Abby Breaux, a 25-year veteran teacher in Louisiana, wrote an open letter to the state board of education to explain why she was quitting.
It is a powerful letter that demonstrates the complete disconnect between the people on the state board who make the rules and the teachers in the classroom who must live with them.
Is Louisiana determined to get rid of experienced teachers? Who will take their places?
Julian Vasquez Heilig, a scholar of education at the University of Texas, has noticed an interesting phenomenon: A growing number of TFA alumni are contradicting the company line. They know how hard the work is. They discover they are miracle-workers and they are not going to close the achievement gap. They don’t like being used to sell a false narrative. One even said it was time for TFA to close down.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, bloggers are asking why TFA wants the state to pay $5 million for their teachers, on top of a payment of $3,000 per teacher, each of whom will get a full salary. The question becomes pointed because TFA is rolling in hundreds of millions of dough while Louisiana’s public schools are under-funded.
I am speaking in Baton Rouge on Thursday.
The first event will be hosted by Leaders with Vision at Drusilla’s restaurant. My talk will be followed by comments by Charles Roemer, president of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Then, I will speak at a teacher Town Hall. Admission is free and open to all.
Doors open at 5, and I speak at 5:30 pm.
Location: BREC Administrative Building Ballroom, 6201 Florida Blvd, Baton Rouge.
Mike Deshotels wrote an amazing post about the shortcomings and failures of charters in Louisiana. I asked him for his permission to repost it in full and he graciously granted it. Mike blogs at http://louisianaeducator.blogspot.com/. Mike, an experienced educator, taught high school science in Louisiana.
NOLA.com, Blackboard Wars Reveal Charter Shortcomings
Recent reports in NOLA.com have described California charter school developer Steve Barr’s problems with expanding his charter concept to New Orleans. Barr has a contract with Oprah’s OWN network to produce a documentary series on his efforts to turnaround John McDonogh high school in New Orleans
Barr’s comments in the NOLA story contradict each other. In one instance he talks about how “beautiful and brilliant” he finds the students of John DcDonogh High School. In another instance he criticizes the New Orleans community and students exclaiming “this is what seven generations of crap looks like!”
The OWN network documentary focuses on some of the new TFA teachers struggling to succeed in their teaching assignments at John McDonogh. Steve Barr is quoted explaining that such teachers are having problems because of inexperience. He points out that it takes at least 4 or 5 years for a teacher to become proficient at his/her craft. If he knew that beforehand, then why did he hire so many minimally trained TFA teachers for his experiment at John McDonogh?
The NOLA article reveals discontent in the parent community and on the charter board and advisory committees. Two of the Board members have threatened to resign because they were not consulted on the approval of the documentary series filming. They also believe that Board members should be able to vote on hiring of staff and teachers. (Note: This is contrary to Jindal’s Act 1 of 2012 which places all hiring totally in the hands of school administrators. This provision of Act 1 has been ruled unconstitutional by a district court, so the charter board at McDonogh may still have some say so in employment matters.)
But the real issue is that charter board members are not elected by the public the way the law provides for traditional Louisiana public school districts. Charter schools are really run by their charter management organizations (In this case Steve Barr who lives in California) and by corporate reform power brokers like John White. There is a related story about Lycee’ Francais, another charter in New Orleans, which is in the process of being reorganized by John White and Charter School Association head, Caroline Roemer Shirley, using ad hoc appointed puppets.
These recent disputes highlight one of the weaknesses of the charter system. Like other recent school reform schemes, the charter concept assumes that schools cannot be run effectively by democratically elected school boards. The corporate reform movement assumes that schools need to be taken over by business oriented managers like Steve Barr or even for-profit organizations like Edison Schools or K12 or Connections Academy. All of these have proven to be failures in Louisiana, yet the Jindal and White power structure wants to give them more and more students to experiment with. They even want out-of-state Course Choice Providers to be able to freely recruit students from Louisiana public schools paid for by our tax dollars with minimal accountability, just because they are privately run.
There is absolutely no research that shows that these schemes educate children better. But there is plenty of evidence that for profit groups like Edison, K12 and Connections squander our tax dollars with minimal service to students. Jindal and White talk about “the urgency of now” as justification for throwing out democratic systems upon which our successful public school system has been built.
The chickens are now coming home to roost. All over the state we are witnessing dramatic charter school failures. Absolutely all the schools taken over and converted into charters in EBR, St Helena, Pointe Coupee and Caddo are failures by the very grading system forced upon our schools by Jindal and White. In recent months we have seen scandals in charter schools from unreported child sexual abuse to embezzlement, to financial collapse with schools not being able to pay utility bills, and to sheer mismanagement by incompetent amateur administrators. Now White and his TFA administrators have announced they will form an “Achievement Zone” in Baton Rouge with the very schools they have so badly mismanaged. Yet the Baton Rouge Advocate reports on the Achievement Zone as though it is an innovative action designed to correct the failures of our local school boards!
The secret weapon of Jindal and White is a strategy of appointing local power brokers such as business leaders, ministers and state legislators to puppet advisory boards for all these hair brained schemes. This assures buy-in from the powers that be. The same strategy has been used in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington D. C. to implement the corporate reform models while bypassing professional educators. These schemes are all failing to produce academic results and end up in the closing of schools serving at-risk students dislocating thousands of students and ruining the careers of thousands of professional educators.
