BESE, you got some ‘splaining to do!

Whenever comic icon Lucille Ball got into farcical trouble on the old I Love Lucy series, husband Desi Arnaz would exclaim, “Lucy, you got some ‘splaining to do!”

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is having a Lucy moment this week, being called to explain multiple follies, mostly committed in the name of “choice,” but some as what might be considered fraud.

First, the fraud-y stuff. 

NOLA.com reporter Lauren McGaughy writes that BESE member Walter Lee has apparently been double billing the DeSoto Parish School Board – where he was superintendent of schools – and BESE for travel expenses. He also allegedly got sweetheart deals on buy-backs of parish-owned vehicles. And he “determined his own pay raises, granting himself substantial salary increases that conflicted with recommendations by the system's business director.”

BESE President Chas Roemer says he will take “appropriate action” and ask for repayment and maybe censure of the 13-year veteran BESE member.

More travel news comes from Louisiana’s indispensible investigative journalist, Tom Aswell. His Louisiana Voice reports that seven Department of Education employees with a combined income topping $1 million are driving large, courtesy of the state.

In just over a year, those seven high rollers ran up $63,700 in car rental fees, not including fuel. Aswell reports that “they have been cruising around town in vehicles like Jeep Grand Cherokee, Jeep Liberty, Jeep Compass, GMC Terrain, Nissan Murano, Chevrolet Yukon, and Cadillac Escalade at monthly rentals as high as $1,450.”

“These Enterprise rentals,” Aswell writes, “ are not the occasional rentals for quick one- or two-day trips on departmental business; they are perks by every definition of the word—used year-round, nights and weekends, for personal use as well as the occasional business-related trip. And perks are taxable in-kind income.”

On to the “choice” parade of sleazy hits:

The biggest slam on BESE’s credibility as an agent of reform came from Legislative Auditor Daryl Purpera. This article by NOLA.com reporter Danielle Dreilinger quotes the state official as saying that Gov. Jindal’s voucher program “doesn't have enough safeguards to ensure participating private schools spend public money properly and educate the students they admit.”

Because LFT and others filed a successful lawsuit against the state, vouchers have to be funded outside the Minimum Foundation Program, with a line item in the general fund budget. This year, that amounts to nearly $45 million divided among 118 private and religious schools. More than 6,700 students participate.

While State Superintendent of Education John White contends that the state has sufficient safeguards to protect parents and taxpayers, Purpera disagreed.

"Without specific criteria, LDOE cannot ensure it is holding schools accountable for their academic performance and treating schools consistently," Purpera wrote.

The state could have been saved the trouble, as this report from KATC-TV in Lafayette notes. Over a year ago, the LFT urged BESE to adopt a more stringent accountability procedure for the voucher program. Our effort was rebuffed.

As LFT President Steve Monaghan said, “This sent a very clear signal. The mission of the department of education was to champion vouchers and privatization by any means necessary, and that’s why more than a year later we have audit report stating the obvious, and what we had attempted to fix in October 2012.”

While we’re on the subject of accountability, BESE recently adopted a blanket renewal for many charter schools around the state. Just six days later, the FBI raided Kenilworth Science and Technology Charter School for as-yet unknown reasons, according to this story by Advocate reporters Charles Lussiere and Will Sentell.

Kenilworth is under the auspices of The Pelican Educational Foundation, which is apparently linked to a shadowy Turkish outfit known as the Gulen movement. In 2011, the Pelican Foundation’s charter for Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans was revoked for “allegations of inappropriate use of school space for religious processions, concealing student-on-student sexual harassment and intimidating teachers."

In this WBRZ-TV report by Rob Krieger, BESE President Chas Roemer wonders if Kenilworth violated the terms of its charter.

Maybe these scandalous episodes are the natural outcome of the veil of secrecy that shrouds BESE and the Department of Education. Countless public information requests have been ignored, leading Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss to include Louisiana in her list of states in which education policy “is increasingly being made in secret or without public input — and with a lot of private philanthropic money.

“In Louisiana,” she wrote, “the 19th Judicial District Court recently ruled that the state Department of Education does not have to provide researchers with raw data that would help them determine if school reform efforts are working — and can pick and choose to whom it provides the information.  The court ruled that the data is not subject to the Public Records Act, according to Research on Reforms, Inc., which sued the department for the information. The suit was filed after the organization requested raw data and was denied it — even though the department had given it to other researchers already.

