This is one of the sharpest commentaries I have read about the depredations of the Jindal-White gang in Louisiana, who are intent on destroying public education in the state as well as the teaching profession.
Everyone can pick their favorite line; there are many.
What I appreciate is the writer’s slashing criticism of the silent education professors, who have lost their tongues, unable or unwilling to defend the people they trained, mute in the face of the vandals at the gate.
State Superintendent John White took a pounding when he showed up at a local school board and gave his stock speech. A local reporter wrote:
State Supt. of Education John White addressed the Tangipahoa Parish School Board Tuesday, giving the same insipid speech he gave about a month ago in Amite
For almost an hour, the board heard a stream of fast talk and hot air, similar to his boss, about the next layer of bureaucracy that is settling over the state’s education system that will supposedly lift Louisiana students out of the muck and mire of ignorance.
A teacher told White that if he and his staff were judged by the same standards applied to teachers, they would be rated ineffective.
When board members complained that the voucher program and the charters would drain their already strained budgets and that voucher students would be going to schools that teach creationism, White said he didn’t care about the financial stress for public schools as long as voucher students got an education. He didn’t explain why they would get a better education in the little denominational schools that teach creationism.
White said he saw no reason for teachers to be certified. A board member challenged him and said that was like going to a doctor who never went to medical school.
A large part of the Louisiana reform package bypasses local school boards and empowers the state education department. It’s fair to say they are no fans of John White or Bobby Jindal.
The radical privatization that Jindal and White are promoting is a run-through for the Romney agenda.
Louisiana is a playground for the education theories of the far right.
The following post was written by a teacher in Louisiana who is a former journalist. Private schools that accept vouchers can score an F with no accountability. Students may enroll in a private school that is far lower-performing than their own public school, and the private school gets $8,000 of public money:
Academically Unacceptable? Not If It’s A Private School.
Nobody wants a doctor who scored an F in medical school. Nobody wants a plumber who scored an F in training courses.
Conventional wisdom holds that nobody wants her kid to attend a school that scores an F.
But what about a private school that scores an F? According to the state of Louisiana, private schools that score an F are A-OK.
If there was any question of whether Louisiana’s much-publicized school voucher program is an effort by State Superintendent John White and the rest of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration to overtly favor private schools over public schools, the recently released “accountability” requirements for private schools in the voucher program should clear up any doubts. The requirements trumpet “a common standard for student performance across the system of traditional public, charter public, and nonpublic schools,” yet the standards for private schools receiving vouchers are far lower than those for public schools–so low that public schools meeting those standards are considered failures.
Louisiana evaluates its public schools using a 150-point scale, which is then converted into letter grades of A, B, C, D and F, based on students’ scores on standardized tests, as well as measures such as attendance and graduation rates. If a public school scores below a B on the accountability index, students from that school whose household income does not exceed 250 percent of poverty level can apply for vouchers.
Despite White’s own assertions about the importance of accountability to the voucher program, he has chosen not to hold voucher schools to the same standards. Private schools receiving vouchers will be able to continue receiving tax money previously earmarked for public schools–more than $8,000 per pupil–while scoring in the F range.
Yes, that’s right, an F. Private schools can score an F and continue receiving public funding.
Specifically, private schools receiving vouchers, whose voucher students will take the same standardized tests as public-school students, will be required to score only a 50on the scholarship cohort index–which the documentation states will be “substantially similar” to the public-school scoring matrix–in order to be eligible to receive more voucher students, and the money that comes with them. Judging by the public-school matrix, such a score places a school squarely in the F category. In fact, with just 60 schools out of 650 in Louisiana scoring below a 51 in the most recent round of grading, such a score would place a school in the ninth percentile of all tested schools. A similar score in a public school would lead the state to deem that school academically unacceptable and would render its students eligible for vouchers.
Given the emphasis that Louisiana officials place on test scores as incontrovertible measures of school (and teacher) quality, it is fair to ask under what logic one ninth-percentile school is considered superior to another ninth-percentile school, simply because one is private and the other public. That question is unlikely to be answered anytime soon, as is the question of how schools were chosen to receive vouchers in the first place; White and the Jindal administration have refused to release the records of the voucher-program deliberations.
