THE VAUNTED VOUCHERS, OR IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING?

As Gov. Bobby Jindal tries again to fund his controversial school voucher program, new test scores indicate that many of the current students educated with public money in private schools are not thriving. Or at least they aren't yet.

Released Wednesday, LEAP scores for third- through eighth-graders show only 40 percent of voucher students scored at or above grade level this past spring. The state average for all students was 69 percent.
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[Superintendent John] White said the 2013 scores for voucher students were low because of the large influx of students from failing schools.

That's right, Superintendent White, blame the public schools for the less than stellar results of the brilliant plan by you and Governor Jindal to improve education in Louisiana by privatization.  I'm not at all surprised at the results.  At least some of the voucher schools teach junk science and junk history.  What do you expect?  Roman Catholic schools do a creditable job of educating children, but it appears that a good many of the new "academies" that sprang into existence when vouchers became available to private schools are not the solution to poor performance by educational institutions in Louisiana.

Public schools have been struggling from cuts in funding from the state since Jindal took office in his first term, and, were it not for the Louisiana Supreme Court ruling that paying for vouchers from public school funds was unconstitutional, the schools would have suffered further as more and more voucher money was siphoned away from their budgets.  Keep in mind that private schools can weed out troublesome students and students with challenges, but public schools must accept all who apply.
Why not focus on improving public schools?

"Anytime you start something new, it's going to take some time to grow," White said. "Nearly two thirds of the kids taking tests in those schools had only been there six months."

And he pointed out that the state did take seven schools off the voucher list. "After a period of time we cannot tolerate failure," he said.

Come now, Mr White, no more excuses for the poor results in the private school voucher program that you and Governor Jindal esteem so highly; take responsibility for the consequences of your grand plan.  If the two had their way, the end result would be the gradual destruction of public school systems in the state, and what would replace them?  More "academies"?

According to the article, White did not actually take seven schools off the voucher list; he merely stopped them from accepting new voucher students, so, in my book, he is still tolerating failure.

Oh, and lets not forget the earlier glitch in the effort by Jindal and White to provide quality online education by private companies to the students of Louisiana. 

When will Jindal and White have gone far enough down the road of poor results to give them a grade of  F in educational reform?   

BLOGGER REVEALS BOBBY JINDAL'S "FIXES" FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION IN LOUISIANA

Blogger, Lamar White, has done brilliant reporting, yes, real reporting, on Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and his gradual destruction of public education in Louisiana.  To all you professional journalists who mock the efforts of bloggers, and not all paid journalists do, my advice would be to learn from the likes of Lamar and other fine bloggers.  Lamar explores the results of the efforts of the out-of-towners whom Jindal has brought in and paid high salaries to "fix" public education in Louisiana.  I don't mean to imply that our education system did not and does not need fixing, but Jindal's failing gurus are most emphatically not doing the job of improving public education in Louisiana.

John White and his team at the Department of Education, in an effort to demonstrate how the public school system is failing Louisiana school children, are diverting millions in funding every year from public schools in order to enrich some of the worst schools in the United States– religious zealots posing as educators, fly-by-night operators who don’t even have the necessary infrastructure, and bigoted and religiously intolerant “church schools” that specialize in utilizing thoroughly debunked textbooks and materials to stifle dissent, schools that seek to enrich themselves with taxpayer dollars while reserving their right to expel any student on the basis of their perceived sexual orientation or religion.  

There you have it - the fix for public education by the well-paid out-of-towners, who are no more than flim-flam artists paid generous salaries by our flim-flam artist governor.  I am no xenophobe, but please, Governor Jindal, if you're going to bring in people from other states and pay them high salaries, even as you lay off thousands of state employees and raise the unemployment figures here in Louisiana, at the very least, hire people who are knowledgeable and competent in their jobs, and not the likes of John White and his cohorts.  

GET RID OF NON-SCIENCE IN LOUISIANA SCIENCE CLASSES

Support for the effort to repeal Louisiana's anti-evolution law is mounting. The American Institute for Biological Sciences, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society for Cell Biology, the Louisiana Association of Biology Educators, the Louisiana Science Teachers Association, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the Society for the Study of Evolution together with the Society of Systematic Biologists and the American Society of Naturalists have all endorsed Louisiana's Senate Bill 70, which if enacted would repeal Louisiana Revised Statutes 17.285.1, which implemented the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008. All of these statements are posted at the Louisiana Coalition for Science's website.

That should be enough to get the attention of the legislators who passed the stupid bill, but who can tell?

A real hero in the fight for repeal of the bill is Zack Kopplin, a high school student from Baton Rouge. His website is Repeal Creationism.

The Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008 should be renamed to the Louisiana Non-Science Education Act. The law disgraces and embarrasses all but the ignorant amongst us.

The text of the act may be found here.

D. This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.

And the above statement from the text is nothing more than a load of BS.