that BESE will approve only the lowest cost providers for particular categories of courses or if many different fee proposals will be approved for the same courses. As far as the students and their parents are concerned, there is no incentive for choosing the lower cost courses because all such courses are free (if the student comes from a “C” or below rated school or if the course is not offered in his/her “B” or “A” school). This course approval process by BESE is sure to be controversial and may result in court challenges.

According to the law these course providers, once approved by BESE, may offer choice courses for up to 3 years. The law provides for an evaluation of Choice Course Providers after 2 years, and allows a course provider to be put on probation for their third year based on performance of students taking their courses. After 3 years each provider may be terminated or renewed for at least 3 more years. This process means that many students may be allowed to participate in these unregulated schools possibly providing sub-standard services for at least 3 years before anything is done.

Choice course providers can pay their administrators any salary they choose using our tax money, allocate any amount they choose to their owners or stockholders and use any pupil teacher ratio they choose. Their teachers will not be evaluated as is required by state law because they are private schools. At this point, there are no plans for the state to monitor whether or not students attend regularly as required in public schools. As far as I know there are no plans by the state to check to see if students are spending the number of required minutes each day on each course, and no one will know if the required GLE's or common core standards are being covered. Choice schools will receive 50% of their fees at the time of student enrollment. At this point there is no regulation to cover what happens if a student is expelled from a choice provider course or what happens to the initial 50% payment made by the state to the choice provider if the student drops out or is expelled by the choice provider. It looks like most of the “choice” will be in the hands of the choice course providers.

But here's the most disturbing part of the rules for choice courses. All students participating in the course choice program will be tested by LEAP or its successor tests at their original home public schools. Their scores made on LEAP and other high stakes tests will be assigned to their home schools even if the majority of their courses are taken off campus. So the profit for choice courses goes to the providers, but for the first three years at least, the penalties for any under performance will go to their assigned public schools.You could have a “C” rated school that may have its grade reduced to a “D” or worse by the scores of choice students. Or you could have a school that may lose its higher performing students to choice course providers while the lower performing students remain. Some choice course providers may look good because they have carefully skimmed the best performing students from the public schools! We have already seen that some of the voucher schools have ways of discouraging qualified students from enrolling if the school administrators want to cull out certain students.

Another unintended consequence of having courses offered by unregulated providers is grade inflation. There is nothing to keep some of the choice providers from watering down standards and using grade inflation to attract more students to their profit making enterprise. Particularly in cases where the courses offered are not tested by the state, the state may not be in a position to challenge the rigor of such courses. This is very similar to what we see now with many of the virtual schools offering “college level” courses over the Internet. Many graduates of such schools are finding their degrees to be worthless even after they have accumulated huge college loan debts. (see my post of August 5)

Louisiana does have a great need for expansion of career training as opposed to our present policy of attempting to prepare all students for college. This could have easily been done by providing for partnerships between our high schools and our vocational/technical and community colleges. In addition there should be more business and industry related apprenticeship programs. There was no need for a law that could drain the lifeblood out of our public schools.

What Jindal and the Legislature have done is to allow private companies and individual profiteers to experiment with the education of children and collect much of the MFP money with very little oversight. The difference is that even if a student may be under-performing in a public school, at least the public system assures taxpayers that the student is in attendance, that the teacher is being monitored and evaluated, and that the required elements of the curriculum are being taught. With a choice course nothing is guaranteed. The same lack of accountability applies to the new voucher schools. How can we trust that the Department will properly evaluate choice providers based on some of the atrocious voucher schools approved so far? For the voucher and choice schools, over 75 years of legislation designed to protect the education of Louisiana public school students has been thrown away. At the same time, the State Department of education will continue to micromanage our public schools as never before. This is school reform?

Based on my many years in education, I know that this and the other parts of the Jindal plan will not work. In all probability many students will be hurt by this multitude of poorly monitored privatization schemes. Our students should not be the guinea pigs for these untested programs. Please talk to your legislator. There is still time to stop this train before it runs off the tracks and wrecks our education system.