Finally, there is this week’s revelation that a voucher school in Baton Rouge subjects potential teachers to an inquisition before they can be hired, reported here by The Advocate’s Will Sentell.

Hosanna Christian Academy requires teachers to answer invasive, personal questions about their religious faith, living arrangements and private lives – questions that no other employer, public or private, would be allowed to ask.

The Statement of Faith on the application expresses a clear preference for dunking over sprinkling where baptism is concerned. That the applicant is expected to be of the Christian faith is not in doubt.

All of which might be okay, except that the school derives most of its income from public tax dollars in the form of vouchers. The state pays tuition for about 460 of the school’s 675 students. Last year, Hosanna collected $1.4 million in public funds.

That led LFT President Steve Monaghan to say, “We understand the church’s desire to hire whomever they wish. We do not believe that the taxpayer dollars should be used for such discriminatory employment practices, however.”

“Those kinds of issues consumed Europe in religious wars for centuries,” Monaghan said. “That is precisely why the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment erects a wall of separation between church and state. That is why no public funds should be provided to institutions with religious preconditions for employment.”

No official response from BESE was forthcoming. According to Sentell, “Chas Roemer, president of BESE, was unavailable for comment and his message mailbox was full.”

Did the CREDO study fudge charter school data?

Many charter school supporters are touting a study by Stanford University’s CREDO (Center for Research on Education Outcomes), which claims to document greater academic growth in charter schools than in their public counterparts.

The Louisiana Department of Education was quick to use the study as evidence that we are “among eleven states where charter school performance outpaced traditional public school growth…”

As always with controversial subjects like charter schools, there were conflicting reports about the accuracy of the study. But in a man-bites-dog twist, one of the loudest critics of the new CREDO study is an ardent supporter of charter schools, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform.

Allen told National Public Radio reporter Claudio Sanchez that CREDO “manipulated data and made conclusions about policy based on that data” that are “absolutely un-credible.”

As Sanchez wrote for this story, “the CREDO study did not compare real kids to real kids. Instead, researchers took selected data and created a ‘composite’ student to represent public school kids.”

As Jeanne Allen put it, "They compared those (charter school) students to students that don't even exist."

Allen told the reporter that it is possible to collect data on individual student achievement over time and create a legitimate study.

“But it takes a lot of patience and money that too many studies have been unable or unwilling to spend to get to that crucial question,” Sanchez wrote. “Are charter school students learning more than kids in traditional public schools?”

As long as the debate over charter schools is based on flawed research apparently aimed at bolstering a political agenda, it won’t be possible to answer that question.

In Louisiana, the politicians and venture capitalists have decided that charter schools and other privatization schemes are the way to improve educational achievement. They are all too happy to use bogus reports to support their cause.

A caution to moviegoers: Don’t get trigger happy!

A new motion picture that has been described as an inept, bizarre and deceptive attack on public education, teachers and their unions proposes that parent trigger laws are the cure for what ails our schools.


“Won’t Back Down” has been almost universally panned by critics, but a good movie was never the intent of the right-wing billionaire who financed it – the point is to promote the idea, now codified in Louisiana law, that parents should have the right to take over schools they perceive as failing.

But as this article by Molly Redden in The New Republic reveals, there are a number of problems with parent trigger laws that were not discussed when Gov. Jindal rammed his bogus education “reforms” through the legislature last spring.

Louisiana’s trigger provision, like those in six other states, calls for replacing traditional public schools. Under Act 2 of 2012, the law applies to schools rated “D” or “F” on state report cards. If parents representing a majority of the students attending the school sign a petition, the school will be transferred to the State Recovery School District, which presumably will charter the school.

But as The New Republic’s article point out, a Stanford University/Credo study shows that a vast majority of charter schools “fared worse or no better than their public school counterparts in producing academic gains.”

That same study said that Louisiana’s charter schools performed slightly better than the national average. But – and this is a really, really big but – the study clearly says that Louisiana’s advantage, when the study was conducted, was that our state had few charter schools and the requirements to be chartered were very strict.

Under the Jindal regime, however, limitations on charter schools have been obliterated in the rush to abandon public schools. Expect that small advantage to disappear in the next round of charter school studies.

“Won’t Back Down” was produced by Walden Media, a right-wing propaganda firm funded by the very people who want to privatize and profit from our schools. The movie was described by Variety critic Peter DeBruge as “grossly oversimplifying” education reform. He called it a “disingenuous pot-stirrer (that )plays to audiences’ emotions rather than their intelligence.”