Indeed, many people are beginning to wonder whether the state used any criteria at all, as stories of legal troubles, schools without teachers and self-proclaimed prophetsemerge among the institutions chosen to receive vouchers, to say nothing of the overtly religious agendas of the program’s legislative supporters or the disturbing claims found in textbooks used by some voucher schools.
White has previously proven sensitive to bad press over vouchers, but apparently he is not sensitive enough to the state’s citizens to give them the clarification they deserve. He did announce earlier this week that the state would be tightening the rules for voucher applicants because, according to the Times-Picayune, “this process now has greater importance.” White apparently did not elaborate on why he did not find the process greatly important to begin with.
Besides demonstrating the state’s prioritization of funding private schools over funding public ones–a prioritization that may be unconstitutional–Louisiana’s differing standards for public and private schools raise another interesting question: What do test scores really mean, and what do they really mean to policymakers? The “school accountability” and “school reform” movements–both of which have gained significant ground in Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina seven years ago–take for granted the fact that standardized tests are the best way to measure learning and to hold schools accountable. Louisiana’s low test-score standards for private schools, however, trumpeted concurrently with calls for improved education, complicate the narrative. Could White, Jindal and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education possibly believe that factors other than test scores can be indicators of student learning? Or do they believe that private schools are just inherently better, no matter what the test scores say?
One thing’s for sure–when it comes to evaluating White’s own accountability, Louisiana’s leaders are apparently not that eager to find out whether the superintendent scores an A, a B, a C, a D or an F. The state just postponed his first performance review.
Elizabeth Walters teaches in southeast Louisiana.
The Jindal administration will not release any public records explaining its decisions about which schools will get vouchers and which will not.
Considering that the voucher program has made the state of Louisiana into an international laughing stock, that might be the best they can do.
Best not to let the world hear or read those discussions about whether to let children leave a failing public school in kindergarten (how is that even possible?) and enter a school where they will learn that slavery wasn’t all bad and the KKK had some positive features and evolution is a hoax.
The more people learn about the Louisiana voucher program, the more it will embarrass Mitt Romney, who is pushing to bring vouchers to every state and even wants federal funding for vouchers.
So the state has decided that the best course of action is to shroud all this nonsense in mystery.
You know, when the foreign press starts making fun of your education reforms and laughs because you are putting kids in schools where they take the Loch Ness monster seriously, it is best to keep quiet.
Louisiana is giving us a laugh a day with this voucher program.
This one takes the cake.
John White has approved the Light City Church School of the Prophets to get vouchers, nearly $700,000 a year.
The man who runs it describes himself as an apostle or a prophet.
Whatever. People can call themselves whatever they like.
Please read the linked article to see how low the bar is for getting taxpayer dollars from the state of Louisiana.
The state will have no standards for voucher schools. There will be no accountability for voucher schools.
A few months ago, John White told a Reuters reporter: “To me, it’s a moral outrage that the government would say, ‘We know what’s best for your child,’” White said. “Who are we to tell parents we know better?”
Well, he is the state commissioner of education, and he is the one who is supposed to know better. If he doesn’t, why is he in that job?
But John White has no problem setting standards for public schools and holding their teachers accountable.
He thinks that once you leave the public system, no standards or accountability are necessary.
In Bobby Jindal’s world, that’s called reform.
This post had a hilarious excerpt from a film. It showed a scantily clad man and woman, living in what presumably was prehistoric times. They were hiding and running as to huge dinosaurs fought one another. A reader sent the clip as “proof that dinosaurs ad humans co-existed,” thus proving that evolution never happened. He was joking, of course.
I posted it, readers thought it was funny,p. but now the YouTube video of this segment from the 1950s has been taken down.
Too bad. It was really funny!
Here is the original post. If you ever find the clip, send it to me and I will post it again.
Here is proof that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time.
This could help to support Louisiana’s voucher plan and could even be useful for revisions of the state curriculum.
Be sure to send this to John White, Bobby Jindal and Mitt Romney.
One of the reasons I love Twitter is that I find it a great source of information and stories. People send me links to stories in newspapers across the country and to magazine stories they know will interest me. I got several tweets today with this story.
