Blogger Louisiana Educator has had it with John White, who left Joel Klein’s talent pool and went first to New Orleans, then to be Commissioner of Education for Louisiana. He made some pretty dramatic predictions about the miraculous rise of test scores that the state could expect on his watch. None of his predictions came true, and I am not even including the time he said that all students in the state would be proficient.

White is a TFA alum and a Broadie, so naturally he has high expectations. But eventually even he finds that the bell is tolling…for him.

Louisiana Educator writes:

This article is all you need to know about John White’s effect on Louisiana education.

Superintendent John White, who has no formal training in education, was brought to Louisiana by Governor Jindal and LABI for two reasons: (1) To privatize as many of our public schools to for-profit entrepreneurs as possible and (2) To put as much emphasis as possible on raising test scores by forcing teachers to spend most of their time preparing our students for his lousy Common Core tests. As a bonus, he and Jindal took away almost all of teacher rights and substituted merit pay based on student test scores on invalid tests for legitimate teacher evaluation. Now we have a teacher shortage, and our national comparison test scores are the lowest ever. And the voucher schools and charter schools are the lowest performers in the state.

There should be no excuses for John White. He has failed miserably at all his efforts and our children have suffered while he experimented with untested, unsound theories. He should now be judged by the same crappy standards he has forced on every public school and teacher in the state!

The article he cites in his opening sentence is a newspaper article about the state’s NAEP scores.

It begins like this:

In the latest snapshot of education achievement, scores for Louisiana public school fourth-graders plunged to or near the bottom of the nation in reading and math.

In addition, eighth-graders finished 50th among the states and the District of Columbia in math and 48th in reading….fourth-grade math scores finished 51st while fourth-grade reading scores are 49th.

This explains why White complained so loudly about the switch to computerized testing. How else to explain the catastrophic decline in state scores when White had followed the reformer textbook to a T?