A range of critics describe the “Won’t Back Down” as “divisive,” “manipulative,” “heavy-handed,” “noxious” and “muckraking.” But the most damning verdict against the movie was pronounced by audiences, who have stayed away in droves. It reported the worst box office ever for a movie opening on over 2,500 screens.

Parents should also be very wary of the parent trigger laws lauded by the movie. The New Republic’s Redden ends her article by reporting that California parents who once took advantage of a trigger law “now testify to feeling like they were duped into signing over their children’s school to a charter school corporation, without understanding that there was no alternative option. And that, of course, is the worry attached to Won’t Back Down—more duping, set to the rousing strains of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Stronger.’”

You might not be a public school if...

Education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch has a new post online in which she asks the question, "Are charter schools public schools?"

After an introduction in which she gives Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, credit as a founder of the charter school movement, Ravitch questions the direction that charter schools have taken.

Shanker, she says, thought "that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decision making and participatory governance...He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students."

Ravitch says that the vision of Shanker and others has been corrupted by charter schools run by "for-profit corporations or by nonprofit corporations with private boards of directors...Most charters are non-union and rely on young teachers who work long hours and leave after a few years, thus keeping costs low."

While charter schools are ostensibly public, Ravitch wonders if  the corporate model followed by so many schools is in keeping with the spirit of public education.

So with apologies to comedian Jeff Foxworthy, here are some indications that some charter schools might not really be public schools if...

Charter schools might not be public schools if...a non-profit charter holder subcontracts operation of the school to a for-profit corporation, it might not be a public school.

Charter schools might not be public schools if..."a charter sponsor is involved in complicated real-estate transactions that profit the sponsor," it might not be a public school.

Charter schools might not be public schools if...courts can rule that a charter school is not a public school when it comes to protecting the rights of teachers and other employees, it might not be a public school.

Charter schools might not be public schools if..."a privileged group of schools called charters...can select their students and exclude the ones that are hardest to educate; and the remaining schools are composed of students who couldn't get into the charters or got kicked out" they might not be public schools.

LFT urges rejection of education budget



LFT President Steve Monaghan

 (Baton Rouge – May 10, 2012) The Legislature should reject a proposed $3.4 billion public education budget because it violates the state constitution and could enrich as-yet unidentified private companies at the expense of public schools across the state, Louisiana Federation of Teachers President Steve Monaghan said today.

If the Minimum Foundation Program formula proposed by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education goes forward, Monaghan said, it will constitute a radical redefinition of the meaning of public education. The plan would pay for a dramatic expansion of charter schools in the state, and for the first time make tuition for private and religious schools an official part of the education budget.
“This is the worst Minimum Foundation Program ever submitted,” Monaghan told the Senate Education Committee.

In spite of Monaghan’s objection, the committee voted four-to-one to report SCR 99 by Sen. Conrad Appel (R-Metairie) favorably to the full Senate.

To read the rest of the story, please click here.

Panel denies whistleblower protection for charter school employees

(Baton Rouge – May 2, 2012) Despite evidence that charter school teachers have lost their jobs for reporting criminal activities, a legislative committee today rejected a bill aimed at protecting whistle blowers.


Charter school teachers are at-will employees with few job protections, and many are afraid to speak out when they see laws and policy procedures broken, according to United Teachers of New Orleans President Larry Carter.

“Because of pressure to do as they are told, teachers and school employees in New Orleans charter schools are afraid to bring issues to light,” Carter told the House and Governmental Affairs Committee. “They fear reprisal.”

The UTNO President and Louisiana Federation of Teachers Legislative Director Mary Patricia Wray urged lawmakers to approve House Bill 1149 by Rep. James Armes (D-Leesville). The bill would have doubled the penalty on charter schools for punishing educators who report infractions. It would have also required action on complaints within 90 days. Currently there is no time limit, and some complaints have languished for more than a year.

Carter told the panel about shocking cases in which charter school employees were punished for reporting violations.

In one well-reported scandal, Carter said, three teachers at Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans lost their jobs after reporting cases of sexual misconduct between students at the school. One was terminated within weeks of the report, and the others’ contracts were not renewed for the next school year. A state education official who warned of problems at the school was also fired.

While the school’s charter was eventually revoked, the three teachers were never rehired.

