The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the state of Louisiana can require every public school to post the Ten Commandments. This issue has been controversial in many states. The Ten Commandments is a specifically religious statement, and there are multiple versions of it among Christians and Jews. Some religions do not recognize the Ten Commandments.
Whenever religion is introduced into schools and other public places, the same problems arise. Whose religion will be taught? What about the rights of atheist families? it’s easy to forget that there are scores of different religions in the U.S., and each complains if the government honors one religion but not another.
NEW ORLEANS — A federal appellate court has cleared the way for displays of the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana public school classroom, removing an order that stopped state officials from enforcing a law that requires them.
In a decision issued Friday from its full roster of 18 judges, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a June decision from a three-judge panel that determined the 2024 state law was “plainly unconstitutional” and upheld a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law. Friday’s ruling lifts that injunction and allows the state to mandate all schools display the 10 Commandments in every classroom.”
Five judges on the 5th Circuit dissented with the unsigned majority opinion that placed emphasis on not knowing exact details of what the displays would look like once placed in classrooms. Attorney General Liz Murrill has provided examples and guidance for displays to follow the law, but local school districts have authority to determine what they look like.
Without any context, appellate judges said in the opinion they were unwilling to rule based on conjecture.
“It would oblige us to hypothesize an open-ended range of possible classroom displays and then assess each under a context-sensitive standard that depends on facts not yet developed and, indeed, not yet knowable,” the opinion reads. “That exercise exceeds the judicial function. guessing.”
The ruling stops short of declaring Louisiana’s law constitutional or saying it doesn’t violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that prohibits a state-sanctioned religion.
However, in a concurring opinion, Judge James Ho, a federal court appointee of President Donald Trump in 2018, went further than the other judges in the majority.
“In sum, the Louisiana Ten Commandments law is not just constitutional — it affirms our Nation’s highest and most noble traditions,” Ho wrote.
“Don’t kill or steal shouldn’t be controversial,” she said. “My office has issued clear guidance to our public schools on how to comply with the law, and we have created multiple examples of posters demonstrating how it can be applied constitutionally. Louisiana public schools should follow the law,” said Attorney General Liz Murrill.
Murrill issued a statement in response to the 5th Circuit ruling. Benjamin Aguiñaga, the state’s solicitor general, has argued the case before the 5th Circuit.
The ACLU of Louisiana, which was among the groups representing plaintiffs in the case, is “exploring all legal pathways forward to continue the fight against this unconstitutional law,” executive director Alanah Odoms said in a statement through a spokesman.
The plaintiffs in the case, Roarke v. Brumley, are nine families who have children in public schools in five parishes — East Baton Rouge, Livingston, Orleans, St. Tammany and Vernon. Their views range from secular to religious, including Catholic, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Jewish and other faiths. They have argued the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments the legislature adopted for the classroom displays differs from the versions they follow.
Along with the ACLU, Americans United and the Freedom from Religion Foundation represented the plaintiffs and issued a joint statement in response to the 5th Circuit decision.
“Today’s ruling is extremely disappointing and would unnecessarily force Louisiana’s public school families into a game of constitutional whack-a-mole in every school district,” the statement reads. “Longstanding judicial precedent makes clear that our clients need not submit to the very harms they are seeking to prevent before taking legal action to protect their rights. But this fight isn’t over. We will continue fighting for the religious freedom of Louisiana’s families.”
I’m confused. Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not send the National Guard to Chicago. Okay.
But a few minutes later, he mobilized the Louisiana National Guard and ordered it to New Orleans, where serious crime is declining. Jeff Landry, the Republican Governor of Louisiana, was delighted that Trump was sending in the Guard.
Questions:
If the president can’t send the Guard to Chicago, why can he send it to New Orleans?
If Governor Landry thought that New Orleans needed the National Guard, why didn’t he mobilize them himself? Maybe it’s because the federal government will pay part of the costs. But if the need was urgent, it seems the Governor would have acted without delay.
Kristen Buras lives in New Orleans and has written several notable books about the charter school takeover of the city’s schools. After two decades at Emory University and Georgia State University, she currently works in New Orleans as a scholar-activist. She is cofounder and director of the New Orleans-based Urban South Grassroots Research Collective, a coalition with Black educational and cultural groups that melds community-based research and organizing for racial justice. Buras has written multiple books on urban educational policy, including Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance and What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.
