Louisiana
Supreme Court to Decide on Vouchers: The Louisiana Supreme Court
will hear final arguments today on Louisiana's voucher and course
choice programs. Those are the Jindal reforms that allow some public
school students to get “scholarships” to attend private and
religious schools or to take individual courses next year provided by
various private groups. The Supreme Court has already received
written briefs from both the plaintiffs and defendants of the voucher
system and today will only hear limited oral arguments. There is
concern among opponents of the voucher system that even though the
constitution seems to clearly prohibit the use of the MFP for private
schools, the election recently of a new Justice who campaigned on a
conservative platform could sway the court against public school
supporters.
In
another development, new litigants have joined opponents and are
challenging the vouchers on the grounds of separation of church and
state.
This story in the Monroe New Star points out that the ACLU and some
religious groups are concerned that Louisiana's voucher program to
religious schools is not only a violation of church and state but also has opened the door to many non-conventional
religious groups receiving state aid to run their schools. If the
Court agrees to consider this argument, we would have a much more powerful
argument against religious school vouchers. The challenge to vouchers would
no longer be limited to just the source of funding. My legislator
who had voted for Act 2, woke up recently and expressed alarm that
some Muslim groups who may want to get funding for Madrassa schools
could possibly qualify for voucher funding. This is the Pandora's box
you open up when you decide to use public money to fund vouchers to
religious schools.
One of
the bogus arguments for vouchers often expressed by BESE president
Chas Roemer and others, is that parents should have the right to take
their school tax money and use it for whatever schools they choose
for their child. The basic flaw in this argument is that many of the
parents who are qualifying for vouchers because of the public school
their children attend, are not paying significant school taxes. Certainly not enough to
fund their child's “scholarship”. The fact is that parents who
are actually paying tuition to private schools are probably paying
more than the average of public school taxes because they are
wealthier and pay more property and other taxes. So with the
structure of vouchers approved by the Jindal reforms, we have a
situation where parents who pay tuition to send their children to
private schools are also subsidizing funding for voucher parents.
But the
reality is that most elite private schools allow only a limited
number of voucher students if any, because they do not want to deal with too
many low performing students.
What we are seeing instead is the
overnight growth of independent religious schools that will make
their preachers rich by marketing to poor parents while providing a
truly substandard education to the children.
Outrageous Merit pay
Scheme Tried in New Orleans: You
have got to read this article in the New Orleans Lens describing how
a few teachers in a New Orleans charter school were awarded huge
bonuses using our federal tax dollars. Arne Duncan apparently
has not yet seen a merit pay scheme for teachers he is not willing to
fund at least temporarily with federal grants. The idea apparently
was to raise the performance score of this charter school by
rewarding teachers who raised their student scores. But the plan was
so poorly devised that it left out the one teacher who seemed to
raise student performance the most. At the same time, the huge
bonuses to just a few teachers is causing distrust among the entire
faculty. After all this awarding of merit pay to improve the school performance, the school got an SPS of 75.8, just barely above an "F" rating!
Diane
Ravitch pointed out last week that even in a carefully designed merit
pay system studied by Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee,
it was found that the control group of teachers who were not given
merit pay produced equivalent student performance when compared to
the group eligible for merit pay. Ravitch concluded that maybe this
means that all of the teachers were doing their best with or without
merit pay.
One of the flaws of teacher merit pay is that it assumes
that teachers are somehow holding back on their best efforts and will
only teach their best when they can get bonuses for higher student
performance. One teacher was quoted as joking: “Yea sure, I have
these fantastic lesson plans that I keep locked up until I get
offered merit pay!”
Local School
Reorganizations May be Illegal One
of the newest schemes for reorganizing schools was pioneered in
New Orleans by the Recovery School District under Director Paul
Vallas. It consisted of the laying off of the entire teacher force after Katrina
and then rebuilding the school system by rehiring mostly new
teachers. Well Vallas is long gone now but those experienced
teachers who were laid off recently won a court ruling that their layoffs
were not valid and did not consider their tenure rights. Apparently
the judge was convinced by the testimony that the layoffs amounted to
mass firings and replacement of tenured teachers without due process.
It is yet to be seen how this whole mess is going to be finally
resolved.
The
same thing on a smaller scale may be about to happen in Baton Rouge.
The new Superintendent originally from Michigan who may not be
familiar with the law in Louisiana is in cahoots with the RSD to
reorganize some low performing schools to avoid state takeover. (The
state has already failed spectacularly in all of the schools
previously taken over in Baton Rouge but they are not giving them
back and are using the thereat of more takeovers to force the EBR
system to create more charters.) Superintendent Taylor has announced
that when some schools are reorganized the entire faculty will have
to reapply for their jobs with whoever is the new principal. Well I
believe that if this process results in new teachers being brought in
to take teaching positions resulting in the layoff of some of the
tenured teachers, those teachers will have solid grounds for suing to get their jobs back.
Stay tuned to this
blog to keep up with all the wacky schemes in Louisiana that pass as
school reform!
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