In another example cited by Carter, a middle school teacher in a charter school sent his principal an e-mail about special education students who were not receiving the services they needed. Within a week, he said, the teacher was suspended and later terminated.

Rep. Armes told the committee that “We are here because of things that are happening in charter schools in New Orleans. Terrible things.”

The bill was opposed by the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools and the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

LAPCS policy director Veronica Brooks said the bill is unnecessary because existing laws should protect educators. She also said it is unfair to double the penalty for charter schools over what would be imposed against traditional public schools.

If schools are are doing the right thing, Wray responded, they don’t have to worry about the penalty. “We are here because charter schools are the ones who are not following the law,” she said.

Faced with opposition from both the politically potent charter school organization and the state education board, the committee quickly killed the bill. Only one member, Rep. Girod Jackson (D-Harvey) voted in favor. Casting “no” votes were Reps. Taylor Barras (R-New Iberia), John Berthelot (R-Gonzales), Stuart Bishop (R-Lafayette), Mike Danahay (D-Sulphur), Tony Ligi (R-Metairie), Gregory Miller (R-Norco) and Tim Burns (R-Mandeville).



United Teachers of New Orleans President Larry Carter, right, argues in favor of a bill that would protect charter school employees who report illegal or improper activities. With him are Rep. James Armes, author of HB 1149, and Louisiana Federation of Teachers Legislative Director Mary-Patricia Wray.



Teachers sick-out to protest charter school pay cut

Teachers at a Baton Rouge charter school staged a sick-out on Wednesday to protest a 20 percent pay cut imposed by the board that runs the school.

Crestworth Learning Academy, which is operated by Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church, is apparently facing a budget crisis because of low pupil enrolment.

Teachers say they will lose between $400 and $80 per paycheck because of the decision. They are also being removed from the Teachers Retirement System of Louisiana, which will affect retirement plans.

Neither the principal of the school nor spokesmen for the church would speak to reporter Kiran Chawla, who filed this report for WAFB-TV.

The world behind the world behind the scenes

In the realm of legislation, there are at least three layers. The most visible to the public is the one in which votes are taken and laws adopted. Behind the scenes of that world is another in which deals are made and votes traded.

That is the layer most people think of when they hear the quote usually attributed to Otto von Bismarck, “Laws are like sausages – it’s best not to see them being made.” The idea of legislators basing their votes on the currency of favors and promises can make the public queasy. It’s an inelegant and gritty system, but it grinds out laws like sausage and keeps the machinery of government functioning.

But there is at least one other world, deeper in the legislative shadows, that can have a much greater impact than petty cloakroom horse trading. That is the world in which the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, operates.

ALEC, as Matt Reichel reports in this post, is “a conduit between corporate boardrooms and elected officials willing to enact their agenda of austerity and privatization.” ALEC’s agenda is to simultaneously reduce the tax burden on its corporate sponsors and to channel what government funds remain into their corporate coffers.

ALEC creates model legislation that benefits its members, including, Reichel writes, “prison privatization, stripping collective bargaining rights, reducing or eliminating environmental protections, and enacting regressive tax laws.”

Also looming large on ALEC’s agenda is a corruption of the charter school movement to enrich corporate providers.

One example is Act 417 of the 2011 Louisiana legislature, which was written “to provide for enrollment preferences and membership on the governing or management board of a charter school for certain major corporate donors; and to provide for related matters.”

Note that charter school expansion benefitting corporate providers, prison privatization, regressive tax laws and an attack on collective bargaining rights all figure prominently in this year’s legislative session as well.

Maybe – just maybe – ALEC has gone too far in its underground campaign to raid the public treasury and turn our nation in to a corporate plutocracy. Jamie Lorber, a reporter for Roll Call on Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill, writes here that some of ALEC’s sponsors are reconsidering their support.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has withdrawn support for ALEC. Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola and Intuit have also announced that they are pulling back from ALEC.

The reason why should bring a smile to all true believers in small-d democracy. An African-American civil rights group, Color of Change, has campaigned relentlessly for corporations to sever their ties to ALEC.

Color of Change, writes Lorber, went after ALEC because of its model legislation opposing voter ID laws:

“Civil rights activists say the laws disproportionately target minority, student and elderly voters, who tend to vote Democratic, and could bar up to 5 million voters from the polls this fall…Color of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson said the group is using Internet appeals to pressure companies that have made explicit efforts to build a strong relationship with African-American customers.”