Her latest report appears here:
The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on ‘Large Achievement Gains’ in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students
Buras’ latest report exposes how “Large Achievement Gains” in New Orleans’ charter schools mask persistent inequities
The National Center for Charter School Accountability (CCSA), a project of NPE, has released a new independent report, The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on ‘Large Achievement Gains’ in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students, authored by noted scholar Dr. Kristen Buras. The report delivers a penetrating critique of the widely circulated “success narrative” surrounding the charter-school takeover of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. It challenges the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA)’s claims of significant achievement gains. It reveals how shifting metrics, questionable data, and students’ lived experiences paint a far more complex—and troubling—picture.
The Stories Behind Statistics raises substantial concerns about the foundations of ERA’s conclusions. First, it details how Louisiana officials repeatedly modified the school performance metrics in ways that boosted the apparent success of charter schools, creating an illusion of dramatic improvement. Second, it questions the reliability of the data ERA relied upon, noting allegations, lawsuits, and documented violations—including grade-fixing, financial mismanagement, and other irregularities—that have occurred across the New Orleans charter sector. Third, the report underscores the longstanding lack of meaningful oversight and accountability for charter schools, which further undermines confidence in the performance data.
Finally, the report scrutinizes ERA’s surveys on teaching quality and school climate, demonstrating that the experiences of Black students—when examined at the school level—are far more negative than ERA’s brief suggests. To bring these realities into focus, Dr. Buras incorporates original qualitative research, including firsthand testimony from students and parents describing their experiences in New Orleans charter schools.
The Stories Behind the Statistics urges policymakers, researchers, and the public to look beyond celebratory headlines and examine the deeper structural issues that continue to shape the city’s all-charter experiment—issues that profoundly affect the educational experiences of Black youth and their families.
According to Network for Public Education President Diane Ravitch, “As cities and states across the nation look to New Orleans as a model of charter-school reform, this report cautions how important it is to dig deeper than surface metrics. Without transparency, accountability, and attention to student experience, reforms that appear successful on paper may in fact perpetuate inequities and undermine educational justice for students.”
The mainstream media never tires of printing stories about the “miracle” of charter schools. A few days ago, the Washington Postpublished an article by Eva Moskowitz, leader of the Success Academy charter chain, titled “These schools are the answer to unlocking every child’s potential: Children born into poverty should not be consigned to failing schools.” The article was shameless self-promotion, announcing that she was expanding her brand into Florida.
But much to my surprise, readers were not buying any of her pitch. The comments following the article overwhelmingly criticized charter schools, saying they chose their students, they kicked out those with low scores, they excluded kids with disabilities, they were no better than public schools.
If all those readers get it, why don’t the editors at the mainstream media?
They still cling to the myth of charter success in New Orleans. NOLA has not been great for the students and their parents. But it has been a public relations coup.
Her article: “The ‘Miracle’ of New Orleans School Reform Is Not What It Seems: The city’s all-charter school experiment is a cautionary tale about what happens when democracy is stripped from public education.”
After the hurricane, parents wanted well-resourced community-based public schools. Instead they got charters focused on testing and no/excuses discipline.
The entire “reform” project is based on the practice of “charter churn.” Of 125 charters that have opened since Hurricane Katrina, half have closed and been replaced.
Burris writes:
The truth is that the all-charter experiment in New Orleans was built on the displacement of Black educators, the silencing of parents, and the infusion of foundation dollars with strings attached. As a result, students and families have faced disruption, instability, and hardship as charter schools open and close. Two decades later, the “miracle” is not what it seems. It is instead a cautionary tale about what happens when democracy is stripped from public education and governance is handed over to markets and philanthropies.
Ashana Bigard is a parent activist in New Orleans. From her perspective as a parent leader and as the parent of a child with special needs, the New Orleans experiment has been a very expensive flop.
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, the nation’s most radical education overhaul has produced stunning inequality alongside modest test gains
As I sit in Bricolage Academy’s office, frustrated but trying to remain pleasant, I’m having the same conversation again about my son. He’s on the autism spectrum. He is high performing, extremely quiet, and sweet. Despite his IEP, he wasn’t receiving the required services. The special education coordinator had quit in frustration, the school counselor was cut due to budget issues, and my fifth-grader was falling through the cracks.
I’m not just any parent. I’m an advocate who has worked with the CEO since the school’s creation. I have written for national magazines about our system’s problems and challenged the school’s “diversity by design” narrative. Yet here I was, fighting for basic services. If this is my experience, imagine what average parents face.
