Flurry of surveys re-opens debate on education reforms

(Baton Rouge – August 22, 2013) New surveys demonstrate that parents overwhelmingly favor public education as the best choice for children, Louisiana Federation of Teachers President Steve Monaghan said today. The results call into question continued efforts to privatize the state’s education system and judge teachers by standardized test results, he added.

“Seventy percent of Americans oppose vouchers for private and religious schools,” Monaghan said. “That is the highest negative ever recorded in 45 years of research by Phi Delta Kappa and the Gallup organization.”

Monaghan’s comments came after release of the annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the public’s attitudes toward public schools.

Reflecting public support for neighborhood schools, Monaghan said, was the PDK/Gallup finding that 71 percent of public school parents would grade the school their oldest child attends as “A” or “B.”

Another poll released about the same time, from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, shows that 76 percent of public school parents rate their child’s education as good or excellent, and that 82 percent have high opinions of their children’s teachers.

“These are careful, scientific surveys,” Monaghan said, “that need to be taken seriously as we debate the nature of education reform in Louisiana.”

The state’s reliance on standardized tests for determining everything from teacher salaries to school funding does not seem to have great public support. In the PDK/Gallup poll, for example, only 22% of Americans believe that increased testing has helped the performance of local public schools. A solid majority (58%) reject the notion that teacher evaluations should include “how well a teacher’s students perform on standardized tests.”

In the AP-NORC survey, parents agreed that the proper use of standardized tests should be “to identify areas where students need extra help.” But according to Monaghan, the testing imposed under new state law has little diagnostic value, and is used primarily to label teachers, students and schools.

Also in the AP-NORC survey, parents were asked to rank the importance of different factors in determining teacher salaries. The top three responses were classroom observation by local school officials, the type of training or advanced degrees obtained by the teacher and years of teaching experience. In Louisiana, all three have been eclipsed by testing, and state officials downplay the importance of degrees and experience.

The PDK/Gallup poll shows support for community charter schools, as well as a belief that students can “receive a better education at public charter schools than at other public schools.”

“We’d like to see more research on that question,” Monaghan said. “Apparently people see charter schools as places where there is parental support, where discipline is enforced, where disruptive students can be removed and where learning is prized. Instead of abandoning traditional public schools, we need to inculcate those values into them.”

The PDK/Gallup survey also reveals general support for “increasing opportunities for students to earn high school credit online over the Internet.”

While that may seem to bolster Louisiana’s controversial Course Choice pilot, Monaghan urged caution.

“Louisiana had a viable public school online learning program,” Monaghan said, “but it was supplanted by Course Choice, which is little more than an online voucher scheme. Course Choice opens the state treasury to profiteers as certainly as any other voucher program.”

Not all of the survey results would lead to policies favored by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, Monaghan said. But the deeper issue revealed by surveys like these is that no real policy debate was allowed when still-contested reforms were rammed through the 2012 legislative session.

“Not since the days of Huey Long have such radical policies been imposed so quickly and with such overwhelming political force,” Monaghan said. “We are seeing the consequences of that action as courts overturn policies and teacher morale plummets.

“We need to reopen the education reform debate in Louisiana. It should be informed by surveys like these, by scientific research, and by input from educators and parents. Political ideology and potential profits should be left at the door when we discuss the education of our children.”

Scam and scandal in the Course Choice fraud

A motivational speaker without education credentials is paid $145,000 per year to coordinate a "Course Choice" program that will drain millions of dollars from public schools in Louisiana.

He only works four days a week at the State Department of Education because he commutes to Louisiana from his home in Los Angeles.

And the program he runs is already mired in scandal.

This is the state of public education in the age of Gov. Bobby Jindal and Superintendent of Education John White.

EdLog has already introduced readers to Dave "Lefty" Lefkowith, the erstwhile motivational speaker, associate of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and purveyor schemes to deregulate energy and manipulate water rights in Florida.

Lefty is the star of this article by Advocate reporter Will Sentell, who writes that Lefkowith leapfrogged from a $35,000 contract to the $145,000 position as Assistant Superintendent of Portfolio (whatever that means).

All without having to move from sunny California to muggy Louisiana.

Now we're starting to learn more about the course choices that seem to beg for a criminal investigation.
As Gannett journalists Mary Nash-Wood and Vickie Welborn report here, students in Northwest Louisiana are being registered for the courses without their knowledge.

The company that seems to be improperly registering students without permission is called FastPath, and it stands to make between $700 and $1,275 for each student enrolled in a course. Company officials declined to be interviewed for the article.

We know that FastPath recruiters cut a swath through low-income areas of Caddo and Webster Parishes, promising tablet devices to prospective students, including profoundly disabled children who may not have the ability to use the devices.

"Neither students nor their parents are responsible for the tablet devices if they are lost or stolen," according to the Gannett article. "And they can keep them even if they don’t pass the course."

And who are the education experts trolling for Course Choice students?

FastPath's want ad on Craig's List for "student enrollment specialists" says they have to be 18 years or older, have no criminal record, and have automobile insurance.

"By conducting community outreach through program marketing," the ad says, "this position will promote parental choice in education and the FastPath Learning program. The duties of this position are primarily focused on marketing the program and enrolling students in the program using a mobile device, such as a netbook, notepad, or internet enabled smart phone."

The pay is $16 per hour.

Thanks to indispensable journalist Tom Aswell, we know a lot more about FastPath.

The chairman of the FastPath board is former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who served under President George W. Bush.

Paige was appointed secretary largely because of the"Houston Miracle," his vaunted success as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District. Which turned out to be a fraud, because HSID  falsified its dropout statistics during Paige's tenure.

Jindal. White. Lefkowith. Paige. These are just a few of the names that will go down in infamy for the scam they are perpetrating on the taxpayers and school children of Louisiana.