My questions are: When will our news media start doing their job of exposing the fraud and abuse of charters, vouchers, and reform profiteers? When will our legislature call a halt to this misuse of our tax dollars? When will our District Attorneys start prosecuting the crooks who are using our public school children to raid our school funding?
One way for educators and parents to fight the corporate takeover of our schools is to participate in groups like my Defenders of Public Education. Please consider signing up in the manner described in my previouspost.
The wonders of education reform never end in Louisiana.
Reformers Bobby Jindal and John White want to take money dedicated to public schools and give it to religious schools that teach creationism. That’s reform.
Even though a judge said this plan was unconstitutional, that doesn’t stop them. You know, the fierce urgency of now, sending kids off to school where they will learn that the Loch Ness monster lives. That’s reform too.
They want lots of for-profit entrepreneurs to scoop up public education dollars. That’s reform.
They want to cut funding for students with disabilities and gifted students. That’s reform.
Way to go.
Right back to the 19th century.
Louisiana is in a budget crisis, and Governor Bobby Jindal has been closing hospitals that serve indigent patients and other social services for the needy. He has also been trying to find a way to fund his expensive voucher program, since a state court declared it unconstitutional last fall.
But Teach for America is undaunted by the state’s budget crisis. It has applied for a grant of $5 million.
Blogger Louisiana Voice writes:
“According to the project summary submitted with its application, the money would apparently be used to provide 550 to 700 teachers and 1,000 alumni who would serve as teachers, leaders and “positive change agents (whatever that is) in the lowest income schools throughout the greater New Orleans and greater Baton Rouge areas, central Louisiana, Acadiana and the Louisiana Delta.”
But wait. LouisianaVoice has come across three state contracts with TFA totaling almost $1.6 million to recruit, train and place 570 TFA teachers in the Delta region of Louisiana and the Recovery School District.”
Meanwhile, colleges in Louisiana are producing teachers who can’t find jobs.
Shouldn’t Louisiana be encouraging career educators who plan to stay in their jobs and remain in their communities?
Mercedes Schneider explains the significance of the Jindal legislation–Act 1–that was declared unconstitutional by a Louisiana judge yesterday.
The state constitution says that each piece of legislation shall deal with only one subject. It was on this procedural ground that the law was declared unconstitutional.
As Schneider shows, Act 1 covered numerous subjects. Its primary purposes were: first, to destroy the teaching profession; second, to remove the powers of local school boards; third, to make the state superintendent the most powerful figure in the state; fourth, to make test scores the singular purpose of education.
Under this legislation, tenure would become hard to get and easy to lose. A teacher’s survival or termination would be tied tightly to the rise or fall of test scores. Test scores are the heart and soul of the law and are used punitively against teachers.
Not surpringly, the legislation closely tracks ALEC model laws for getting rid of tenure, making certification optional, and gutting local control.
A state district judge in Louisiana, R. Michael Caldwell, threw out the state law that was intended to make teacher tenure extremely difficult to get or keep.
This is the same judge that held most of the law constitutional only a few months ago.
He just reversed himself.
Last December Bobby Jindal and John White were celebrating and praising the judge.
Now the teachers of Louisiana are celebrating and praising the wisdom of the same judge.
Last fall, a state court in Louisiana ruled that it was unconstitutional for the state to pay for vouchers by taking dollars from the Minimum Foundation Program. The state constitution says the money is for public schools only. Judge Tim Kelley, a Republican, ruled that private and religious schools are not “public schools.” He wrote: ““While the Court does not dispute the serious nature of these proceedings nor the impact and potential effects on Louisiana’s educational systems, vital public dollars raised and allocated for public schools through the MFP cannot be lawfully diverted to nonpublic schools or entities.”
Governor Bobby Jindal and his faithful State Commissioner (ex-TFA) John White immediately sought a way to circumvent the court ruling.
Not willing to wait for a judge to rule on the state’s appeal, they now say that the public funding will go to districts, which will be expected to fund vouchers.
Nothing will slow Jindal and White’s efforts to privatize the state’s public schools, not the state constitution and not a court decision.
Mercedes Schneider nails it when she says this is nothing less than a “money-laundering scheme.”
And the Louisiana School Boards Association denounced John White’s effort to circumvent the court’s ruling and the state constitution.
The Louisiana Federation of Teachers said that White’s proposal is “an attempted end run around the State Constitution.”
Steve Monaghan of the LFT said, “This is simply a dodge, but it isn’t artful,” he continued. “The simple fact is that if it is illegal for the state to spend MFP funds on private and religious schools, it would also be illegal for local school districts to do the same thing.”
Sorry, I forgot the link! Here it is:
This video was created by Herbert Bassett.
Herb Bassett is a Louisiana music teacher who also holds a math minor. His principal asked him in October to investigate Louisiana’s school performance scores. Since then, Herb has also done work to explain and expose Louisiana’s value added modeling (VAM),
The teacher evaluation model in Louisiana is based overwhelmingly on student test scores. A single year rating of Ineffective can get a teacher fired.
This is wrong. Those imposing this punitive and inaccurate approach should be held accountable for their errors and for demoralizing the state’s teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 