The Numbers Don’t Add Up
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina replaced New Orleans’ traditional public schools with the nation’s first all-charter system, the grand experiment presents a troubling paradox. With half the students and double the funding, the system has achieved modest academic gains while disempowering the communities it promised to serve.
“When you have half the students and twice the resources, you should see transformational results,” says Neil Ranu, a civil rights attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Instead, we see money flowing upward to administrators while classrooms struggle.”
Antonio Travis, director of Black Man Rising, mentored several affected students. “There was shame, self-blame. Many felt they wouldn’t be successful in college.” Families canceled graduation celebrations, uncertain about the future.
Right now, Louisiana U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey is currently presiding over the dissolution of the special-needs consent decree related to New Orleans schools. Because New Orleans public schools have no oversight, and no unions to fight to ensure the law is followed, we, as parents of children with special needs, have to fight to get our stories to the judge so hopefully he will keep it in place.
Walk through charter schools and notice what’s absent or insufficient. Arts programs have declined; fewer offer pre-kindergarten, and students average 35-minute bus commutes. Basic skills, such as cursive instruction—required by state law for signing legal documents—are often ignored. “The children only learn what’s tested,” observes one advocate. “Everything else gets cut.”
“When people ask if they should move out of the city for better education,” says one advocate, “my answer is: if you can afford to move, you should. This system is not built to support our children.”
The comment hangs like an indictment not just of a school system, but of a 20-year experiment that promised everything and delivered prosperity for some, displacement for others, and continued struggle for families who need excellent public education most.
Ashana Bigard is a fifth generation New Orleanian and lifelong resident of the Crescent City. A mother of three, Ashana is a tireless advocate for equity and social justice, especially in her work advocating for children and families in New Orleans and Louisiana. She leads the Education Justice Project of New Orleans, where she organizes and advocates for the rights of students and parents. Ashana is an adult ally advisor to United Students of New Orleans. She also serves as a Community Faculty member with Tulane University’s Center for Public Service.
I was born in 1967 in Chalmette, Louisiana (St. Bernard Parish), a suburb of New Orleans so close to the city that is is the actual site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.
I did not know that my father moved to Chalmette in the mid-1950s as part of the “white flight” from New Orleans.
I did not know why the St. Bernard-Orleans Parish line was so starkly white on the St. Bernard side and black on the Orleans side.
I did not know that the black teachers at my all-white elementary and middle schools were part of an effort for local officials to dodge federal mandates to racially integrate the schools (as in integrating the student body).
(I do remember seeing what I think was one black student in the special education, self-contained classroom of my elementary school– such an unusual, remarkable event that it puzzled my young mind to see him as a student assistant in the cafeteria, and the moment remains clearly in my memory to this day.)
I did not know that when I moved to a more rural section of St. Bernard Parish as I started high school that the African-American residents “down the road” knew full well of the dangers of trying to reside in certain sections of the parish (namely, Chalmette and Arabi).
I did not know that the school-superintendent uncle of one of my favorite teachers tried circa 1961 to create an “annex school” near the Arabi-New Orleans city line in order to enable white parents in the city to avoid racial integration by using school vouchers from New Orleans to enroll their children in an all-white public school just across the parish line.
I did not know that the proliferation of parochial schools in New Orleans was fueled by white flight from the New Orleans public schools.
I did not know that the reason I attended an all-girls public middle- and high school was for local officials to try to sham-integrate the St. Bernard public schools but to keep “those black boys away from our white girls.”
There’s a lot that I did not know and did not begin to learn until I was in my twenties and started asking questions.
But there were a lot of lessons that many white adults in my life tried to instill in me, lessons that indeed needed some serious questioning:
“You know property values will drop if the blacks start moving into a neighborhood.”
“It is better for a white woman to have a physically-abusive white boyfriend or husband than a black one, even if he does treat her well.”
“Interracial marriage is cause for a family disowning a child.”
“The city is a wreck because blacks are lazy and destroy everything.”
As I began reading about New Orleans officials’ cross-generational efforts to obliterate the black middle class in New Orleans (by, for example, by destroying multiple black owned businesses in order to build both the Desire housing project in 1956 and construct Interstate 10 in 1966), I felt like I had been lied to for decades– and my views as a white child and young adult repeatedly manipulated in order to purposely cement in me a sense of white superiority that no amount of personal maturity would ever shake.
Nevertheless, I am happy to say that such twisted, misplaced superiority is indeed and forever shaken in me and shown to be the mammoth lie that it is– the very lie that happens to fuel the white saviors who would impose themselves on black communities– including the center of the community:
The community school.
