A nice summary of a bad week for John White, who was hired to implement Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan to privatize public education in Louisiana.
The blogger has an apt title for the week, referring to a delightful children’s book: John White and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
Last spring, Jindal pushed through the legislature the nation’s most sweeping voucher plan, hoping to undermine public education.
The legislation encourages charters and enacts a teacher evaluation plan that is tied to test scores and extremely punitive.
If the voucher process is any indication, privatization will move ahead with minimal regulation or quality controls.
Louisiana enacted virtually every piece of ALEC legislation. You might say that the state is the poster child for ALEC.
The state is throwing open the door to for-profit entrepreneurs or anyone who wants a piece of the public schools’ minimum foundation budget
A federal judge will decide whether the state is diverting money that was supposed to support desegregation into the voucher program.
More than half the children in the state are eligible–about 450,000 students–but only 10,000 or so applied.
The schools they will attend are mainly religious, and some lack even the rudiments of a decent education, like a curriculum, classrooms, teachers–the little things like that.
And the Jindal charterization of the state has hardly begun.
White has a herculean task, doing what privatizers like to do: handing public money over to private interests with little if any oversight.
And lots of out-of-state money flowed into Louisiana to make sure that Jindal gained control of the state board so that Jindal got just the guy he wanted to do the dirty work, and all these privatization plans would move forward, along with new contracts for–what else–TFA.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, the reformers all want to talk about “experimentation” with schools; and now we’re all going to find out there are countless ways that “experiments” fails, and only a few ways they turn out well.
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John White….your days are numbered!
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Maybe after his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, John White will leave for Australia. Of course, I would not wish him on the good people of Australia. They have their own “reformers” there to deal with!
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It has been very simple. Big money from production is very limited in the US because we actually have to pay for labor. Alternative ways to milk the system by the rich or want to be 1%ers is to give tax dollars to private corps. So you give it all to private corps running age and seniority retirement scams and pocket the rest.
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