I read this post by Louisiana’s Crazy Crawfish with a sense of disbelief.
I could not believe that any human being would expend so much effort to crush the poorest and neediest citizens of his state.
Can you believe that John White is going to apply value-added assessments to determine the funding for students with disabilities? If they don’t get higher test scores every year, they lose funding. He will do the sameto gifted students.
Is this mean or mad?
Read Jindal’s spending cuts. Unbelievable. For example, he cut the budget for higher education by more than half. He proposed a tax plan to raise taxes on the poor (by raising the sales tax) while eliminating taxes on the rich (by eliminating the personal income tax and the corporate income tax). He closed most of the state’s mental hospitals and all of the charity hospitals.
Louisiana is rapidly retreating to the industrial era, where there were no protections for workers, no safety net for the needy. It may be 2013 in America, but it’s 1913 in Louisiana and the clock keeps moving backward.
Jindal has a 30 something rate approval rating. He touts the Recovery School District as a success, but most of the charter schools in the district are D and F. Out of 70 districts in Louisiana, the RSD is number 69. These schools were taken over by charters right after Katrina. People here literally hate him for what he has done in our state. He gets rid of anyone who disagrees with him immediately. We can’t wait until his time is over and we can get rid of the shill BESE state school board, and John White, the Eli Broad trained superintendent with a BA and two years of teaching experience, the TFA wonder, who takes orders well, but that’s all. The charade of The Emperor’s New Clothes is crumbling, but not soon enough.
Why read Dickens when you can live it Cripes! I’m at a loss for words. With each passing day, I discover something new that shatters my belief and hopes that we’ll do the right thing. To call these fellows Neanderthals is an insult to Neanderthals. So what should we call them? (Remember to keep it clean.)
Teanderthals …
Jon…that’s a great one!
That’s pretty good. I like it. But at least the Neandrathals took care of their children and probably their elderly. Buried them and had some kind of funeral from some of the evidence. In Baton Rouge if your family cannot pay for your cremation your ashes get dumped in an area of a cemetery that is designate for that, No pauper’s grave even. Have to come up with $350 just to get access to mama’s ashes!
Teaparty Republicans is pretty good. God hating, child hating children of Satan is a definition of that.
My comments regarding a recent article in a local paper concerning John White were banned, blocked/censored. (Even when I toned my comments down and omitted a few choice words and attempted to resubmit my post. This is not the only “omission” I have noticed lately either. An entire article recently was only posted briefly, seemingly vanished, and then was not posted online in the education section. Seems shady to me…) Anyway,perhaps there
is a kindred spirit/venue here to share these thoughts. What I had said was that I didn’t know how this “Johnboy” slept at night unlike his namesake who was tucked in nightly with multiple endearing well wishes. We should be demanding answers and accountability from White and worse yet Jindal. Answer the questions from the children whose schools are closing unjustly (Yeah, take a minute to look THEM in the eye and really get to know them before you destroy their neighborhood school.) Provide an explanation to teachers and parents who now find themselves with a turd for a
paddle in this man-made sewer of so called
school “choice” with little to no direction. Go visit their classrooms; get to know them personally to see who you’re making reapply for jobs. What teacher appreciation for some of the most devoted educators willing to take on the challenge of working in the “worst” school in the district, giving so much of themselves, and succeeding by standards not acknowledged or appreciated by those that have never met the kids or stepped foot in the school. How do you spin a tale to parents and notify them that their child is being taken out of one “failing” school just to be placed in another? Where is a good education/employment lawyer when you need one? (Especialy one who would take on a pro bono case for a rightiously worthy social justice cause?!)Educators in Louisiana would love nothing other than to wake up from this education nightmare, be able to say GOOD NIGHT Johnboy and wake up to a brand new day. We Southerners do tend to give a damn and will continue to advocate for our babies in our public schools. We will still be here long after those who are not locals move on and/or leave town. We can only hope that it won’t be too late. I have to place some hope in all of those “ineffective” teachers leaving in droves (who by the way are very articulate, have honed assessment skills, are used to scoring everything with rubrics and being held accountable
as well as holding others accountable, and are no strangers to dealing with a range of difficult people over the years…) who will now have “nothing but time on their hands” to organize and advocate. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating them.