The community should be the final word on its schools, and when it is, those schools are successful, even in the face of racially-imposed hardship and intentional, multi-generational deprivation of basic resources, including physical space, current textbooks, and even ready supplies of toilet paper.
Such is the story of George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans– a school created as part of a school complex and housing project and build in New Orleans, Louisiana, to intentionally be a segregated school despite its opening post-Brown vs. Board of Education.
In her book, What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans School (2025, Beacon Press), Dr. Kristen Buras offers to readers a detailed history and daily life of G. W. Carver High School in New Orleans, from its inception to its white-savior closure in 2005, post-Katrina, when the state of Louisiana refused to grant the returning Carver community a charter to operate their own school. Buras details what no pro-charter, education reformer discussed at any length as regards traditionally-black New Orleans public schools: the repeated, intentional, multi-generational, systematic fiscal neglect of both the schools and the black community in New Orleans.
In contrast, Buras not only discusses these issues; she brings them to life through her numerous interviews with Carver faculty and staff, a life that begins even before Carver High School opened its doors in the 1958-59 school year.
Right out of the gate, the community served by Carver High School– families residing in the Desire Housing Project– had to face the reality that the project homes were poorly constructed and were starting to fall apart due to a lack of concrete foundations on swampland, no less.
Indeed, the location of what was known as the “Carver Complex” was originally a Maroon colony for escaped African slaves in a backswamp area that 1973 Carver graduate describes as “really not made for residential living.”
Separate was not equal, but to the Carver community, it was theirs, and in the midst of profound racism, the faculty and staff at Carver High devoted themselves to their students and the students’ families, who also happened to be their neighbors.
What speaks loudly to the teacher commitment to Carver High students, as Buras notes, is their multi-decade commitment. Despite being chronically underfunded and under-maintained across its almost-fifty years pre-Katrina, Carver High School had a very low teacher turnover.
In What We Stand to Lose, readers are introduced to the precise and disciplined teachings of music teacher Yvonne Busch, who was known for offering free music lessons during summer break. Former student Leonard Smith produced a documentary about Busch, who retired in 1983 after a 32-years at Carver. We learn of the 38-year career of social studies teacher, Lenora Condoll, who wanted so much for her students to experience the larger world that she organized fundraisers to take her students on Close-Up trips to Washington, DC, and who, on a practical note, showed students that they could make a dressy wardrobe out of a few basic items, including her “black, cashmere skirt.” We meet Enos Hicks, head coach of track and football and athletic director once Carver High opened. By that time, Hicks had been teaching for twenty years already. When Hicks’ students saw “his bag of medals” for track and field, they believed that they, too, could excel and receive their own medals.
These are real teachers whose legacy is undeniable among Carver alumni. They inspired their students to hold their heads high in self-respect despite the cultural pressures and dangers to be pressed into a Whites Only mold of “forever less-than.”
Carver High School was at most 30 minutes from my own high school. I had no idea such quality against the odds was so nearby.
This is the most important post you will read today or this week, maybe this month, if you care about the future of American public schools. It’s about the importance of honest research; it’s about debunking false narratives. It’s about the media printing inaccurate stories without the necessity of fact-checking. It’s about irresponsible journalism.
The Washington Post published an article loaded with inflated claims by a British journalist, Ian Birrell, about the “miracle” in New Orleans that followed the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Five years later, Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan boldly said that the hurricane was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” Birrell agrees with him.
In 2018, Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education allocated $10 million to fund the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University (REACH). In 2023, two of the nation’s leading advocates of choice–the Walton Foundation and the City Fund–gave REACH $1 million “to jointly support a three-year research project on the system-level effects of charter schools at the national level. The goal is to learn how charter schools improve student outcomes and better understand the role of policy in fueling these changes.”
After Katrina, the state converted New Orleans into an (almost) all-charter district. All of the district’s teachers were fired, and their union dissolved. Charter chains and TFA poured into the district as did funding by the federal government and major foundations. About one-third of the students never returned after the hurricane.
Linda Darling-Hammond and her Stanford colleagues Frank Adamson and Channa Cook-Harvey studied the charterization of New Orleans in 2015. Unlike most other studies, they looked closely at student experiences as well as data. They concluded that the district was not only highly segregated by race and class, but was “one of the lowest-performing districts in one of the lowest-performing states in the nation,” not a model to be replicated.
Rutgers’ scholar Bruce Baker examined the advocates’ claims in 2019 and concluded that they overlooked or minimized two significant factors: one, demographic changes (a reduction in concentrated poverty), and two, a huge infusion of external funding.
