False Advertising: It is used to Steal Public School Taxes!

This is an article by The Brookings Institute describing the results of their study of voucher students'  performance in Louisiana. The study shows that the academic performance of voucher students drops dramatically after students transfer to a voucher school compared to their performance in their original public schools.

Take a look at the claims in this mailing that is being sent to public school parents right now encouraging students to apply for vouchers to the same private schools included in the Brookings study.

In Louisiana, the voucher program can pay for up to $5,300 per student to allow children to attend a participating private school. The majority of the voucher schools choosing to participate are parochial or religious schools. Previous reports have revealed that some of these schools could not remain open if they did not have a significant number of voucher students.

The vouchers (tuition scholarships) were sold to the Legislature originally as a way to allow low income students to escape failing public schools and to attend better schools. The definition in the law for a so called "failing school" in the voucher legislation was set at a rating of "C" or below. No one bothered to develop an initial rating system for the private schools that would be eligible to receive voucher students. Later, however, such schools may be barred from receiving additional voucher students if voucher test scores are rated as failing. But many voucher schools are not rated by this method because they have too few voucher students.

Based on the Brookings Institute study, the people sending out the advertisements shown above should be sued for false advertising! These mailings are paid for by the American Federation for Children Growth Fund.

The Brookings study determined that Louisiana was a good candidate for a study of relative performance of students in voucher schools because the participants are selected at random using a lottery system. This may prevent selection of the most capable students. Other researchers have pointed out however, that many parents of more motivated or capable students are self selected by the fact that they took the trouble to apply. Nevertheless, the study concludes that the students that are losers in the lottery are better off because they will continue to attend their public school where their performance is better than that of the voucher "winners"!

Some supporters of vouchers take the position that the MFP allocation somehow belongs to the parents of school children. Representative Nancy Landry of Lafayette has suggested that parents of public school students should be able to attach their MFP dollars to their child just like a backpack and send them to the school of their choice since it is their MFP money and it should be their right to choose the school their child will attend with those dollars. This assertion is simply not true and is also a form of false advertising!

It turns out that more than two thirds of the MFP is funded by taxpayers who do not have children in public K-12 schools. I am an example of one of those taxpayers. My question to Representative Landry and others is: "Why should a parent have the right to send my portion of the MFP (or the amount allocated to voucher students) to the private school of their choice where the student gets an inferior education? Suppose I don't agree with the religious views promoted in some of those schools. Why should my tax dollars go to support those religious views and to indoctrinate children?

Voucher school promotions are just one of the ways that Louisiana taxpayers are being bilked of our tax dollars using the bogus claims of school choice.

New Schools For Baton Rouge Wants to Bring in Selective Charters

This article in The Advocate describes the effort to gain approval from BESE or from one of the new charter school authorizers for one or more BASIS Charter schools in the Baton Rouge area. The BASIS intrusion is being promoted by the group, New Schools for Baton Rouge.

The BASIS Charter school group started in Arizona and is looking to expand. This line: "We do not lower the bar" by the CEO of BASIS is both the secret of its apparent success and the reason for the destructive nature of such schools. While it claims to be an open enrollment school, its policies basically reject or fail any student who cannot meet its very stringent academic standards. Those rejected or failed students must then go back to the real public schools, resulting in downward pressure on performance in schools that are not allowed by law to select their students.  So for all practical purposes, BASIS schools are just glorified magnet schools that cater to high performing students. They don't have to provide better teaching to look good when they choose only the higher performing students.

BASIS Charter schools want to set up shop in any area that has a large pool of students of all kinds where they can attract only the highest performing students away from the real public schools. They hope also to attract high performing students away from private schools using the promise of a free "elite" education! They then ignore the need to serve students with handicaps or those who struggle in school, and the management company makes a profit using our tax dollars! What a sweet deal! That's why I have called such schools "predatory charters". Such schools can do serious damage to our public schools by skimming off the highest performers and thereby lowing the ratings of our real public schools and causing them to eventually lose public support. Such a trend will damage the entire school system because it will become harder and harder to maintain the school tax base and will result in loss of critical resources for all students.