A Great Monroe News Star Editorial

Voucher Program: 

“Details to come”

11:59 PM, Aug. 13, 2012 |

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While no one is certain — because the state Department of Education will not release its records — it would appear to the most casual observer that the state's voucher program was approved "DTC."

That's "Details To Come."

And those details are so vague that even some members the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, who have rubber stamped approval of most every decision this year (after, we've learned, meeting in advance via phone to come to a consensus), may be starting to have questions.

All we can say at this point is a hearty "Hallelujah." It's about time to shine some light on this program.

In the most recent turn of events, after it became apparent last week that voucher athletes would not be allowed to play sports and some dude in South Louisiana who calls himself a “prophet” managed to garner himself a financial bonanza in vouchers, there's now the question of the Common Core Curriculum.

Students enrolled in Louisiana public schools this year will have a tougher curriculum and have to meet higher standards to make the grades they need to advance to the next level. That's the Common Core, which is used in 46 states.

But students who have transferred to private and parochial schools through the new statewide voucher program won't have to comply with the tougher standards.

The biggest differences from what's being taught now, said Nick Bolt, Department of Education deputy chief of staff, are "higher standards, higher expectations" for student performance. "The standards themselves are more rigorous. The Common Core will be better than what we have now."

But it's only in public schools because "private schools have not bought into the Common Core," Bolt said, and "we cannot require that private schools adopt the Common Core. They develop their own curriculum."

This new, tougher curriculum is practically guaranteed to plunge more students — and more schools — into "failing" status. Any educator who understands the testing process will tell you that when the rules change, as they will with the Common Core Curriculum, the baseline year shows more failures with improvements in future years as teachers understand what is required for their students to pass.

And that low scoring will then create opportunities for more vouchers and virtual online academies that don't face the same requirements of the Common Core.

If private and parochial schools are willing to accept taxpayer dollars, they should be held to the same standards as public schools. We are, after all, in this to improve the overall quality of education in Louisiana, are we not?

Questions are being raised about the quality of teaching and the academic quality of what's being taught at some of the new schools that are to receive state funding for the first time.

Even Penny Dastugue, president of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, says "we need a deeper discussion of the approval process." She said she will ask the board Tuesday to postpone action on final approval of the first-time schools seeking approval so they can receive voucher funds.

"They're not just getting non-public approval status," which makes schools eligible for state textbooks and transportation, Dastugue said. "They're using it for a statewide voucher program" that brings thousands of dollars of state funding.”

There may be a constitutional question about this inequity related to the curriculum.

Article 8, Section 4 of the Louisiana Constitution states, "Upon application by a private elementary, secondary, or proprietary school with a sustained curriculum or specialized course of study of quality at least equal to that prescribed for similar public schools, the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education shall approve the private school. A certificate issued by an approved private school shall carry the same privileges as one issued by a state public school."

Our best hope is that the elected and appointed BESE members will start asking questions — in public — about the voucher process.

It's obvious they too have been kept in the dark about the "DTC."

The editorials in this column represent the opinions of The News-Star's editorial board, composed of President and Publisher David B. Petty, Executive Editor Kathy Spurlock and community representatives Lyle Miller, Tom Nicholson and Kelly Shambro

______________________________________________ 

COMMENTS:

Brad Allen Thompson · Top commenter

The goal of Jindal's program was to promote Republican Party ideology, not to protect students' interests or to improve academic standards. That is clear. When you try to improve something, you invest yourself, your time and your money into that thing, and make changes that bring demonstrable results. The Republican plan is and has always been nothing but washing their hands of the public education system, and disintegrating it so that private enterprise could step in and take over, with the benefit of subsidies from our public tax dollars.
Meanwhile, standards are higher at public schools with fewer resources and an out-flux of students, while private schools don't have to follow the same academic standards, don't have to follow clearly nondiscriminatory admissions standards, and as is reported nationally, can "teach" just...

See more   [Click on the link to the article above to read more.]