But Birrell is not an education journalist so he seems not to have looked for views that countered the charter enthusiasts.
It has been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina wiped out the New Orleans schools system causing it to be replaced with all charter schools. And it has been over 15 years since former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, based on what he considered early evidence of the success of those charter schools that Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” And it has been also about 15 years since educational researchers have been continuously debunking the New Orleans educational miracle.
So I was quite surprised to see that The Washington Post just published an opinion piece with the headline “‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution — Twenty years after the hurricane, taking stock of the miracle in New Orleans Schools.”
Reading this Op Ed was a strange experience for me. Supposedly based on recent research, it basically trotted out all the old bogus claims that I hadn’t heard anyone claim in at least ten years. Since it was The Washington Post, I figured it had to be Jay Matthews who has been known to write puff pieces (and books) about KIPP and Michelle Rhee. But these talking points were so antiquated that it would have been odd even for him to use them. No, this anachronistic Op Ed was not from any of the usual suspects but from a name I had never seen before: Ian Birrell.
Reading up on the biography of Ian Birrell, things made a bit more sense. Ian Birrell is a British journalist who has mainly written about international affairs. I’m sure he is a very competent journalist but this is his first foray into education reporting. So he heard about the New Orleans ‘miracle’ for the first time, got a totally biased ‘research’ report from Doug Harris supporting the miracle and, not knowing that there has been an ongoing battle over education reform in this country where the ‘reformers’ have all kinds of tricks for misrepresenting data to advance their agenda. So, thinking he has discovered something incredible, of course he wants to write something about it. But what he writes is completely naive since he doesn’t know the right questions to explore to get to the truth. It’s kind of like if I decided to become a nature reporter and wrote a thing about Big Foot based on just photoshopped images and unreliable first hand accounts.
The New Orleans Miracle is pretty easy to debunk if you know the right questions to ask.
So the first thing to look at is the Louisiana AP scores. Even though AP tests and the way they are sometimes misused, are not the only thing that matters in looking at a state’s education quality, colleges do look at AP scores so it is a bit of a measure of ‘college readiness.’ From the College Board website, it can be seen that Louisiana has the third worst AP passing rate in the country.
In the Washington Post Op Ed, Birrell describes the interventions after Katrina as follows: “They fired all 7,000 teachers, sidelined unions, invited ambitious experts to run the schools and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children.”
If he knew the full history of this he would know that the “ambitious experts to run the schools” included KIPP, the famous charter chain created by two Teach For America alums. So to measure the size of the miracle twenty years later, just check to see how the KIPP Booker T. Washington High School students are doing academically. For this I went to the recent US News & World Report data.
So the gold standard charter network in the miracle city of New Orleans has an 11% Math proficiency, a 21% Reading proficiency, and a 10% Science proficiency.
As far as AP scores at the top charter chain in the miracle city of New Orleans, the exam pass rate is just 2%.
But maybe you think I am cherry picking a KIPP school that was never mentioned in the Op Ed. In it Birrell writes about a specific ambitious expert “Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage 20 years ago was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me in a 2010 interview how, soon after the disaster, at age 26, he moved to the city from New York to set up a school, starting in a refurbished building with 120 pupils ages 11 to 15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests and won a national medal for its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents.” He explained how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.”
So I looked up Ben Kleban to see how his school was doing. It is a little confusing but it seems like the entire charter chain he created was shut down in 2018 except maybe one school which is called Walter L. Cohen High School. For them, there are no AP passing scores reported. For their test scores, they are a little better than KIPP for math and reading but lower on science.
So what evidence did Birrell see that convinced him that the New Orleans miracle was authentic? Doug Harris has some nice graphs that shows test scores in New Orleans scores now compared to test scores in New Orleans 20 years ago. But of course this is not the proper comparison to make. The way a scientific experiment works is that if you want to measure the impact of an effect, you try to take a group and split it in half and apply the impact to half of the subjects and make the rest the ‘control group.’ So in this situation, had they not made all the New Orleans schools into charter schools but instead randomly picked half the schools and made them charters and left the other half under local control, then you could compare the results of the two groups after 20 years and, as long as the groups continued to be randomly distributed, that could be a useful way to make a comparison.