It is one of the best portrayals of what is taught in at least 19 of the schools that will get voucher students and about $4 million of taxpayers’ dollars.
Every one of these dollars will be subtracted from the minimum foundation budget for public schools, which will be poorer so that children can learn that the Ku Klux Klan was a benevolent society and slavery wasn’t all that bad and the Loch Ness monster is real and people co-existed with dinosaurs.
This is John White’s idea of good education for the children of Louisiana.
This is Bobby Jindal’s idea of education reform.
Friends, the only way this era of idiocy will end is to laugh. Someone said the other day that when the noose is tightening around your neck, it’s hard to laugh. I get that. But when the guy with the noose is wearing a clown suit, it’s funny. There is a novel by Nabokov, I think it is called Invitation to a Beheading, where the main character is behind marched right up to the scaffold, and he stops, turns around, disbelieving, and freeing his mind from the oppressors. And they melt away.
A science teacher read the post about the textbooks used in some of Louisiana’s voucher schools. As we know, Governor Jindal is eager to pay public money to send children in Louisiana to religious schools that teach creationism as fact. So is Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who looks to Jindal as an education expert and who praises vouchers for religious schools. The teacher writes:
Hopeful Monster Theory!!!!! Since when is there any such thing outside of the creationists imagination. The Flying Spaghetti Monster perhaps but that was created to point of the fallacious arguments made by Intelligent Design.
Romney giving Jiindal the time of day for any education position is beyond ridiculous. This is like giving the president of Exxon the position of EPA director.
Some of the schools getting voucher students–not all, but a significant number–use textbooks that teach creationism.
Jonathan Pelto posted what is found in a science textbook used to teach creationist “science”:
“Biblical and scientific evidence seems to indicate that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time…. Fossilized tracks in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, also give evidence that men and dinosaurs existed simultaneously. Fossilized human footprints and three-toed dinosaur tracks occur in the same rock stratum…. That dinosaurs existed with humans is an important discovery disproving the evolutionists’ theory that dinosaurs lived 70 million years before man. God created dinosaurs on the sixth day. He created man later the same day.”
The ACE, (Accelerated Christian Education®) curriculum is being used in a number of Louisiana schools that receive public funding as a result of Jindal’s publicly funded voucher program.
ACE claims that it maintains “high Biblical and academic standards and remained committed to setting children on a path for success. The goal is the same today: to prepare children for the world today and give them the academic and spiritual tools necessary to achieve their God-given potential.”
“In a desperate attempt to keep the ‘sinking ship’ of evolution afloat, recent ‘scientists’ have proposed a new theory. This theory states that certain organisms experienced (for some unexplained reason) a dramatic genetic disturbance that hurled them across the gap left by the missing links. This theory, called the ‘hopeful monster’ theory, has no scientific basis.” ( Accelerated Christian Education, Science 1107)
Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, knows a good bit about science. He was a biology major at Brown University, one of the nation’s finest universities, and a Rhodes Scholar.
An excellent article in Slate explains how Jindal has sacrificed the principles of science for political expediency.
As the author notes, “…in his rise to prominence in Louisiana, he made a bargain with the religious right and compromised science and science education for the children of his state. In fact, Jindal’s actions at one point persuaded leading scientific organizations, including the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, to cross New Orleans off their list of future meeting sites (PDF).”
In 2008, Jindal signed the “Louisiana Science Education Act,” which undermined science by encouraging the teaching of creationism. Earlier this year, Jindal pushed through his voucher program, which will send millions of dollars to religious schools that teach only creationism.
University scientists have testified that they have lost strong candidates for faculty positions because scientists are reluctant to move to a state that is antagonistic to science. When you see what is happening in Louisiana, you can see why teachers need tenure–or they will be fired for teaching science. But of course, Jindal’s legislation took tenure away. To quote the article, ” Gov. Jindal has given wholehearted support to a program that will use public money to teach scientific nonsense to the young people of his state.”
What’s worrisome here is that Jindal is perceived as Romney’s spokesman on education, despite the fact that he has identified himself with hostility to science.
Some see Jindal as a contender for the vice-presidential nomination.
When you see how a man with the best education imaginable has sold out basic principle for political advantage, it makes you worry about the future of our nation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 