Griffin Scott · Subscribe· Top commenter · Delta Ouachita Vo-Tech

Better late than never.
But BESE is hardly the only culprit, how bout the rubber stampers of the Louisiana Legislature?
Or the Vice Pres, oops, I mean the governor who privatized Louisiana's public education system in the first place?
Remember this past spring, just a few months ago when all we heard from supporters of this debacle of an education 'reform' plan, how bad teacher and their unions were?
Funny how now that it’s happened all those cheerleaders have faded away... you know, if I didn't know any better I'd say it’s almost like they're ashamed of this Republican accomplishment.

Bilbo Jenkins · Top commenter

Agreed. Jindal performed a masterful dance, pirouetting from an open, honest discussion of vouchers and subsequent ramifications to a smokescreen of questioning teachers' benefits and their dedication to education. The chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak, with even the News Star having to reverse their prior lavish praise of "the boy wonder". Now, would all of you Jindal enthusiasts please admit you were flimflammed by this con artist and do something about it? If you can't own up to your misguided mistake of electing this man, then we are going to perpetually remain off course. As the old saying goes, "lead, follow, or get out of the way".

Time for you to step aside; those of us who warned you about him will get to work and clean up your mess.

Welcome Back, Louisiana Public School Teachers

Louisiana teachers beginning the 2012-13 school year will face the greatest challenges in the history of our public education system. Teachers this year will be expected to do much more with much less and to do their jobs under the constant threat of humiliation and dismissal by a blatantly unfair evaluation system. This new system guarantees that at least 10% of the teachers who are rated by the new value-added system mustbe found to be “ineffective” and immediately be placed at the top of the list for layoffs and placed on track to dismissal and decertification. At the same time teachers will begin the process of preparing kids to take new high stakes tests based on the common core standards. (Our entire education system is now primarily about preparing kids for state tests)

Wow! Given these challenges and threats, only public school teachers could be expected to greet their students this year with a smile and a firm determination to continue giving their students the best education possible.

In my many years of dealing with public education I have never seen anything like the present threats to our teaching profession, nor have I ever seen the level of misinformation and scapegoating of teachers as I have seen this year. This blog has pointed out the blatant inaccuracy and unfairness of Louisiana's school grading system and its destructive effects on teacher morale. My analysis of all available data shows that Louisiana teachers today are educating students better than ever before, yet they have been labeled by our Governor as individuals who get paid for just breathing. This was a major insult to both teachers and their principals. When they pointed out the flaws of the so called reforms teachers' professional organizations/unions have been labeled as defenders of the status quo.

If you want to know the facts about the high level of performance of our teachers nationwide, read this linked article by education professor Linda Darling-Hammond. In this article Hammond points out that our public school students in schools that are not affected by poverty outperform even the highest performing school system in the world! My analysis all 1400 Louisiana public schools also demonstrates that the only significant causes of low achievement in our schools are the debilitating effects of poverty related factors. It is wrong and counterproductive to blame teachers for this condition. Yet none of Louisiana's efforts at reform are focused on the real problems and almost all reforms result in the threatening and punishing of teachers and principals. But the icing on the cake is Governor Jindal giving parents taxpayer funded “scholarships” to transfer their children to private schools that have inadequate facilities, teachers and a substandard curriculum.

It's as though Louisiana were to declare war on lung cancer and our war strategy would include the firing of a certain percentage of doctors while ignoring smoking, obesity and other environmental factors. What do you think would be the effect on lung cancer if we rated oncologists according to patient mortality and fired the bottom 10% and replaced them with “bright young” college graduates with 6 weeks of “intensive summer training” in curing cancer? By the way, those new “doctors” would only work as doctors for two years, then many of them would be promoted to run the hospitals. That's like what we are doing when we replace experienced teachers with TFA corps members and then promote some of them to run the State Department of Education!

