The Title of Education Legislation "Misleading"

The title of the legislation proposed by HB 1368 is: RED TAPE REDUCTION AND LOCAL EMPOWERMENT WAIVER PROGRAM.

This title could be misleading because it will not necessarily reduce red tape for local school systems and it certainly does nothing to empower any local school system, while it greatly empowers the State Department of Education to dictate various actions to local school systems.

The legislation allows local school systems to apply for a waiver of various state laws and BESE regulations such as class size maximums, pupil-teacher ratios, and instructional time requirements provided that the school system submits a plan for improvement of academic achievement of the students of any schools exempted from such laws or regulations. The law actually seems to be aimed at providing an alternative to state takeover of low performing schools. It basically would allow a local school board to maintain authority over its low performing schools if the local superintendent agrees to make state mandated changes to such low performing schools. To avoid state takeover the school system must choose one of the following reorganization plans for any of its low performing schools it wishes to have exempted from state takeover:

1. Turnaround: Replace the principal and a majority of the teachers and give more power over the budget and teacher selection to the new principal

2. Restart: Turn over the school to a charter or outside management organization

3. School closure: Close the school and send the students to another school that is a high performing school within the district

4. Transformation: Replace the principal and implement various changes to the management of the school. This option can be used for no more than 50% of the schools receiving waivers for that school district.

The law would also require that any school that fails to improve according to state mandates over a period of time regardless of any waivers, would eventually have to be converted into a charter school. This legislation would establish charter conversion as the final solution for any school that is judged to be chronically low performing. What would happen if such a charter school still failed to perform satisfactorily? The law would mandate that it be turned over to another charter organization. In this legislation we finally have an answer to the question: Who would take over a takeover school if it still failed? Answer: It would simply be another takeover organization. It would never go back to the local school board.

How will this law actually affect local school systems?
The law is obviously intended to apply only to school systems that have “low performing” schools as defined by BESE. This year it would focus on schools that have been assigned a School Performance Score of 65 or below and have not met state mandated improvement goals. Next year the minimum score will go to 75. At least 20 of Louisiana's local systems would not be affected at all because none of their schools have SPS scores below 75. Here's how it will affect some systems:

For example, if we use the School Performance Score of 75 to determine which schools could possibly be affected, a large school system such as East Baton Rouge Parish could have approximately 40 of its 80 schools affected. That means that if school scores do not improve sufficiently, the school system would have almost half its schools subject to state takeover. If it wants to retain some control of its schools, EBR would have to apply for the waiver described in this legislation.

If the school system does not want to close any of these schools it would have to turn some over to charter organizations or fire at least half the faculty or at least fire the principals and find replacements and then follow the dictates of the State Department of Education as to how to run these schools. This certainly does not look like red tape reduction and local empowerment!

With the passage of this law, the state will be mandating to local school systems what may be considered draconian measures in all schools classified by the state to be low performing. And as we have seen, the definition of low performing can be changed at any time by BESE. What could be some of the other effects of such new rules?

A school system with several low performing schools could face the following problems:

1. Some principals would have to be fired or transferred even if the local superintendent believes he/she is doing the best job possible under the circumstances. The state does not consider extenuating circumstances such as high poverty communities served by a particular school. It is assumed that all schools can and should perform at a certain level. If it does not do so, the principal and teachers must be blamed.

2. If none of the low performing schools are to be turned over to Charter Management Organizations, and if closing schools is not feasible, then at least half of the low performing schools would be required to replace at least half of their teachers. Would the local school system be forced to fire these teachers, or would it switch them with teachers from higher performing schools? How would teacher and administrator morale be affected by such mass firings or transfers?

3. A few of the smaller school systems serving high poverty districts may be forced to turn over almost half of their schools to Charter Management Organizations or try to implement massive teacher firings and replacement or just turn over such schools to the state.

If both this legislation and HB 1033 (the law mandating teacher evaluations based on student test scores) passes, Louisiana can expect major disruption in the operation of many local school systems. Sadly, based on the performance of schools in the Recovery District, there is no reason to believe that such disruptions in the lives of many dedicated educators will actually bring improvements in the education of our students. There is no evidence that taking schools away from democratically elected school boards and handing them over to outside charter management organizations will improve instruction. In my 44 years of involvement with public education, I have never before seen such a drastic experiment with the lives of thousands of students and educators.