It’s a good sign that people aren’t completely powerless in the face of the corporate juggernaut. If you’d like to join Color of Change’s campaign to separate ALEC from its corporate sponsors, click here.

Three ways to stop the Jindal agenda

Gov. Jindal’s anti-public education, anti-teacher agenda: Tell your Senator and Representative to vote NO on these bills: HB 974 and SB603, and HB976 and SB 597

By now you know how educators were disrespected at the State Capitol on March 14 and 15. Thousands were turned away at the door while the House and Senate Education Committees marched almost lockstep to approve the Jindal agenda. The few lawmakers who stood with us were railroaded by the most extreme display of executive overreach since Huey Long.

It’s important for the rest of the Legislature to hear from the voters before these bills become law. They have the potential to destroy public education and our profession. Here are 3 things you can do right now to help derail Gov. Jindal’s train before public education and the teaching profession are damaged beyond repair.

1. Click here and send an e-mail message to your Senator and Representative, telling them about your opposition to the bills.

2. Call your Senator and Representative.

Your Senator’s contact information is here, and your Representatives information is here. If you don’t know who they are, click here to find out.

Using the information listed below, explain to them that you are a voter in their district and you oppose these bills.

3. Send this link to everyone in your address book – legislators need to hear from as many people as possible!

Here’s what is at stake with these bills:

HB 974/SB 603: Attacks on the teaching profession

If these bills pass, virtually all personnel decisions will be based on the controversial new ‘Value Added Model” of teacher evaluation.

• There will never be another across-the-board pay raise, and no more salary schedule for new teachers. Local superintendents will decide how much each teacher and school employee will earn, largely based on evaluations.


• Any teacher who receives an ”ineffective” rating even once will be ineligible for pay raises, will lose tenure rights and will be considered an “at will” employee who can be fired immediately.


• Teachers will have to be rated “highly effective” for five straight years to earn tenure. The architect of Gov. Jindal’s Value Added evaluation program says that is nearly impossible to do.


• In dismissal proceedings, teachers have no right to a list of specific charges, may not appeal to the school board, and have only 60 days to lodge an appeal, instead of the current one-year limitation. Language requiring teachers to be found guilty is removed.

HB 976/SB 597: The destruction of public education

These bills will use the funding process to virtually abolish public education. Your tax dollars will be spent on private and religious schools, virtual schools, home schools and charter schools created by corporations, businesses and industry providers.

• These bills violate the State Constitution, which says that Minimum Foundation Program funds can only be used for “public elementary and secondary schools.”


• Tax money approved by voters for local salaries, construction and maintenance will go to these schools, even if the schools are in a different city or parish.


• The only requirement to teach in these schools will be a Bachelor’s degree – no certification will be necessary.


• The only fiscal oversight for these new charter schools is an annual report to the unelected charter authorizer, not to BESE or the local school board.


• Online teachers from anywhere in the world will automatically be certified as Louisiana teachers. These online teachers will NOT be subject to Louisiana teacher evaluations or accountability.

Letter writer gets it right

Looks like the word is getting out on Gov. Jindal's sham "education reform" scheme. It all sounded good when the governor was a candidate last fall, and made only vague references to a bold reform agenda.

Now that details are emerging, it doesn't look so good. Voters might be starting to question the essence of a plan that relies so heavily on publicly funded vouchers for private and religious schools, radically expanding charter schools without sufficient accountability, and attacking teachers.

This letter to the editor of The Advocate hits a nerve:

The purpose of reforming education is to lower education inequity by
providing every student the same, high quality, and affordable education. Gov.
Bobby Jindal has
worked to do the exact opposite by freezing per-student aid to public schools
for three years. Now his “education reform” plan will pretty much further hurt
the public school system by offering vouchers for private schools.

See Steve Monaghan on LPB's "The State We're In"

Louisiana Public Broadcasting Reporter Sue Lincoln has interviewed LFT President Steve Monaghan for two episodes of her program, “Louisiana – The State We’re In.”
Part one, “Jindal Tackles Teacher Tenure,” will air tonight at 7:00 P.M. on Louisiana Public Broadcasting stations.

If you don’t have access to an LPB station, the show will be available online at the www.lpb.org Web site by Saturday morning, under the “News” category.

The second episode, which will cover charter schools and vouchers, will air next Friday at 7:00 P.M., and will appear online the next morning.