But that is not what happened since unfortunately there is no control group to compare to. It is quite possible that the scores now are lower than they would have been had Katrina never happened and the New Orleans charter experiment had never happened. But even without anything to compare to, the data from that one gold standard KIPP is, in my opinion, pretty good evidence against the miracle. Just like the way you can check the temperature of a Thanksgiving turkey by putting a meat thermometer into one spot of the Turkey, looking at what is supposed to be the best charter school is a good measure of all the schools since the KIPP is surely better than the average school there.
I thought I’d never have to debunk the New Orleans miracle again, but I guess I’m going to have to every five or ten years for each milestone anniversary of “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”
My view: Gary Rubenstein is a national treasure. The major editorial boards should check with him before they publish stories about a “miracle” school or “miracle” district.
On Saturday June 21, Governor Greg Abbot of Texas announced that he had signed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom in the state.
The goal of plastering the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom is promoted by Christian nationalists who want to see an official declaration that the U.S. is a Christian nation.
The Founding Fathers would be stunned to hear the assertion that the Constitution they wrote was influenced by the Ten Commandments. The First Amendment very clearly states the importance of freedom of religion, meaning that anyone could practice any religion or none at all. It also declares that government should not “establish” any religion, meaning that government should not sponsor or endorse or favor any religion.
CNN reported:
Texas’ law requires public schools to post in classrooms a 16-by-20-inch (41-by-51-centimeter) poster or framed copy of a specific English version of the commandments, even though translations and interpretations vary across denominations, faiths and languages and may differ in homes and houses of worship.
Supporters say the Ten Commandments are part of the foundation of the United States’ judicial and educational systems and should be displayed.
Its supporters said that the Ten Commandments were the foundation of the American legal system. The state of Louisiana intends to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last year by parents of Louisiana school children from various religious backgrounds, who said the law violates First Amendment language guaranteeing religious liberty and forbidding government establishment of religion.
The ruling also backs an order issued last fall by U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, who declared the mandate unconstitutional and ordered state education officials not to enforce it and to notify all local school boards in the state of his decision.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the mandate into law last June.
Landry said in a statement Friday that he supports the attorney general’s plans to appeal.
“The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our laws — serving both an educational and historical purpose in our classrooms,” Landry said.
The Founding Fathers would laugh at Governor Abbot and Landry. And Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who shepherded a similar law in Arkansas. It’s especially funny that the leader of their party has broken almost every one of the Ten Commandments. Perhaps the place to start posting them is in the Oval Office.
He has decided that getting vaccinated should be a personal decision, not a mandate that applies to everyone. It’s not possible to stop the spread of a highly contagious disease if vaccination is optional.
Please open the link to read the order of the Louisiana Surgeon General.
A lot of people, mainly children, will get seriously ill, and some will die, because of this idiocy.
Schneider writes:
If it were only that easy:
Do you want to contract polio? Measles? Smallpox?
No?
Well, now it is only a matter of personal choice: Just say you don’t want a disease, and you will not catch a disease.
Of course, that’s not how it works. If it did– if one’s “personal choice” could prevent disease, especially disease epidemic– then count me in. I really don’t care for shots, anyway.
But you know what I like less that those shots?
The diseases themselves.
When I enrolled in my masters program at West Georgia in 1995, I received a letter stating that I needed to have a booster of the MMR (measles mumps rubella) vaccination since my first shot in that two-shot series occured before I was a year old (I was 10 months old at the time).
So, I went to the health clinic where I received my childhood vaccinations, and I received the booster.
While I was there, the nurse asked if I wanted to also have a tetanus shot, as I had not had one for 10 years.
I remember that shot making my arm ache. I replied, “I hate that shot.”
Without missing a beat, and dryly-stated, she responded, “You would like lockjaw even worse.”
Indeed I would. And so, I also received a tetanus booster.
If you want the benefit of disease protection without incurring the full wrath of a disease, the prophylactic properties of unvaccinated personal choice fall far short.
Nevertheless, in the name of “personal choice,” the Louisiana surgeon general has decided that the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) will no longer promote vaccinations, as Contagion Live reports on February 16, 2025:
The Louisiana Surgeon General, Ralph Abraham, MD, is advocating for autonomy over one’s body and that the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) will no longer be publicly promoting vaccination, but rather saying it is a discussion between people and their providers. Abraham told the LDH staff to not encourage vaccines, and LDH will no longer have vaccination events, according to a memo sent late last week (see below).
“The State of Louisiana and LDH have historically promoted vaccines for vaccine preventable illnesses through our parish health units (PHUs), community health fairs, partnerships and media campaigns. While we encourage each patient to discuss the risks and benefits of vaccination with their provider, LDH will no longer promote mass vaccination,” Abraham wrote in the memo.