What to do When Education Reforms Fail

Each week local newspapers report that more and more school boards have been forced to lay off education staff and cut student services because of a severe state-wide budget crisis caused by increasing retirement costs and the many unfunded mandates by state and federal authorities. What is the answer of our State Department of Education to this crisis? Our State Superintendent whose own job security is now firmly protected by his alliance with Governor Jindal, is recommending that local school systems use mostly imagined surplus funds to cover these mandated costs. In addition he is pushing legislation that will implement a new teacher and administrator evaluation system designed to fire teachers and principals based on student test scores. The idea is that if school systems fire and then replace the bottom 5% to 10% of teachers based on student test scores, student achievement on LEAP and other tests will automatically go up. This assumption is based on national studies that distort the effect of teacher quality related to student achievement. The state instead of providing support to local school systems to deal with increasing costs and budget shortfalls will develop a state mandated evaluation system aimed at producing such teacher dismissals. In addition, the State Department of Education will simply create alternative certification processes for replacing fired teachers. As Diane Ravitch points out in a recent Teacher magazine article, education policy makers may soon be tempted to waive all teacher credentials and certification requirements in favor of employment of anyone who can raise student test scores. Click on this link to read an interesting discussion between Ravitch and Mike Rose on the current state of education reform.

Our state Department of Education should be the strongest ally of local public schools. Instead it is an adversary. It supports outside interest groups (Charter Management Organizations) who want to remove local schools from supervision by locally elected school boards. It supports increasing vouchers for parents wanting to use public funds to send their children to private schools. Now it wants to set quotas for firing and replacement of locally employed teachers.

Much of this is a desperate effort to divert attention from the fact that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted in the last ten years on ill conceived reforms. Taking over schools in New Orleans and other parts of the state is a fiasco, and when the Katrina based federal funding dries up, the state will either have to pick up the tab or abandon many expensive programs and highly paid administrators. Charter school operators are increasingly leery of taking responsibility for handicapped students, many of their test scores are backsliding, graduation rates are dismal, state bureaucratic costs are out of control, yet the State Superintendent somehow finds a way to keep blaming local school systems that are out-performing the state's takeover schools.

Because of the ill conceived “college prep for all” agenda pursued by Superintendent Pastorek, attention has been diverted from vital technical skills programs leaving Louisiana with almost no young people trained for promising careers requiring modern construction and technical skills. Louisiana businesses are having to recruit workers from other states while our dropouts and flunk-outs go on welfare or to prison.

So what does our Department of Education do when reforms fail? Blame the teachers and local school systems and start up a new round of reforms.

The High Cost of Our State Education Bureaucracy

A recent article in the Baton Rouge Advocate points out that the Education Bureaucracy at the State Department of Education just keeps on growing despite serious state budget shortfalls. The article (click here to view article) points out that the State Department of Education has approved more than 6000 contracts for outside services over the last 6 years. This fiscal year alone the outside contracts amounted to 342 million dollars with $175 million of that going for test related agreements that span 12 years. Appropriations Chairman, Jim Fannin, said he would like to see reductions in the 20 million dollars of professional services contracts for educational services funded from the state general fund.

In addition, State Superintendent Pastorek has steadily increased the number of very highly paid unclassified positions in the State Department of Education. Since he assumed the position of State Superintendent, it was noted in state records that he has added over 20 unclassified positions, some with salaries up to $140,000 according to news reports. Very recently positions were added in the Department to help pursue the Race to the Top federal program. The state was unsuccessful in the first round of this application for federal dollars yet the bureaucracy continues to grow. All this is happening at a time that local school systems are being urged by the State Superintendent to implement plans to reduce central office costs and shift more funding to the school level.

House bill 1033 which would establish value-added teacher and principal evaluations is moving through the legislative process with no fiscal note attached. (Such a note is usually required to indicate the cost to the state of implementation of legislation) This legislation is based on part of the Race to the Top application that would have set up a new state mandated teacher and administrator evaluation system based on growth in student achievement as measured by state tests. The as yet unfunded application included approximately 30 million dollars over a 4 year period for implementation of this program. Such costs would have included more contracted services, but also the employment of more State Department employees. If the program is funded, possibly in the second round of the R2T competition, the federal government requires that any programs started by the federal funding must be continued by state and local agencies after the federal grant runs out. This means that sooner or later Louisiana will have to pay for this as yet untested scheme.

There have been some cuts in the past year, mostly in the areas providing actual educational services such as the regional service centers. One other notable cut was the cancelation of the contract with JBHM Education Group of Jackson, Miss. For the past couple of years this outside contractor had been employed to monitor and audit low performing schools in the Recovery District at a cost of more than $1 million dollars a year. Its contract was cancelled after it issued an extremely critical report on 4 new charter schools in the Baton Rouge area. This contract was canceled in favor of a new in-house school monitoring process that's being developed.