Over the past several weeks, Governor John Bel Edwards has made a flurry of appointments to various boards and commissions, including his Advisory Council on the Every Student Succeeds Act, a new committee the Governor established through an executive order in late May. The Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA), of course, is the latest iteration of the Elementary and […] More
Just in time for Christmas, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) released 2015 school letter grades and School Performance Scores (SPS) earlier today. Schools were assigned grades on a curve again this year, based on a temporary policy adopted to ease the transition to the higher demands of the Common Core standards. LDOE calculates elementary […] More
Apparently some folks haven’t gotten the memo, so let me reiterate something: The war over Common Core in Louisiana is over. Yep, kaput. Done. Finito. The ship has sailed. The curtain has fallen. Louisiana’s citizens have spoken through their elected representatives in the legislature, who have rejected every single bill – and there have been […] More
There’s a difference, of course, between ambition and naked ambition. The former is a quality we admire in an individual who is willing to push themselves to the heights that their talents can take them. The latter is much less flattering; it denotes a gracelessness in pursuit of those ends, a willingness to jettison principles […] More
With all of the attention given to New Orleans this summer around the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, you may have missed the good news that’s come out about the performance of students from across Louisiana. The positive results released over the past several months show that the policies advocated by Superintendent John White and […] More
Well, Andrea Gabor is at it again. A few years ago, Andrea Gabor wrote an article for Newsweek that maligned the transformation of New Orleans’ public schools since Hurricane Katrina. At the time, I wrote a response that exposed the “inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and glaring omissions of fact” in her Newsweek piece – issues that made […] More
Bobby Jindal wanted to be a contender. He wanted to be somebody… …specifically, President of the United States. And for a while, at least – back in the days before his disastrous State of the Union response – everyone thought Jindal was the next big thing. However, over the course of his tenure as Governor, […] More
I’ll tell you, it’s pretty depressing being a Louisiana Democrat these days. It’s hard to believe that when I moved to this state just 13 years ago, Democrats occupied six statewide offices, including Governor, as well as both U.S. Senate seats. Since that time, the GOP has proceeded to systematically demolish the Democrats’ once-dominate position […] More
It’s been a tough couple weeks for our friends at the Louisiana Federation of Teachers (LFT). On October 15th, the Louisiana Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Act 1 is constitutional, overturning a lower court’s finding that the law violates the “single object requirement” of the Louisiana Constitution that prohibits the legislature from passing bills with […] More
The website of the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) went down Monday morning after the state Department of Administration (DOA) failed to pay the site’s annual $280 domain fee. By midday, LDOE’s website was back online after DOA officials scrambled to make payment on the past-due bill. While DOA Communications Director Meghan Parrish attributed the […] More
This post was originally published on PE+CO: Louisiana Education Legislation Update While the inimitable Huey P. Long has gone down in history as “The Kingfish,” to his political opponents he was known by another, less flattering name, “The Dictator of Louisiana,” a reference to his unrelenting pursuit of power as governor, and subsequently as a […] More
This post was originally published on PE+CO: Louisiana Education Legislation Update In one of the most shameless acts of political pandering in recent memory, Governor Bobby Jindal released a statement on Monday calling on legislators to withdrawal from the consortium of states developing the Partnership of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test. Just two […] More
Peter Cook