So, no campaign to stop outbreaks from happening, but Louisiana will promote vaccination once there is an outbreak.
If I have an outbreak of measles, there is no longer a vaccination option for me to prevent it. I just need to plug it out. By the way, at 57 years old, I now fall into the category of people likely to experience complications, including pneumonia and encephalitis (I.e;. brain swelling, whereby “most people require hospitalization so they can receive intensive treatment, including life support.”)
Speaking of measles, the personal choice prophylactic is currently falling short in neighboring Texas, where NBC News reportsthat by February 14, 2025, 49 cases had been confirmed in rural West Texas:
On Friday, the number of confirmed cases rose to 49, up from 24 earlier in the week, the state health department said. The majority of those cases are in Gaines County, which borders New Mexico.
Most cases are in school-age kids, and 13 have been hospitalized. All are unvaccinated against measles, which is one of the most contagious viruses in the world.
The latest measles case count likely represents a fraction of the true number of infections. Health officials — who are scrambling to get a handle on the vaccine-preventable outbreak — suspect 200 to 300 people in West Texas are infected but untested, and therefore not part of the state’s official tally so far.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can only send in its experts to assist if the state requests help. So far, Texas has not done so, the CDC said.
The CDC has sent approximately 2,000 doses of the MMR vaccine to Texas health officials at their request. However, most doses so far are being accepted by partially vaccinated kids to boost their immunity, rather than the unvaccinated.
Remember the claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing public schools”? As we see in state after state, it’s not true. Josh Cowen wrote in his new book The Privateers that voucher researchers have known for years that vouchers don’t help poor kids; in reality, vouchers actually hurt poor kids. The poor kids don’t go to elite private schools; they mostly go to religious schools with uncertified teachers. The greatest benefit of vouchers goes to wealthy kids, who use the money to subsidize their private school tuition. In every state with universal vouchers, the majority are used by students who are already attending private schools.
If you have read Josh Cowen’s new book about the failure of vouchers, called The Privateers, this story would not surprise you.
Louisiana ‘s academic results for poor kids has been consistently dismal. The state plans to increase the voucher program and weaken or remove regulations. That’s a way to help failing voucher schools evade accountability.
School vouchers were supposed to be an academic lifeline for Louisiana’s neediest children.
Under a 2012 law, the state would pay for poor students in struggling public schools to attend private or parochial schools where, it was promised, they would receive a better education.
But more than a decade since the statewide voucher program began, after Louisiana has spent half a billion taxpayer dollars to send thousands of students to private schools, data show the state’s lofty promise has not panned out.
On average, voucher students at private schools fare worse on state tests than their public-school peers, according to scores examined by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. In 2023, just 14% of voucher students in grades 3-8 met state achievement targets, compared with 24% of low-income students at public schools.
“If the goal was to improve achievement, then the program is not succeeding,” said Doug Harris, an economist at Tulane University who has written about Louisiana’s voucher program.
Even voucher proponents acknowledge the lackluster results
“Louisiana is kind of famous for having one of the weakest, or maybe the weakest, private scholarship program in the country,” said Ginny Gentles, a school-choice advocate and former U.S. Department of Education official, while interviewing Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley on a podcast last year. Brumley agreed that “it’s called the worst (voucher) program in the country” and “has its limitations.”
The private schools that get about $6,800 per voucher student face scant oversight. Unlike public schools, most don’t receive state ratings because they enroll too few voucher students. But 30 private schools were graded last year, and nearly 80% earned Ds or Fs.
State regulations forbid F-rated private schools from enrolling new voucher students. Brumley waived that rule in recent years, allowing even the worst-performing schools to take in more students and tax dollars.
“These kids, there’s no price we won’t pay to make sure they get a good quality education,” Gov. Jeff Landry said while promoting the program at a Catholic school in Metairie last year.
While the scholarship program will replace vouchers, many of the same private schools already have signed up — including over 20 with D or F ratings.
“It makes absolutely no sense,” said Ashana Bigard, a New Orleans public school parent and advocate. The voucher schools struggled academically, “so we’re going to give them more kids?”
But proponents insist the scholarship program, which includes fewer regulations, will attract stronger schools and achieve better results than vouchers.
“I think what we learned is that a private-school choice program is only as good as the quality of the private schools that are enticed to participate,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas who studied Louisiana’s vouchers.
In that program, he added, the “quality level appears to have been quite low.”
Early results disappoint
Louisiana first offered vouchers in the 1960s to parents fleeing school desegregation, before resurrecting them decades later as a refuge from struggling public schools.