Teachers vote to unionize charter school

The Board of Directors at Khepera Charter School and the year-old bargaining unit representing its teachers ratified their first contract Monday. The contract establishes a salary scale and regularizes procedures for labor-management communications and teacher evaluation.

Khepera is a K-8 African-centered academy in West Mount Airy that opened in 2004.
The teachers voted last June to be represented by the Alliance of Charter Schools and Employees, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers Pennsylvania.

To read more, please click here.

Post-holiday catch up edition

Important things happened while teachers and school employees were on holiday for Christmas and New Year's. Here are a few items that you may have missed during the celebrations.

Education reform defined: Gannett reporter Mike Hasten wrote this column, in which he asked an important question about the meaning of "education reform."

Here's the takeaway from the column:

But one man's view of reform is another's view of harming public schools and another's view of harming
teachers.
If reform is just creating more charter schools and getting rid of
teacher tenure, it's not going to have the backing of those that have to
implement it — public school systems across the state.
It's got to be much
more than that.

Governor meets with teachers (but offers no clues): Governor Bobby Jindal finally had his first meeting with teacher unions during the holidays. The governor listened politely, but did not say what will be in his education agenda, which he plans to announce later in January.

Also in the room were an assortment of politicians and, most notably, a handful of parents whose children attend religious schools in New Orleans, with tuition paid by state vouchers.

That led LFT President Steve Monaghan to wonder if the governor plans to include expanded vouchers in his plan.

“The major concern is that, in a tight financial construct, which we know we are going to be in, the dollars that will be siphoned away from those schools left behind will be significant,” Monaghan told Advocate reporter Will Sentell for this article.

Voucher concerns confirmed: Worries that vouchers for private and religious schools will play a major part in the governor's agenda were confirmed by Times-Picayune reporter Andrew Vanacore in this article.

Citing unnamed administration sources, Vanacore wrote, "Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies on education reform are considering an unprecedented, statewide expansion of private school vouchers..."

Tenure also on the line: Also high on the governor's agenda for "education reform" is the protection offered to public school teachers by the state's tenure law.

Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President Penny Dastuge told Advocate reporter Will Sentell that tenure "is the subject that comes up in every conversation" for this story.

As Sentell put it, "Dastugue, a Jindal appointee, said legislation could address anything from how long teachers with unsatisfactory ratings should have before they face formal job reviews, to new tenure policies for future teachers.

Coalition leader hits "reforms": With a consensus growing that the Jindal administration plans to make vouchers and expanded charters big pieces of his education agenda, St. Tammany Parish school Board President Jack Loup is pushing back.

Loup, who recently accepted LFT's Friend of Education Award, told WWL-TV in New Orleans that the governor's emphasis on charter schools is misplaced.

Noting that charter schools can be much more choosy about their students than traditional public schools, Loup said, "Our Constitution says, we take all, we teach all. OK, well we're doing that in the public school system. We're not doing that in the charter schools."

Supremes to hear school waiver case: The case of Gov. Jindal's signature legislation from 2010, the phony-baloney Red Tape Reducation and Local Empowerment Act - will be heard by the Louisiana Supreme Court on January 23.

Advocate reporter Joe Gyan, Jr. writes here that the state will ask the high court to reverse a ruling by District Court Judge Mike Caldwell that the Red Tape Act violates the constitution.

The act gave Board of Elementary and Secondary Education the authority to waive state education laws if requested by local school districts. LFT successfully argued in district court that the act is unconstitutional because the legislature does not have the right to hand off its legislative responsibilities to other bodies.

Post-Thanksgiving catch-up

The education world did not stop turning just because teachers and school employees had a few days off for Thanksgiving. Here, briefly, are a few things you might have missed:

BESE election: Following the November 19 general election. Governor Bobby Jindal is in complete command of the state's Board of Elementary and Secondary Eduction. Candidates favored by the governor and others who believe in his style of "reform" swept all three BESE runoffs: Kira Orange-Jones won District 2, Chas Roemer took District 6 and Carolyn Hill won District 8.

According to this article by Advocate reporter Will Sentell, that means the governor "could have the support of nine or 10 members after months of 6-5 votes on key school topics."

The governor's only disappointment in the BESE races came in District 3, where St. Martin Parish School Board Human Relations Director Lottie Beebe defeated long-time incumbent Glenny Lee Bouquet in the October 22 primary.

In this article by Gannett's Mike Hasten, Gov. Jindal reports that he is happy with the new, right-leaning BESE. The new members seem to be struggling to maintain their own identity, but will that last when the governor applies pressure?