The State Supreme Court has ruled that Jindal,White et al cannot use Minimum Foundation Program funds to pay for the Course Choice scam. The legislature now has an opportunity to cancel Course Choice before even more damage can be done.

Question is, will lawmakers have the courage to do the right thing?

WWL-TV op-ed: Jindal plan shows disdain for teachers

Check out this op-ed by LFT President Steve Monaghan on the WWL-TV Web site!

When cultural historian Jacques Barzun wrote "Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition," he could have been describing the education “reform” movement pushed by Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies in Louisiana. Jindal’s approach to education is typified by an apparent disdain for those who have made the profession their life’s calling.

The governor’s attitude about teachers emerged in a speech before the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry a year ago, in which he first outlined the radical overhaul that would become the hallmark of his education agenda. Jindal inaccurately and unfairly asserted to those influential business leaders that teachers “are given lifetime job protection…and short of selling drugs in the workplace or beating up” their students, teachers couldn’t be fired.

“Not only is this not a factual statement,”I said at the time, “but evoking images of those specific behaviors in reference to educators is unjust and insulting.”

The governor has often been quoted as saying that, prior to his overhaul, Louisiana teachers retained their jobs simply because they “keep breathing.” As proof, he and his supporters said that only a small percentage of teachers had been found incompetent and fired.

That ignored the fact that about half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of entering it. What other profession suffers such an exodus? One would naturally expect a higher level of competency among those who survived past their fifth anniversary.

As part of this assault on public school teachers, Act 1 (2012), a hodge-podge of policies that all but abolished teachers’ due process rights and tied their professional futures to an unproven new evaluation system, was steam rolled through the legislative process.

Simultaneously and in the same manner, Governor Jindal pushed Act 2 (2012), through the legislature. This bill comprises the most overreaching efforts at privatizing public education ever conceived in the United States.

Act 2 was so big, so bloated with various unrelated schemes, and was rushed through the system with so little scrutiny, that few paid much attention to its details.

The act is best known for funneling public education dollars to private and religious schools. Some of those have been shown to be woefully inadequate in curricula, facilities and, ironically, teacher quality.

But Act 2 encompasses much more than vouchers, and provides public funding for all manner of private and quasi-public education alternatives, without appropriate safeguards to assure the instructional quality of the programs.

Under these so called reforms, public tax dollars flow to largely unregulated voucher schools and other so-called “course providers.” (Those can be any individual, business or institution that has an idea for providing an academic course and receives approval from the governor’s education department.)

Act 2 is replete with examples of disdain for teachers as well as for public education in general. For example, the act deletes any requirement that teachers in charter schools be certified, but grants automatic certification to anyone who is approved as a “course provider.”

If non-traditional schools are to be part of the reform mix, then there should be ways to compare their achievement with that of public schools. The governor and his allies steadfastly refuse to consider measurements on privatized education that allow the public to accurately assess the academic results in those schools.

That coincides with a second hallmark of the Jindal agenda: a blind faith that private is better than public, and that profit is a guarantee of quality.

Across the United States, some $500 billion a year is spent on public education. In Louisiana, our Minimum Foundation Program budget is $3.41 billion. The privatizers want a big piece of that, and have donated millions to politicians who support this agenda. They have been rewarded with an astoundingly lax system of accountability.

The purpose of any real reform should be to guarantee all that children have equal access to high quality, well resourced public schools regardless of geography or economic circumstances. The reforms should be based on research which demonstrates the efficacy of the program or policy. No such research was presented to support these reforms as they were pushed into law.

So there you have it. An apparent lack of respect if not outright disdain for the profession of education, in combination with extreme ideological and profit motives have spawned these misbegotten reforms.

Fortunately for parents and the taxpaying public, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers’ constitutional challenges to this agenda have served to heighten public awareness and to encourage greater scrutiny.
Even though appeals are pending, there is a growing awareness that this agenda is not the right direction for education reform to take in Louisiana.

Our message to lawmakers is simple: these laws are terribly broken, and we're depending upon legislators to fix them.

In a VAN down by the RIVER

In a classic Saturday Night Live sketch, comic Chris Farley portrayed a failed motivational speaker who now plies his trade from a van down by the river.

Superintendent of Education John White may have found Farley’s equal in a motivational speaker hired by the department to shill for the Course Choice Program.

“Lefty” Lefkowith is paid $145,000 a year to promote the governor’s “course choice” program, as seen in this YouTube video. Thanks to a public records request by blogger Tom Aswell, we know that Lefkowith’s title at the department is “Director of the Office of Portfolio,” although he claims to be Deputy Superintendent.

Since last July, Lefkowith has been, in the words of a Department of Education spokesperson, “effectively implementing a number of large, complex programs and activities aimed at benefiting Louisiana school children.”
In plain English, he was hired to make it easier for corporations and entrepreneurs to raid the public education budget and siphon funds away from our schools. He apparently has no education credentials, but “has worked with private sector companies and government agencies across the nation to harness the talent of professionals in diverse industries and develop creative solutions to improve results.”

In Superintendent White’s world, an academic background, appropriate credentials and experience as an educator are all disqualifying criteria for high-salary positions. Just ask the 27-year old director of teacher evaluation, who does not have a teaching certificate.

The Department of Education’s swank Claiborne Building is definitely not a van, but it is down by the river. That’s good enough for the superintendent.

UPDATE: Tom Aswell, Louisiana’s indispensable investigative journalist, lifted up a rock and found the creepy-crawly essence of “Lefty” Lefkowith in this blog entry. Not just a carnival barker for privatization, it seems that Lefty has an unsavory past “with strong connections to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the infamous Enron Corp.” and schemes to deregulate energy and manipulate water rights in the Sunshine State.