“Parents and kids should not be trapped in a failing school,” then-Gov. Bobby Jindal said when the statewide voucher program launched in 2012, adding that all children deserve “an excellent education.”
One of several Republican-led states to adopt vouchers, Louisiana targeted its program to families with incomes at or below 250% of the poverty line with children in public schools rated C or lower. Participating private schools had to admit all applicants, charge no more than the voucher amount and administer the state’s annual LEAP test to voucher recipients.
“We’re talking about some of the worst results we’ve ever seen in the history of education research,” said Josh Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University who opposes vouchers.
The low scores persisted for several years, especially in math. It was a far cry from Jindal’s assertion that vouchers would give students access to an excellent education. (Jindal did not respond to a request for comment.)
Voucher proponents posited that the private schools’ curriculums could be misaligned with the state tests or the program’s rules could have deterred higher-performing schools from joining. Less than a third of the state’s roughly 400 private schools participated in 2012, and those that did tended to be Catholic, have declining enrollment and charge low tuition.
“It was a very heavily regulated program and it tended to attract schools that were more desperate for the money,” said Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, a pro-voucher group.
Advocates point to surveys showing many parents who receive vouchers are happy with their children’s schools. They also say public schools improve when forced to compete with private schools for students.
Last school year, nearly 6,000 students received vouchers, costing taxpayers $45 million. More than 75% of those students attended private schools where fewer than 1 in 4 voucher students achieved “mastery” on the state tests, meaning they’re ready for the next grade level, according to an analysis of state data by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. At least 26% went to schools where fewer than 1 in 10 voucher students achieved mastery.
The raw scores don’t show where students started academically and whether the voucher schools helped them grow. But the state’s rating system tracks students’ academic progress, giving schools credit for boosting student achievement even if their scores remain low.
Even by that measure, 11 of the 30 voucher schools that received ratings last year earned Fs, 12 got Ds and five earned Cs. Just two earned Bs.
Lakeside Christian Academy in Slidell posted some of the worst results last year: Fewer than 5% of its voucher students achieved mastery. The school, which enrolled 79 voucher students, earned Fs three years in a row.
Principal Buffie Singletary said voucher students typically arrive at the school far behind, with limited reading skills, making it difficult to catch them up.
“It’s just really hard,” she said.
Under state regulations, F-rated private schools can keep their current voucher students but may not enroll more. But Brumley used his authority as state education chief to pause that rule, saying in memos that he sought to promote stability and parental choice.
The move has been a boon for schools like Redemptorist St. Gerard, a Catholic school in Baton Rouge. It earned an F in 2023, then enrolled nearly 40 new voucher students the following year, for a total of 134. In 2024, just 8% of those students achieved mastery.
School leaders did not respond to a request for comment.
Jackson Parish Schools Superintendent David Claxton said if the state is going to give private schools tax dollars, they should be held to the same standards as public schools.
“You still want parents to have choice,” he said, “but let’s make it a fair playing field.”
At first, lower-income families will be eligible for the tax-funded scholarships, which will replace vouchers, but eventually, all will be eligible. Offering private school subsidies to all families, regardless of financial need, is a priority for Trump.
“With President Trump, we will continue working towards education freedom for all!” Landry posted on X last month.
Unlike with vouchers, private schools that participate in the scholarship program can decide which students to admit and how much to charge them. Rather than use the state test, they can choose which assessment to give students. And the schools will no longer be rated by the state.
“LA GATOR has fewer of the regulations that typically scare away high-quality schools,” Wolf said.
But critics are doubtful that the top-performing private schools will enroll students with the greatest academic needs. Instead, those students will likely land at less-selective private schools with more open seats, which tend to be lower performing.
“The fact that you’re getting rid of the regulations doesn’t solve that problem,” said Harris, the Tulane researcher.
As Landry and others set high expectations for the new scholarship program, the voucher results loom large.
Last year, as the Legislature considered a bill to establish the scholarship program, state board of education member Conrad Appel expressed misgivings to a state education official, according to an email obtained through a public records request. (In a recent interview, Appel emphasized that LA GATOR was designed to avoid the voucher program’s mistakes.)
With vouchers, “we ended up taking kids from bad public schools and basically encouraging them to go to even worse private schools,” he wrote. “I am afraid that the push to allow parental choice may mean a repeat of history.”
Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that 24% of low-income public school students in grades 3-8 achieved mastery or above on the state tests in 2023, not 23%.
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