My guest blogger today is Mike Deshotels of Louisiana.

Deshotels taught Chemistry and Physics at Zachary High School near Baton Rouge starting in 1966. He served as Research Director for the Louisiana Association of Educators and moved to the position of Executive Director for the LAE/NEA before retiring. He now writes a blog called The Louisiana Educator. The site is louisianaeducator.blogspot.com.

Here he explains how Governor Bobby Jindal is reforming the teaching profession in Louisiana.

The Truth About Teacher Reforms in Louisiana

Diane Ravitch asked me to write a guest post on education reform in Louisiana and suggested that I attempt to tell the untold story. Upon considering this, I realized that there was a major untold story about the destructive attacks on the teaching profession in Louisiana. I chose to tell this story because I fear similar efforts may soon be attempted in many other states. If you believe in teaching as a profession, be forewarned. The profession could be dismantled in your state just as we are witnessing in Louisiana.

Outsourcing of teaching jobs: I posted a story on my blog at http://louisianaeducator.blogspot.com/2012_09_16_archive.html about teaching jobs in Louisiana verses chicken processing jobs. Our governor Bobby Jindal talks a lot about attracting highly-skilled or college-trained jobs to Louisiana. He has a Department of Economic Development that uses a special taxpayer supported fund to attract high tech business to Louisiana. But contrary to his rhetoric, a couple of years ago some of his legislative allies in North Louisiana became alarmed about a chicken processing plant that may close down and ship operations and jobs to another state. The Governor’s economic development department stepped in and subsidized this company with millions of our dollars to bribe them to keep their chicken butchering operations in Louisiana. Later on, I was informed that about half of these unskilled workers are actually coming over the border from Arkansas. Soon after this Governor Jindal pushed a new law in Louisiana that will allow for outsourcing of teaching jobs to out-of-state virtual providers. (Course Choice Programs may soon be coming to your state!) So now K12 and Connections Academy and others will be allowed to recruit students from Louisiana along with their education taxes to pay for computer based virtual courses taught by persons from out of state. The new law also allows our state DOE to waive some of the certification requirements of these far away teachers. Who knows, soon our kids may be taught by teachers in India. This outsourcing was approved even though statistics show that our much maligned public schools perform much better on average than any of the virtual schools.

Teacher certification standards reduced: Now because of education reform in Louisiana, public charter schools are allowed to hire non-certified teachers. All one needs to teach any subject or grade in a charter school in Louisiana is a bachelor’s degree in any field. Just last week, the Jindal controlled state board repealed a requirement that all public schools go through periodic accreditation by an independent accrediting agency. This means that there will be no independent checking of teacher certification. In the same meeting the state board repealed requirements for staffing schools with guidance counselors and librarians and also reduced PE classes. I assume these actions are supposed to minimize distractions to test teaching and test prepping.

Teacher Evaluation Based 100% on VAM: A law was passed in 2010 requiring that all teachers in Louisiana be evaluated starting this year with a new evaluation instrument based 50% on student performance. The other 50% is supposed to be based on observations of the teacher’s classroom techniques by his/her supervisor. But contrary to the law, our state superintendent has adopted rules requiring in certain cases that value added student performance (VAM) may count for 100%. Our new state superintendent, John White, who has zero experience in teacher supervision or evaluation has mandated that when a teacher’s value added score falls in the unacceptable range, the teacher will be rated as unsatisfactory no matter how good the rating on the principal’s observation portion. In addition, DOE overseers will monitor the performance of local evaluators to see if their observation results are in line with the VAM portion. It is expected that corrective action may be considered against any evaluators who do not rate teachers similar to their VAM score. Even worse, since all the teacher observation data is entered on a state computer system, the computer can be programed to point out discrepancies between the VAM and the observer evaluations. That’s why many conclude that the teacher evaluations will be based 100% on VAM data.