Also this year, Louisiana will begin the process of creating a whole new type of charter school (type 1-B) that will be allowed to flood the airways, billboards and newspapers using part of their MFP dollars with misleading ads in an effort to lure the best students away from public schools. (Please read this commentary by a charter school teacher). And this year for the first time, charter schools in Louisiana will be allowed to staff entire schools without hiring a single certified teacher.What a reform! Shame on those who would defend the status quo!

So welcome back public school teachers of Louisiana! You have my sincere admiration for the miracles you will accomplish this year despite the challenges you face. All I ask is that all of you resolve to use a small part of your boundless energy to fight back against these horrible attacks on your profession. I and many other old retired teachers promise to stand and fight with you!

Voucher and Charter Abuses

The Baton Rouge Advocate carried a story that stumbled upon a common practice of both voucher and charter schools called creaming. This story is about a child who received a voucher to attend a religious school in Ascension Parish. Upon attempting to enroll her child in the school, the parent found out that the school required an entrance interview and the taking of an enrollment test. Following the testing, the parent was notified by the school that her child would be required to repeat the 4th grade in order to be accepted by the school. The student had passed the 4th grade LEAP which normally is the main criteria for promotion to the 5th grade, yet the voucher school would not honor the previous placement of the student. As a result the parent will probably choose not to enroll her child in the voucher school.

These practices (the entrance interview and grade repeat requirements) allow a school to skim only the most "acceptable" students without officially refusing entry to some students they don't want. Many charter schools "manage" their enrollment in this manner to insure high performance ratings. Real public schools must accept all students no matter what it does to their performance scores.

Another story in the same issue explains how Crestworth Middle school will now be taken over by the state from its charter manager partly because of fire code violations. But it also turns out that the charter board has not been paying its bills and is probably in financial trouble. So even though the media has buried the real story, all but one of the charter takeover schools in the Baton Rouge area have now been taken back from their charter operators. And the one still in the hands of its charter operator is a Turkish operated school still under investigation for possible violations of policy and/or law. Instead of reporting on the complete disaster of the Baton Rouge takeovers, The Advocate a couple of months ago announced that the State Department had created a new "achievement zone" to take over failing Baton Rouge schools. That article forgot to mention that all but one of the schools being taken over were really failed Recovery District schools.

You couldn't make this stuff up! The voucher and charter schools are a huge waste of our taxpayer dollars, yet the new media in Baton Rouge continues to assist the State Department of Education in trying to dupe the public. This one story by reporter Charles Lussier is the first one by the Advocate that begins to tell the public truth about how deceptive the Recovery District has been in dealing with the charter school disasters.

Take a look at the latest posts by Diane Ravitch just today that demonstrate how dangerous these vouchers and charters can be to our public school systems and how they shortchange our students. To add insult to injury, Louisiana is becoming a laughing stock across the country for Jindal's reform fiascoes.

Wall Street Vultures

A member of the Coalition for Louisiana Public Education sent me this link to a Reuters news story dated Aug.2 about a recent business conference where the opportunitiesfor school privatization schemes were discussed with interested business persons. It seems that many of the Wall Street guys see K-12 education as a major source of big profits. Big profits? How can that be at this time of shrinking school budgets and increased mandated costs to local school systems?

Here's the gist of it. The wall street guys have figured out that the major cost of providing K-12 education is in personnel. You know the cost of salaries and benefits for teachers, administrators, central office personnel, and even custodial workers. Also because of a major pension and health insurance cost escalation (much of it caused by the shenanigans of those same Wall Street guys) local school systems and states are looking for alternatives to the high cost of education personnel. Some entrepreneurs are proposing to replace education personnel with various forms of computerized instruction. Another big factor working in the profiteers favor is the current panic about the supposedly poor performance of our public education system compared to other industrialized countries. (See Diane Ravitch's analysis of this bogus issue) Some politicians are convinced that the way for America to boost education performance is to turn over large segments of the education process to private enterprise.

