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

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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.

Creating More Failing Schools

The La State Dept. of Education has been releasing its list of schools rated as failing based on school performance scores for the past school year. See the Advocate story. The list of failing schools has increased over last year solely because the state has raised the passing score from 65 to 75. Purely arbitrary! No reason given except that BESE wanted to raise the bar. Why not simply decree that all students must score above average or their school would be rated as failing?

Jindal claims to be trying to attract industry and jobs to Louisiana. What will this arbitrary grading system for our public schools do to the attractiveness of our state? These people on BESE are not experts in determining the success of a school (and neither are the TFA'ers and other non-educators occupying our Department of Education).

What will this increased threat to the survival of public schools accomplish?? In my opinion it will encourage more teaching to the the test, outright cheating, (see Campbell's law) and much less real education.

How to Create Failing Schools and Privatize Education

Our Governor and the news media have done a great job of creating “the failing schools of Louisiana”. This creation was a brilliant plan for the privatization of our k-12 school system. Once the government and the media announced that approximately 40% of our children in Louisiana are attending failing schools, it was an easy step to convince the public that something must be done! Any reform is good because at least it is not the status quo. Anyone who is against reform must be for keeping kids in failing schools and a defender of the status quo. In this environment almost anything the governor wants to do to education is considered good, even if it is not supported by research of any kind.

Why do I say that the Governor and the news media have created the failing schools of Louisiana? That's because the term “failing school” is a purely arbitrary designation. It is not necessarily valid, but once the government announces it has identified hundreds of failing schools, most people believe that such a designation must be based on fact.

To demonstrate how arbitrary the definition of a failing school is, let's conduct a thought experiment. Let's pretend that Louisiana had a great educational system, and that every single teacher was doing the best job possible in educating children. Let's assume that in this perfect school system there was not one bad teacher in our public schools! Let's assume that every teacher had complete knowledge of his/her subject matter and followed the state curriculum guide perfectly, used the best teaching techniques and worked with each student providing individualized instruction etc, etc.

But at the same time let's stipulate that those teachers and that the public education system would still be educating our current Louisiana students where about 60% qualify for free lunch because of the high poverty in our state, a large percentage of our students come from single parent homes, many do not have good nutrition, many do not have a quiet place in the home to study, many are not required by their parents to attend school regularly, and many have learning disabilities. But they would all be taught by perfect teachers, go to schools with great facilities, and have the best opportunities possible.

Let's also require in this system that at the end of the year the state would test all of these students in the basic skills to see how much each had learned. What do you predict would be the scores produced by our students in this ideal school environment? Would all students make the same scores as their classmates at their grade level in all schools in the state? Would the scores for each school across the state; some serving wealthy communities, some middle class communities, and the majority serving high poverty communities be pretty much the same? Would all the schools produce high student scores?

Common sense tells us that even if all the teachers are perfect and all the schools have good facilities and good administrators, there will still be major differences in student performance across the state caused by the many other factors that affect the academic performance of students. We can also reasonably conclude that the students from the wealthiest communities would do the best in school and those from the poorest communities would do the worst. (The statistics on this are irrefutable)

So now suppose we assigned each school a performance score that was based on the average performance of all students attending that school. The schools with high student scores would get a high performance score and the schools with low student scores would get a low performance score. Now suppose we came up with a letter grading scale so that the schools with the highest performance scores would be assigned an “A” and the schools with the lowest performance scores will get an “F”. Then suppose we allowed a committee of citizens to set the lowest score for a “D” at a level where approximately 10% of the schools will fall below the D level and establish a scale so that all the other schools are distributed between D and A. Then we would publish the results for all schools and announce that we have identified the "failing schools" of our state and that we are very disappointed in those schools and also in the schools that have been rated “D” and “C”. In addition, we are concerned that many thousands of students are “trapped” in these failing schools and that parents need other options for their children other than being forced to attend “C” through “F” public schools. Those options, we would decree, must be private schools where the students have never been tested by the standardized tests we have given to the public schools students. Some of those schools teach Creationism instead of Science, and we really have no idea what their curriculum looks like. But the one thing we know is that many of their teachers are not certified and many are not teaching in their field. By this system we would have “created” a huge number of failing schools and we could propose to fire the ineffective teachers in those failing schools. But wait, how would that make sense if all the teachers in all the schools were perfect to begin with. Also, how would it make sense to allow some students to transfer to schools with questionable curricula and untrained teachers?

The above thought experiment demonstrates how our state could create failing schools even if all of the children had been given the greatest opportunity possible. That's because anytime you test students from different backgrounds you will get a huge range of scores. All the testing experts know that student scores vary greatly no matter what school they attend and that students from poor neighborhoods score worse than those from wealthy neighborhoods. Of course not all teachers are effective in the real schools of Louisiana, but the point is we have no way of knowing how much of the low performance of our students is caused by poor teaching.

Then there is the issue of grade level performance. Here is an important revelation. It is mainly statisticians that have created the concept of grade level performance using the natural distribution of achievement scores produced by a representative group of test takers from across the nation or across the state. The statisticians look at the distribution of all scores and slice off a section around the median of all scores and that becomes the grade level range. Any tester who scores above that arbitrary range is considered “above grade level” and all those scoring below that arbitrary range are considered to be performing “below grade level”. Here's the important point We will always have a significant number of students scoring below grade level because the statisticians have designed the system that way, and because students always perform at different levels no matter how effective the teachers are. Guess what! Even where you have mediocre teachers, some students will still perform above grade level! That's because the students, and their aptitude and motivation have a lot to do with achievement in school, maybe even more than the effectiveness of the teacher. Thomas Jefferson was considered one of the best educated persons of his time even though he had almost no formal education. He apparently had a tremendous thirst for knowledge.

I have written all of the above to point out that the so called “failing schools of Louisiana” were created by the Governor, Superintendent White and the News media. There is absolutely no basis for assuming that the teachers in a “D” or “F” school are not doing their job as well as is humanly possible, just like it is wrong to assume that the teachers in an “A” school are all great teachers. Yet this is what the public has been led to believe and why this system is so unfair to educators and students. I believe that if you switched the teachers of the top performing school in a parish with the teachers in the lowest performing school in a parish, you would still get basically the same student scores as before the switch!

One more thing: There is no evidence that transferring students from low performing schools to other schools makes any difference in the performance of those students. This was done in Chicago under Arne Duncan, and studies have shown that the transferred students have not done any better than before their transfer. Milwaukee has had a system of Voucher schools for years and the results for students in those schools is no better than for their cohorts in regular public schools. Finally, in the case where vouchers have been tried in Louisiana in the New Orleans area, the voucher students have produced lower average scores than those attending the Recovery District schools which have the second lowest scores in the state!

I believe that what Jindal has done in Louisiana by creating this misleading grading system for schools is designed to privatize our schools and to allow his friends in the business community and for those in the far right religious factions to profit from children no matter how damaging it may be to the future of these children. This system and the privatization of schools is a giant step backward, and will be damaging to students and will eventually cripple our public school system. We must do every thing we can to stop it!