I want my readers to be aware that the same executives that run New Schools for Baton Rouge are the leaders of recent efforts to take over and turn around the performance of several struggling schools in the Baton Rouge area. They have failed miserably in all these efforts, and have been forced to close school after failed school. So they have basically given up on turning around schools that serve the most at-risk students and they want to go after the high performers. This devious strategy is also a form of false advertising, because it is exactly in contradiction of the reason charter schools were authorized in Louisiana. In addition, it is a travesty to let some out-of-state moguls make a profit off of our children just when school funding is in danger of absorbing budget cuts.

Rampant Violations of State Law by Charter Schools. What Can We Do?

This excellent article in nola.com by Danielle Dreilinger exposes how charter schools continue to flaunt state law on open meetings and continue to pay extravagant salaries to administrators who have no direct education responsibilities.

Read on to find out that violations of the open meetings law is just one of the many violations of state law and BESE policy by charter operators.

Do you remember when we were assured that one of the benefits of charter schools was that they would eliminate wasteful central office bureaucracies and put more of our tax monies in the classroom? Well now we find that a charter school provider administering only 6 schools requires the funding of two bureaucracies! School taxes are used to fund the Algiers Charter Association central office staff plus the RSD central office that oversees the same charters. This study by Western Michigan University shows that nationwide, charters spend more on administration than do the real public schools. Is it no wonder that after all the hoopla about charters claiming to improve student performance, three of Algiers charter schools are seeing serious declines in school performance scores. One high school went from a "B" to a "D" when the charter group merged two schools.

In addition to wasting taxpayer dollars on an extra central office, the Algiers Charter Board found it expedient to violate the state open meetings law in neglecting to announce the move to fire and replace its top administrator. Should not the Algiers Charter board be repremanded in some way or at least warned by BESE for violating the open meetings law? Are charters so special that they can waste tax money on overpaid administrators and then violate the law in firing and hiring those administrators? Does anyone know the salary that will be paid to the new administrator or is it a secret agreement made using our tax dollars?

Another example of misuse of school taxes is exemplified by the Louisiana online virtual school, Connections Academy. You may recall that State Superintendent John White phased out a highly cost effective and successful state-run virtual school to provide an automatic client base for two new for-profit virtual charter schools. Those schools are funded at 90% of the per pupil allocation of true public schools even though they have no buildings to build or maintain, no school lunches to provide, no libraries, no utilities, and much lower benefits for their teachers. This automatically frees up a huge windfall of funding for advertising and company profit. Even so, a recent study by The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) from Stanford University found that nationwide, privately run virtual charter schools are some of the worst performing schools in the country. Specifically the two online charters in Louisiana are among the worst performing in that low performing category. According to CREDO, on average, students in the Louisiana virtual charters actually fell behind by a whole year of instruction in each year compared to the real public schools!

So what is Connections Academy doing to improve their student performance? Are they beefing up their contacts with students and parents to make sure that students really are logging in the necessary amount of hours to meet state mandatory attendance laws? Are they reducing class size for each teacher to allow more individual attention? There is no evidence of any such efforts, but Connections has greatly boosted their advertising budget aimed at recruiting more higher performing students so that the demographics of their student body will shift away from at-risk, high poverty students. The radio advertising I heard tells us they are looking to recruit students who prefer to be instructed at "above grade level" standards. I believe such active efforts to recruit and shift their student body to more affluent, high performing students violates the state regulations that require charter schools to serve approximately the same percentage of at-risk students as are served by the real public schools.

This is the same trend we have seen at work in several other predatory charter schools operating in the Lafayette area. Charter schools are quietly giving up trying to address the needs of at-risk students (two low performing charters in the Baton Rouge area have been handed back to the original school boards) because it is much easier to receive higher school performance scores if they serve a bigger proportion of high performing students.  This has nothing to do with providing better instruction. It has everything to do with simply recruiting higher performing students that do not need high quality instruction to perform well. This shift in school demographics is also accomplished in some charters by using harsh discipline polices that suspend or expel low performing students back to the real public schools.

Here are a few ideas about how to get John White and BESE to enforce state law

Efforts to stop the above violations of state law by charter schools may require a citizen's lawsuit to force compliance with the few laws and regulations that still apply to charter schools.  Don't expect BESE or the legislature to take action. Too many of them have been bought off by campaign contributions using our tax dollars to get this selective enforcement without regard to the interests of the taxpayers, students, and parents.