Expensive charter school: One charter school in Jefferson Parish spends $87,500 per student, according to this article by Times-Picayune reporter Barri Bronston. The school, which was established to serve students who have been expelled from middle schools for various offenses, has seven teachers and eight students.

That news prompted the Monroe News Star editorial writer to question, in very understated fashion, the wisdom of spending that much money on one school: "it's important to note that even charter schools require some close supervision."

"Within our local systems," the editorial notes, " you could ask Ouachita Parish Superintendent Bob Webber or Monroe City Schools Superintendent Kathleen Harris what they could do with $87,500 per student, and we are quite certain either one of them would respond that an investment of that much public money per student would result in a world-class school system."

Teach for America: The growing influence of Teach for America was explored in this article by Times Picayune reporter Andrew Vanacore.

Once seen as a sort of Peace Corps that brought idealistic young college graduates into hard-to-staff schools, Teach for America has become a political as well as educational force to be reckoned with.

Best known is John White, currently the superintendent of the Recovery School District and Gov. Jindal's pick to replace Paul Pastorek as State Superintendent of Education. But newly minted BESE member Kira Orange-Jones is also a TFT alum, along with the new executive director of BESE and Gov. Jindal's new policy advisor.

A little justice for some Filipino teachers: The Caddo Parish School Board has done the right thing and settled with the U.S. Department of Labor, awarding Filipino teachers in the parish some $1,300 each because of their entanglement with a crooked recruiting firm.

It is a small step to correct a much larger injustice. The settlement only applies to a specific charge brought by the U.S. Department of Labor against the Caddo school board. It leaves open U.S. allegations against other school systems, and does not deal with the LFT complaint, filed with the State Workforce Commission, that Filipino teachers were forced to pay fees that should have been paid by school boards under Louisiana law.

Value Added Model: As the state tests a new teacher evaluation scheme called the Value Added Model, questions are popping up about how fair it will be.

Reporter Sue Lincoln filed this story for the Southern Education Desk, in which LFT President Steve Monaghan questions how well the new system will actually measure teacher effectiveness.

The privatization of public education: In an epic article for The Nation, reporter Lee Fang exposed the "quiet but astonishing national transformation" of public education into a cash machine for big business.

Lobbyists, he writes, have "combin(ed) the financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations."

Focusing on virtual schools, he writes, "This legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business, and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with revenues reaching $24.4 billion."

Local Federation chapters grow together: Educators in Caddo and Bossier parishes can expect to see their influence grow with the creation of the new Red River United Federation.

As reported here by Mary Nash-Wood of the Shreveport Times, the new organization combines the power of the Caddo Federation of Teachers and Support Personnel and the Bossier Federation of Teachers and School Employees.

"It will essentially be a super group over the two organizations," said CFT President Jackie Lansdale.

Man bites dog story: Forbes article supports teacher unions

Malcolm Forbes named his yacht "Capitalist Tool," so the last place you'd expect to find an article supporting teacher unions and questioning the validity of market-based "education reform" is the Web site that bears his name.

Yet here it is. Writer E.D. Cain opens with this riff on conventional right wing wisdom: "Teachers' unions are often portrayed by their opponents as standing in the way of efforts to reform our schools. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing."

Cain acknowledges that attacks on teacher unions and support for privatized reform come from both the left and right wings of the ideological spectrum. Both sides, he says, have fallen for a neoliberal scheme to disempower teachers and their unions while funneling vast amounts of public money into private coffers.

About reforms, he says "Vouchers have been met not only with public disappointment, but with few if any real benefits. Most charters haven't fared much better. And for-profit schools come packaged with all sorts of other troubling implications for our public - or should I say "public" - education system."

About the horde of non-educator experts who devise schemes like high-stakes testing "which seeks....to boil down education to learning by rote," he writes, "When technocrats and businessmen take over the hard work of designing a system of education is it surprising that the result of a complex labyrinth of testing schemes aimed at only those subjects that can be measured, quantified and pasted into spreadsheets? Is it any winder that professionals who care about education might see this as a threat?"

And about the unions which defend professional educators, he writes, "I support teachers' unions because they are the best chance this country has to improve and strengthen public education for the long haul. No other organization will step in to protect teachers from political blowback and the reform-trend-of-the-moment."

It's a good read, with important ideas, from an unexpected source.