Voucher Lottery Losers Win on Getting a Better Education

Desperate to save the sub-standard voucher program that wastes millions of taxpayer dollars, John White's crack public relations specialists have put out a highly misleading press release claiming that the voucher students are really improving more than regular public school students on state tests. But White's friend, Will Sentell of The Advocate refused to give him the usual biased reporting on this privatization scheme.

You see, even with all this alleged improvement in test performance, the voucher schools perform just a smidgen above the performance of the Baton Rouge RSD charters and the Louisiana RSD charters that are the lowest performing schools in the state! So for children to transfer from mostly C or D public schools to go to a private school scoring at a D- level is not anything to brag about. But White's PR experts are under orders to always try to slant the reports to somehow portray almost total failure as dramatic progress!

Here is the truth: Research scientists from Berkeley, Duke and M.I.T. did a comparison of all students who asked to transfer to voucher schools in Louisiana in the past year. Since there were not enough seats available, a lottery was held and some students were denied access to the voucher schools completely at random. Then the researchers averaged the scores on state tests of the students who missed out on being selected for vouchers and who remained in public schools with the students who won the voucher lottery. What they found is that on average, the students who stayed in public schools, performed better on state tests than did the voucher students. There is no amount of spinning of this data that can show that the voucher schools were a better choice for those children.

But here is one other important fact that is often overlooked by the media in reporting the small amount of progress of voucher students over a few years. Voucher schools have the same special privilege afforded to most charter schools of culling out the worst performing students using their discipline policies. Each year right after the October student count which starts the flow of state money going to vouchers and charters, the real public schools are forced to absorb a wave of rejects from the choice schools. Now that's not because of parental choice, but because the real choices are made by voucher and charter administrators who reject any kids that may be harder to teach or that may pose discipline problems. The real public schools have no such choice. In fact state law now requires that even extremely disruptive students whose dangerous behavior requires them to be removed from school must still be provided with educational services even if teachers have to go to their homes to try to teach them. But even though serving as a dumping ground for voucher and charter rejects, the real public schools still manage to produce better results on state testing.

So while some of our tax dollars continue to go to sub-standard voucher schools, at least the kids who lose the voucher lottery get a better education!

Report to BESE and District Superintendents on Standards and Testing

Please click on this link to view my report to BESE and District Superintendents on Louisiana Standards and Testing.

I believe this report which includes about a year of research on our standards and the associated testing, is a wake-up call to our policy makers. The testing tail is "wagging the dog."

Our students and teachers are trapped in an endless cycle of testing and test prep that is counter to the true goals of a good education.

The PARCC-like tests given last spring have no validity because the results cannot be compared to anything, and the teachers received almost no useful information. Many teachers have no concept of what the scale scores on the PARCC-like tests really mean. I believe that was the intent of the testing consortium.

There is no real standard for students and parents. There is no bar "set higher". There is only a tool for blaming and shaming public school systems.

Possible Massive Fraud in New Orleans RSD Charters

Three recent articles by nola.com education investigative reporter Danielle Dreilinger,  here, here and here, exposes potential massive fraud in the operation of some RSD New Orleans charter schools. See also this most recent story in The Advocate by James Gill.

First Dreilinger reported on obvious violations of the open meetings law when the Algiers Charter Association met without notice of impending action to fire the top executive of the Algiers group from his extremely high paid executive job.

Being a good reporter, Dreilinger smelled something fishy about the secretive actions of the Algiers group and did some excellent investigative work digging up possible massive fraud in the testing programs for Landry-Walker High School. But she also found that State Superintendent John White was notified almost two years ago by a charter school researcher that something was obviously wrong with the dramatic improvements in test scores at Landry-Walker high school. The Dreilinger investigation found that the Algiers Board had been investigating the possible fraud at the school for over a year following the heads up they probably received from John White after he was tipped off to the suspicious test scores by an email from a CREDO charter school researcher.

The investigation by the charter school board of directors, did not target anyone for prosecution. Instead it looks like the once highly paid administrator may be seeking a generous severance pay package. Remember how the Wall Street bankers that just about destroyed the world economy and required taxpayer bailouts of their banks got big bonuses as they were given their walking papers? It looks like charter groups are similarly above the law. Or maybe he is seeking hush money to avoid implicating others.

 The investigation by the charter group used high priced attorneys who could invoke attorney client privileges to keep their findings secret. Questioning of teachers and monitoring of the next round of testing resulted in a a dramatic drop of end-of-course testing results for the 2014-15 school year. The year long investigation found numerous violations of testing policy and critical security measures that you could drive a truck through in cheating on state tests. The closer scrutiny of the investigation  resulted in the school grade dropping from a B to a D-.

The charter group has made it clear that they are not interested in finding wrongdoing that may result in educators going to jail as they did in the Atlanta cheating scandal. They just want to insure that the school operates properly in the future. My question is: If wrongdoing occurred with the knowledge of the administrators, why should these highly paid executives be immune to prosecution? What is John White doing about this?

In addition, Dreilinger uncovered possible fraud at Sci-Tech Academy, the crown jewel of the RSD charter systems. It seems that massive cheating occurred on internal tests that were being used to attract possible grants from foundations that support successful charters. But the administration of this charter network said they found no evidence of cheating on state tests. All very suspicious!

Danielle Dreilinger deserves a major news reporting award for her excellent work. This begs the question: Is cheating common practice for other charter operations in New Orleans? All I know is that I was contacted by another researcher recently who had found similar dramatic testing gains in several RSD schools in the LEAP/iLEAP program also. Right now the policy of the LDOE is to let charter management groups police themselves. What an amazing opportunity for the cover-up of fraud! I wonder if our new BESE is willing to change this outrageous policy?