Too bad there is no law that restricts the pay for charter school administrators to a level similar to that paid to real public school administrators. They are using our taxes, but we the taxpayers have no control over how they spend our money. This is similar to the big bankers and wall street executives who paid themselves multi-million dollar bonuses right after their companies were bailed out by the American taxpayers!

What about a lawsuit that requires charters to enforce the state mandatory attendance laws? There are reports that some charter students are allowed to skip school regularly without consequences even though BESE policy requires that a student cannot get credit if he/she misses more than 10 days in a semester of unexcused absences. Does anyone check to see if charter students have legitimate excuses for their abscences? I am informed that some charters do not even check attendance even though every public school home room teacher is expected to meticulously check attendance each day. Does the LDOE require strict enforcement of mandatory attendance laws and enforcement of BESE policy relative to restrictions in school credits for students who have excessive absences. In an interview early in his tenure, White told me that he thought that such rules are not necessary. Apparently White never heard of the studies that report that one of the parimary causes of student failure is a poor attendance record.

When is State Superintendent John White going to start enforcing state laws as they apply to charter schools? I suppose that we should not be surprised by selective enforcement of state law from an official who has repeatedly violated the state public records law. Why doesn't BESE reprimand White for violating state law? White has been found in violation of state public records laws three times in the last two years as a result of lawsuits I was forced to file to be allowed to see public records relating to student enrollment,  statistics on graduation rates, and raw student scores on LEAP  and end of course tests.

Without these public records requests we would not know that the state passing scores on the new PARCC-like tests were set at an average of only 30% correct answers. This is being allowed despite the fact that BESE has a policy that the minimum passing score for students is supposed to be 60%. Apparently the minimum percentage rules don't apply to state tests, but White has never asked BESE for an exemption. Until this year, after a public records request by 33 citizens, we got the real scores even though White has never before informed BESE about the actual percentage of correct answers equating to a passing score on state tests. For example, the state PARCC minimum passing scale score on the 8th grade math test was set at 725 out of 850 to obscure the fact that the real minimum passing score was only 23%! This is the level of accountability we can expect from a person who according to Governor Edwards is not even qualified to serve as a middle school assistant principal.

Finally, I believe we should request help in enforcing state law from the new Edwards administration. One approach would be to shut down all state contracts feeding cronies of the LDOE until someone at LDOE starts enforcing state law. John White now controls non-construction contracts amounting to over 140 million dollars of our money!

New, Positive Leadership for Louisiana. How Will Education Benefit?

This is a link to the text of the inaugural speech of our new governor, John Bel Edwards.

I was pleased to attend the historic inauguration of Governor John Bel Edwards on January 11. Listening to the ideas and goals of a governor who is dedicating his service as Governor to the welfare of the people of Louisiana instead of his own political ambitions should be refreshing and motivating to all of us.

On the subject of K-12 education he said:

"We need to treat our educators with the respect they deserve and demand the best for our children."

I am convinced that the demonization and scapegoating of the teaching profession by the Jindal/White administration has done immeasurable damage to the morale and therefore the effectiveness of our teaching profession. We need to immediately take action to reverse this course. Governor Edwards has made a sincere commitment to respect and support our professional educators.

Concerning higher education he said:

"It's been proven time and again that a more educated and trained workforce is our greatest long-term economic generator. So we MUST make college more affordable. We can start by ending double digit tuition hikes. We cannot fund higher education on the backs of our students."

The draconian cuts to higher education by Jindal totally discredit his administration because it has started to erode the healthy economy that Jindal had promised to nurture. How can we prepare our students for the careers of the future if our government is taking away their opportunities to receive the best possible eduction?

There are huge obstacles in Louisiana's budget structure that could doom all of Edward's excellent initiatives to failure. Solving the budget shortfall of over billion dollars will have to take priority before any real improvements can be made to education.

I hope that the voters will join with me in encouraging our legislators to support substantial increases in tax revenues necessary to get our state moving forward. 

Sure there are cuts in unnecessary programs that should be made before we increase taxes. I have made a recommendation to the governor's fiscal transition team that all government contracts be reviewed for needed cuts including education service contracts. (We could save 100 million by cutting out unnecessary standardized testing) but It is high time we realize that good government must be paid for and that the Jindal formula of cutting vital services just to please the super rich is not the way to produce progress.