He is not mad, as in insane, but he gets mad anytime anyone disagrees with him and has fired every department head who does! HE IS MEAN! He does not consider anyone of value unless they vote Republican and have money to give him. He also tried to keep people from getting hospice care if they were on Medicaid unless they were incarcerated in a nursing home. He got shamed by a big demonstration on the Capitol steps out of that one. This is not the first budget cut against the schools, the K-12 budget has been frozen for 5 years. Everything and more that Crazy Crawfish says is true and, top this one, the charity hospital, Earl K. Long, is closing next week. It is in the poor part of town which is also stuck with the state run and charter schools. A whole section of town where a lot of the people have no transportation in a city with really crappy public transportation WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET TO A HOSPITAL OR EMERGENCY ROOM AND THEIR PEOPLE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GO SEE THEM IF THEY ARE IN THE HOSPITAL. The hospital taking indigent care, OLOL is a long way from North Baton Rouge, at least a 30 minute drive. Already women who don’t have Medicaid have to walk 1-1/2 miles each way to get ob/gyn care or to see their premature babies from the last bus stop to Womens Hospital. This includes pregnant women. And they are walking down a 4-6 lane highway! They used to have an ob/gyn clinic in North Baton Rouge but Jindal shut it down. OLOL won’t take prisoners or ob/gyn patients the former because they are just selfish and the latter is because OLOL is a Catholic hospital. So don’t have a heart attack and be living in North Baton Rouge.
But then we already have the highest cancer and infant mortality rate in America and Baton Rouge has the highest rate of new cases of AIDS.
Industrial age. YEP. When you consider that the good jobs in Louisiana are in the gas and manufacturing plants, I would say DEFINITELY. We lost a large high tech business to North Carolina because their employees did not want to live in a place where the schools taught creationism. IBM is supposed to be opening an office here, but I will believe it when I see it and, if they do come, they will probably leave in 10 years or so. since IBM has a long history of diversity.
Last poll said Jindal had a 37% approval rating. That was before he tried to convince people we should have a 12% sales tax instead of the wealthy paying income tax. It might be even lower now. He withdrew his bill, however, and told the Republican legislators that they needed to write some to sneak the income tax bill in gradually instead.
I teach students with disabilities in NYC – those who have “intellectual disabilities / cognitive impairment/ mental retardation” – whatever they’re calling it this week.
It is untenable to apply VAM to the kinds of “alternate assessments” that are already a BS byproduct of NCLB!
How this guy has been getting away with his agenda all these years remains a mystery to me. It makes me think of “brave New World.”
Bobby Jindal might be a sociopath.
We have five self-contained classrooms at my school, and I have been involved in Special Education since the early 70’s. Some students with special needs have progressive conditions, and they will never, ever improve their cognitive functioning. I once saw a Special Ed teacher administer a state science test to a student with an IQ of less than 30. The student was asked which planet is closer to the sun, Mars or Mercury. The absurdity level was and is off the charts. It is worthy of the stuff of the Colbert Report
BTW, funny comment, Miss Rim, about what we are calling the children this week. Thanks for the lol.
Diane ends with: “It may be 2013 in America, but it’s 1913 in Louisiana and the clock keeps moving backward.”
Phil Ochs wrote a song about Mississippi that contains a line that describes Louisiana of 2013 under Jindal: “The calendar is lyin’ when it reads the present time.”
The song is forty years old. The more things change, the more they remain the same…
and apparently the tax issue isn’t over just yet. I just saw a very well put together commercial stating that we could either get rid of the states income tax or keep loop holes for lobbyist and special interests (thats a new one). The commercial ended by saying call your representitives and tell them you want to get rid of state income tax.
The Jindal/White machine has destroyed my neighborhood school. Last night we attended a “community meeting” where we were told that all first- fifth graders at our turnaround school would be assigned to another “F” rated school for next year, and that they are not eligible to apply for “magnet” schools, because those schools are already closed for enrollement. Sounds like segregation all over again to me…
Jill, Jindal is for school choice and giving children and their parents the opportunity to choose a better school if their neighborhood school is failing. His ed plan is very clear on this. But he is being blocked and sued by progressive reformers. He is currently looking at other avenues to make this happen for more children. I have no idea why he has not backed out of Common Core (but I plan to find out) but please don’t believe a word of what you read here.
