A federal judge in Louisiana called on TFA State Commissioner of Education John White to explain why his voucher program should be allowed to take public funds from a school district that is using its funding to comply with desegregation orders. The judge wants to know why he should not enjoin the implementation of the voucher program.
As we have seen in other states, vouchers and charters intensify segregation, but that is not a concern to Governor Bobby Jindal and Commissioner White.
This should be interesting.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This should be interesting.
So how should the board prioritize? Student achievement? Desegregation? Coordination (extra staff?) with wrap-around social services?
Will priorities be set by lawyers and courts or politicians? Where is the role for schoolchildren and parents?
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I have believed for a long time that the courts will come to the assistance of teachers and schoolchildren. Once parents and civil rights leaders realize that poor children of color are being warehoused in test-prep academies while affluent children take their vouchers to all-white private or charter schools, they will take their concerns to the courts. As for teachers, once they start losing their jobs over invalid test scores, they too will seek redress in the courts and I believe they will win. In the meantime, teachers should keep good records showing the progress of each child and have as many witnesses (parents, other teachers, administrators) as possible.
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I was happy to see the above post by former member of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) Linda Johnson. During her tenure on BESE I was labeled a racist for pointing out to the Department of Education that the schools they were taking over were (at the time) 98% African-American with 98% of the students coming from households qualifying for free or reduced meal prices. It is nice to see that now she too is talking about the disparate impact of the policies she supported at the time. I do not share her faith in the courts, however, for most of the districts do not have active cases dealing with desegregation, and in fact the data needed to expose many of the lies coming out of this administration is not available to researchers such as myself. There is an active policy within the Department of Education to only release data to researchers known to be “friendly” to the administration. This is a recipe for disaster in Louisiana, and it is has been heading our way for some time. Some of us have decided that we cannot wait on courts, or the political process to slowly find its way back into sanity. Instead, we are calling for teachers, students, and parents to take matters into their own hands, and stop this train of terror against students, teachers, and local community control of their schools. Thank you Diane Ravitch, for your work in exposing the illicit activities of the privatization at any cost crowd!
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