Unreliable VAM data used for teacher evaluation and termination: Since VAM will be so important in a teacher’s evaluation, one would assume that the VAM is an extremely reliable system. It is not! We now have enough data from trial runs of the VAM in Louisiana that we can do analysis of the reliability or the stability of VAM data. Stability of VAM refers to the amount of variability of a teacher’s VAM score from one year to the next if the teacher teaches exactly the same way both years. Analysis by Wayne Free of the Louisiana Association of Education’s Instruction division was verified by another study conducted by independent researcher, Dr Mercedes Schneider. Dr Schneider found for example, that if a teacher is rated as highly effective one year, the chance that the same teacher will be rated as highly effective the next year is only 46% (that is without changing any teaching practices). A similar result was found with teachers scoring in other rankings of VAM. Thousands of teachers can easily drop from a satisfactory rating to an unsatisfactory rating from one year to the next even though their teaching remains exactly the same. State officials say that’s OK because a teacher is not required to be terminated based on only one year’s VAM. But only one year of an ineffective rating on VAM will automatically cancel a teacher’s tenure, which means the teacher can be fired immediately without a hearing of any kind.

Teacher evaluation program administered by a two year teacher: If teachers were a bit nervous that the new evaluation system may abruptly end their careers, they were pushed to outrage when they learned that the statewide evaluation system will be administered by a TFA corps member with only two years of teaching, no valid teaching certificate, and no experience in supervision. (http://louisianaeducator.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-10-05T06:52:00-05:00&max-results=2&reverse-paginate=true) Many teachers consider this appointment by the state superintendent to be an insult to the entire teaching profession in our state.

The rigged tenure process: One of the reform laws passed in the last legislative session changes the tenure process for teachers recommended for dismissal. Now the tenure hearing panel will be composed of three hearing officers. One is to be appointed by the local superintendent, one appointed by the teacher’s principal and the third appointed by the teacher. So if the principal and the superintendent agree that the teacher should be dismissed, the hearing process begins with two out of three votes against the teacher. Unlike the previous procedure, there is no judicial appeal. Teachers may wonder why bother with such a kangaroo court?

Teacher seniority banned: The Jindal reforms have replaced seniority rights with the teacher’s most recent evaluation rank. For example, a teacher with 20 years of superior evaluations, but one year of unsatisfactory evaluation possibly because of VAM, would place the teacher at the top of the list to be laid off when the school system orders a RIF.

State Superintendent sets quota for teacher dismissals: As part of the new teacher accountability system included in the Louisiana ESEA No Child Left Behind Waiver approval, the guidelines have set a minimum of 10% of teachers to be found ineffective and placed on a track for dismissal by the new evaluation system each year. (This 10% rule only applies to teachers receiving a VAM score) I asked the state superintendent if the 10% would be applied each year or if it would be limited in some way. He responded that such a quota was to be applied each year until the State Board determined that it was no longer necessary. This idea looked so good to a local school board committee advised by a couple of TFA staffers, that the school system’s new strategic plan will require that the bottom 25% of teachers in the system based on the VAM evaluation would be fired each year!

Remove teacher union payroll deductions: For the coming legislative session, Governor Jindal and his business allies are proposing to eliminate payroll deductions for teacher union dues. But they want to specifically exempt a particular teacher organization that has gone along with all the reform efforts. Many believe the purpose of this proposal is to punish the teacher unions who along with the School Board’s Association have been successful in getting the courts to declare the method for funding the Governor’s vouchers to private schools unconstitutional.

So how are the Louisiana teacher reforms working so far? Here is a link to a recent article in the Baton Rouge Advocate (http://theadvocate.com/news/4902526-123/rate-of-teachers-retiringspikes) that describes a 27% increase in teacher retirements last year with an even greater increase expected this year. Some superintendents are reporting that these early retirements often are some of the most respected teachers in their systems who may be impossible to replace with equal talent. That’s how the teacher reforms in Louisiana are working so far.