Oh, Danny boy. You have no idea with whom you are speaking to when you address Jill. (Unless of course you do and just enjoy stirring the pot or poking the bear/hornets nest.) I think you meant well with your
comments but may have unknowingly or mistakingly “stepped in it” which make the context of your comments somewhat of a source of hilarity. I could enlighten you but I do not feel that is my place. I do hope that Jill is keeping tabs on this article and its posts and that she will choose to reply as she can enlighten someone like no other ☺. That would be a post that I would avidly await to read. I am all for free speech and public opinion but to come on to the Diane Ravitch blog and make a statement like “please don’t believe a word of what you read here” leaves me speechless. This is one of the only outlets for educators to speak the truth and share what they live and breathe on the front lines daily. If you’ve spent any length of time in public
education (particularly in Louisiana) and have functioning eyes and ears, you would be hard pressed
NOT to become a “progressive reformer”! We may just have to agree to disagree here. I do support your questioning of the Common Core…and believe that we need to reapply a healthy dose of Common Sense when facilitating the education of young children and utilize the best developmentally appropriate practices
available.
Danny,
Respectfully to you, unfortunately you have no idea what is going on in Louisiana education politics. For starters, the Recovery School District, which has had charter schools since right after Katrina, some profit, some non-profit (I assume, though hefty salaries for administrators, etc. ) has scores that rank them number 69 out of 70 districts in Louisiana, Hey, that’s one up from the very last district. I will at least say, there seems to have been no test tampering here. So, Jindal’s solution has been going on there for about 7 years and this is the result. Oh, and one charter school, Abramson, was run by a man in Turkey who sent many Turkish teachers who did the science projects FOR the students. Makes one wonder how they marked their tests to get good results. Obviously, this does not work. I knew nothing of what was going on here until last year (I have been retired for many years) when the Jindal controlled Legislature voted in their idea of change and then I started to study, because somehow it did not seem right that John White, a very young man with an English degree, five weeks of training to become a teacher, 2 or three years of teaching experience, plus five weekends (was that 10 or 15 days, I’m not sure) being trained in the Eli Broad Superintendent’s Academy was put at the helm. It turns out he is only an order taker, a shill for billionaires trying to take over mostly 600 billion in education tax dollars. Jindal and our legislators (mostly lawyers who know nothing about education) are either stupid and uninformed, total lapdogs, or in on the deal. Putting White in, and he was the only candidate considered by the Jindal controlled BESE (state) school board, was like putting a new intern in charge of the AMA. You need to be brought up to speed with the truth. Subscribe to Louisiana Voice online, The Lens, Crazycrawfish’s blog, read Diane Ravitch’s book, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, and investigate any blogs that are mentioned on this blog. Believe me after 25 years as a teacher in the Louisiana school system, a Master’s plus 30 from Columbia University in New York City, which means 10 courses past a Master’s Degree and following this for over one year, you are not informed as to what is going on. Also, check nola.com for any articles but these will be whitewashed. It is an interesting journey in learning. Good luck on becoming literate in what is going on in education politics (the truth and the lies) in Louisiana and the rest of the United States.
Jindal’s version of school choice: send three hundred kids from their neighborhood school (which their parents and grandparents attended) to a school 3 miles away. Most families have no transportation, so right away you’ve eliminated parental involvement. And this is their only choice – so is it really a choice? Who’s doing the choosing?
Huey Long, the Governor of Louisiana during the New Deal era may have been corrupt, but at least he wanted to create a social safety net for his state’s citizens. I hope that the citizens of this great state wake up and realize they have been had. Jindal represents the polar opposite of Long.
Sadly, I like many others in Louisiana- or at least those who can afford to do so – am leaving Louisiana primarily because of the dismantling of the higher education and K-12 system by Bobby Jindal and John White. Louisiana is becoming a great state to visit to party, but a horrendous one to live in and raise children. Next school year we will be in another state that values the education of their children and overall population. Though we think in general the people of Louisiana are wonderful people, it is time, as educated people, to escape. Good luck, my friends!
Lorentsen@q.com
On Apr 11, 2013, at 3:16 PM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> >
Diane,
Why don’t you start cross-posting at the Daily Kos. You’ll get a lot more like-minded, nation-wide readers who are interested in the cross section of politics and education.
Pat
I hear on the news that jindal turned down money for medicade for la. Im on disability medacare and medicade if I can’t get help with my meds I will be in a lot of pain so for that reason I HATE our AL’QAIDA govener!