Louisiana of all states is probably the most ripe for the picking by these opportunists. Governor Jindal has fixed it so that almost any huckster with a “great new educational product”is allowed to raid the MFP funding for public schools and make a profit with almost no accountability to the taxpayers. I don't know of any other state that has opened up the public treasury to more "no bid" deals for grabbing education tax dollars than Louisiana.

Some have proposed that the free market system in the long run will insure that taxpayers will get the best results with education dollars spent on privatization. You know the famous Jindal quote: “Parents are the best accountability system.” That's not at all guaranteed. Let me give you one example from a related area. A few days ago I saw an ad on television for the University of P____, promising young people a great career if they would just pick up the phone and make a call for information. So instead of making the call, I decided to google a few facts about the University of P____. I found out that this for-profitcompany has an enrollment of over 300,000 students, many of them receiving instruction on line instead of in a building where you have to pay rent, utilities, custodians etc. Also since there is no guarantee of maximum class size, we have no way of knowing how much contact students have with instructors. You can be sure that this for profit company is minimizingtheir instructional personnel costs. According to the University web site, the tuition is over $11,000. I couldn't tell if that was for a semester or a year of instruction. I wondered how successful this “University” has been in preparing students for valuable careers as is claimed in the ad so I googled graduation rates and found that this school has only a 2% four year graduation rate!Then I googled student reviews of the school and got a bunch of remarkably negative reviews. Mostly the reviews were by young adults who claimed that they ended up deeply in debt with college loans and could find no one willing to hire them with their U of P degree. I wondered how so many young people could be fooled into signing up for this obviously bogus education? Then I googled entrance requirements and found out that all you need to get into this school is a GED. So part of the problem is that these online education sellers “take” anyone who is willing to get a government guaranteed loan and worry very little about whether or not the student gets something for his/her money. This is obviously an extremely successful company as measured by profitbut a total ripoff of the students and taxpayers!Do a little googling of your own and you will find dozens of other high profit, low standard, low performance online schools just like the U of P. The problem is that now that we are allowing corporate America to buy many of our politiciansthere is very little chance of government oversight.

So how does this relate to K-12 in Louisiana? Plenty! Just look at the multitude of ads for K-12 virtual school and Connections Academy where they are trying to lure students away from public schools into their online schools. Soon our MFP will pay the tuition for every kid who gets lured to these sites (Next year there will be no limit to how many students can enroll using the course choice option, and our guidance counselors are prohibited by the new law from discouraging enrollment in such off campus courses). In Colorado the media has uncovered the fact that many of these online students drop out after the online school gets the bulk of the state funding and the students often go back to the public school that has had its funds raided. Those that actually stay in the online schools are performing significantly lower than similar students who go to a real school.

Massive advertising campaigns work!Look at all the legislators and BESE members Jindal and his corporate buddies were able to get elected to office with slick advertising campaigns. Louisiana taxpayers and parents are being fleeced at an accelerating rate. Louisiana as poor as it is, and with all its tax giveaways to big business, is now the proving ground for raiding public education funds to make rich people even richer while our kids get less and less.

Do you want to do your part to stop this attack on public education in Louisiana? If so, you can join my Defenders of Public Education. I believe that dedicated educators can do much to stop this destructive privatization effort. Just last week we sent emails thanking the two BESE members who had the moral fortitude to oppose what I called the Whitewashing of accountability for voucher schools. We know however that our best hope of success is with the legislature. There are dedicated public educators who live in every legislative district in this state. If educators will just use their political influence with their own legislators, I believe we can accomplish much. Have you really had a face to face talk with your two legislators about the major problems with Acts 1 and 2 of the 2012 legislative session? Our initiative for the next month or two will be to have those face to face talks with our legislators. Please send me your home address or at least your zip code and favored email address to louisianaeducator@gmail.com so I can place you in the data base according to your legislative districts and send you custom emails as future legislative decisions are being considered.

Possible Theme Song

Let's just lighten up today by listening to a Utube production by a teacher who just had to put his woes into a song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5wkJxTwXnk.  I am thinking of designating this song as the theme song for this blog. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Let me know if it could be the Louisiana Educator theme song.