The debate in the Senate
Education Committee Wednesday was supposed to be about amending the
constitution in order to elect the state superintendent of education. That
became a side issue as witnesses described allegations of fraud in the State
Department of Education and laid bare Superintendent of Education John White’s
sparse credentials to hold the office.
When the dust settled,
the committee rejected SB 41 by Sen. Bob Kostelka (R-Monroe), but only time
will tell how much damage was inflicted on Superintendent White and his
department by supporters of the bill.
The first blood was
drawn by Sen. Kostelka, who said the superintendent of education is in charge
of the biggest single state budget item, totaling $5.35 billion per year. He
said the state “should have a superintendent who is accountable to the people
and not a rubber stamp for the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.”
Under White’s regime,
Kostelka said, the public has been denied access to information about the department.
Numerous lawsuits have been filed under the freedom of information act in order
to view what should be public records.
Noting that most of
the education overhauls pushed by White and the Jindal administration last year
have been ruled unconstitutional by district courts, Sen. Kostelka said a new
direction is needed, and “a clean break is the best way.”
Sen. Kostelka ticked
off a laundry list of abuses by the department, including a plan to divulge personal
student data to a company that would share it with for-profit organizations,
the “utter failure” of the Recovery School District to turn around failing
schools, and reports of overpayments and lack of supervision involving millions
of dollars spent by the RSD.
The senator said that
White’s credentials to head the department are sketchy at best: “We have a 30-something
superintendent with a degree in English who spent six weekends at the Broad
Academy,” a business-oriented organization that issued White the only
certification that qualifies him for the job.
Devastating testimony
was presented by Herb Bassett of Grayson, a highly qualified math teacher and
band director. Bassett said that he has sent evidence to lawmakers revealing “deceit,
distortion manipulation of scores and data suppression.”
Bassett documents what
he called “the
gross inflation of the high school performance scores. The Department covered
up the inflation by intentionally mislabeling an important column of data in
the initial public release of the scores.”
“The
Transition Baselines,” he said, “showed that the GEE (Graduation Exit
Exam)—which was being phased out—and the new EOC (End of Course) tests were
mis-calibrated by 7.5 points. That’s half a letter grade. Had it been correctly
labeled, the inflation would have been obvious.”
Bassett
said that BESE was given a different set of scores than was shown to the
public. Because the scores given to BESE were the correct ones, he said, “This
shows intent to deceive.”
Bassett
was interrupted by Sen. Jack Donohue (R-Mandeville), who said that these
allegations are very serious, and that he would expect someone from the department
or BESE to answer the charges.
Later,
BESE President Chas Roemer (R-Baton Rouge) appeared in opposition to the bill.
When asked about the allegations of fraud, he said that he had no knowledge
about them, but that he would “look into it.”
Committee
Chairman Conrad Appel (R-Metairie) asked Roemer to investigate the charges and report
back to the committee.
Louisiana's indispensable investigative journalist, Tom Aswell, has much more on the story in this blog post.
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