Tuesday, October 1, 2019

BESE Takeover Effort Intensifies

We predicted that as it got closer to election day, the out-of-state contributors who support the takeover of BESE would dump in massive amounts of contributions to LABI controlled candidates. 
We are now witnessing a massive advertising campaign financed primarily by out-of-state reformer groups that are acting in cooperation with the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) to continue their total control of education in Louisiana. See this blog post by Mercedes Schneider, who I believe is the most effective investigative reporter of educational issues in Louisiana. Schneider describes how a faction of the Louisiana Democratic party called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is backing candidates for BESE using out-of-state money.

Schneider also describes here how other groups including Stand for Children are coordinating their efforts in Republican majority BESE districts. Brigitte Nieland who recently worked for LABI, is now the political action staffer for Stand for Children. Again, the goal is to provide LABI with totally committed candidates in both Republican and Democratic districts to do their bidding on all major education issues. What does this mean for our children and their teachers?

Election of these LABI controlled candidates will insure that John White remains State Superintendent for as long as he cares to do so. It will also mean that teachers and children will continue to spend most of their class time getting drilled and rehearsed in how to take the state standardized tests. Teachers are now being required to teach "scripted" lessons "with fidelity". This means that White and his reformers consider teachers nothing more that robotic test teachers. That's also why almost no teacher's children are choosing education as their profession and we are experiencing a growing teacher shortage. But the worst result of all this "deform" of education is that our children are actually performing at their lowest ranking ever on standardized tests. So the experiment has failed but as Einstein warned: "Insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting to see different results."

If you are sick of this "insanity", please vote against all of the LABI endorsed candidates.
Those are: District 1; James Garvey, District 2; Kira Orange Jones, District 3; Sandy Holloway, District 5; Ashley Ellis, District 6; Ronnie Morris, District 7; Holly Boffy, District 8; Preston Castille.

Here are the candidates I believe would be independent of LABI and willing to restore practical and creative education to our schools. Please consider voting for:
Dist. 1; Lee Barrios, Dist. 2; Ashonta Wyatt, Dist. 3; Janice Perea, Dist. 5; Dr. Stephen Chapman,  Dist. 6; Gregory Spiers, Dist. 7; Timmie Melancon, Dist. 8; Vereta Lee.