What's Really Wrong With Louisiana Education?

The article posted earlier this week on my blog may lead some readers to believe that I am "down" on Louisiana education. Nothing could be further from the truth. I also sincerely believe that our public school teachers are some of the most dedicated and hardest working teachers we have ever had.  This post by Ganey Arsement of the blog, Educate Louisiana, makes it clear that, Arsement at least, believes that my motives in publishing disappointing test results is to enlighten the public about the invalidity of our present state tests, and not to criticize the hard work of teachers. This blog post is an attempt to further clarify my findings about the current state of Louisiana education and to make suggestions about how we as citizens and educators may truly improve our public education system.

Our public schools are still the best choice by far
Many of the various posts of this blog demonstrate that our public education system is much more successful and reliable than the alternatives. Those alternatives promoted by the very rich supporters of so called "education reform" have included the establishment of charter schools and voucher schools in recent years that are vacuuming up and wasting many of our tax dollars, Those tax dollars should be going to the real public schools. Examples of charter failures in Louisiana are described here and here. There are many more. The voucher schools have failed even more dramatically.

The flawed assumption that has been promoted in recent years by wealthy donors to the cause of education reform, is that public schools would benefit from increased competition from privately run schools that are exempt of many of the oversight rules in exchange for a focus on results. It was believed that those privately run schools would lead the way in improving all schools. Much of the data we have provided in this blog and others demonstrate that these privately run schools have been generally inferior to public schools and have instead produced  numerous incidences of mismanagement, misappropriation of public dollars, and even scandals based on abuse and neglect of children.

It has been stated by reformers and legislators who support reform in the form of school choice, that parents are the best judge of the school  for their child. I respectfully disagree with this assumption as a blanket statement covering all parents. Certainly many parents are a good judge of what type of education would most benefit their children, but many parents don't have a clue about which school is best for their child. There is significant evidence that some parents are not choosing wisely. In my findings published in the previous post show, using official LDOE data, that voucher schools in Louisiana have produced lower average scores than the average for public schools on all state English and math tests. 

School choice is often a bad choice
The fact that some parents do not choose wisely about the education of their children is also borne out by the number of thriving post secondary schools across the country that are ripping off their students and awarding worthless diplomas. The fact that some parents do not choose wisely and make decisions that are not in their child's best interest is why we have the mandatory attendance laws requiring parents to send their children to school every day they are healthy and able to attend. That is because long ago in our history, it was determined that some parents were irresponsible when it came to sending their children to school. Often in the past some rural parents thought it was more important that children helped on the farm than attend school. But our legislators decided in favor of the future of children by passing laws that required parents to send their children to school. Now those laws are being seriously eroded by the education reformers. For example, the monitoring of home schooling is very minimal.

If we want to improve education we must start with the truth
The most important reason why I publish student test results using raw score averages and raw cut scores is to make parents and taxpayers aware of the truth in student performance. I have been particularly persistent in revealing the secret conversion tables used for converting raw test scores to highly obscure "scale scores". Unfortunately, as long as students are tested each year using standardized tests where the test questions change each year, there must be a system for making the test results compatible to other years. But that is no reason why the real raw scores and the percentage of possible points achieved by a student should be kept secret. In my opinion this system can and has been manipulated to falsify the true results.

It is also important for the public to have some idea of how much of the material on a test the students have actually learned. Some of those raw cut scores for a rating of passing on Louisiana tests recently have been so low that some students could almost pass a test by just making random guesses. This is wrong and needs to be exposed. John White and his "reformers" are trying to keep the truth hidden because they have failed miserably in their promise to produce. Their one goal of improving test scores has only made teaching and learning into a dull uninspiring exercise with poor results.

The real problem, in my opinion, with the low test scores our students are achieving on the new Common Core based tests, is that the material teachers are forced to teach is often not age appropriate, and often not really useful in preparing students for life. I think it's a travesty to force students to sit in their desks rehearsing for tests that are not relevant to them and that will not help them in the future. We need to completely revise the curriculum, the standards and the tests being used to teach children in Louisiana. Those revisions need to be based on student readiness and on the real needs of our children, not some untested theories about what will result in higher SAT scores.