Monthly Archives: August 2012

Coco, Still Cuckoo for Coco Puffs, Crows City Council Conspiracy 1

by • Humor

As faithful readers know, I’ve never been a fan of Steve Coco, the former Rapides Parish Police Juror and semi-professional teleprompter reader. A few years ago, Mr. Coco, a Republican, after retiring as an evening news anchor from the local NBC affiliate, launched a website, cenlanews.com, generously and hilariously calling himself “Central Louisiana’s most qualified, experienced news source.” Since its inception, Mr. Coco’s website has been continuously plagued by the facts and has been largely concerned with his own personal vendettas. It’s never been a news site, and even as a blog, it’s not particularly well-written or clever.

Steve Coco Actually Posed For And Then Published This Photo Of Himself. Seriously.

Ordinarily, it would have been easy enough to ignore, except that in Central Louisiana, Steve Coco, by virtue of his on-camera job with KALB-TV, is widely-known as a personality. And, more importantly, until his recent defeat, Steve Coco was an elected member of the Rapides Parish Police Jury, representing part of the City of Alexandria. And now, Steve Coco is running to become Alexandria’s next at-large member of the City Council.

To be sure, I’ve never considered Mr. Coco a credible journalist, but because he was an elected official who published his very own “news” website, I’ve paid attention. (It’s worth noting that Coco’s first campaign appears to have been funded, almost entirely, by his girlfriend at the time and that he won that election by only two votes).

Mr. Coco’s brief stint on the Police Jury was utterly unremarkable. During his four years, he didn’t introduce a single piece of meaningful legislation and apparently spent quite a bit of time with the late Greg Aymond, a controversial and often incendiary blogger and former member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Mr. Coco also spent a lot of time hammering out missives on his website. Among my personal favorites, he reported that the National Association of County Officials had published an (obviously-doctored) photograph of President Obama smoking a cigarette, writing:

Since blatant ignorance reigns unchecked in Cenla, here’s background information on this photo of Barack Obama (The White House Marlboro Man).

Several people continue to claim the picture is a fake. Evidently they believe it’s impossible that there’s any evidence of Obama having a cigarette in his mouth and that he could be smoking in the White House and aboard Air Force One. This picture was published by NACO, the National Association of Counties, founded in 1935. NACO’s membership totals more than 2-thousand counties, representing over 80% of the nation’s population. NACO headquarters is on Capitol Hill, publishing a biweekly newspaper, County News, that focuses on issues and actions in Washington, D.C. and around the Country.

NACO officials meet regularly with the President at the White House. Maybe that’s where they took the picture.

If you still think the picture’s a fake, prove otherwise.

So, here’s what I did: I contacted the President of NACo, and she wrote me back. She’d never even seen the photo Mr. Coco had published and attributed to her organization until I sent it to her. It’s no secret that President Obama, like John Boehner, was a smoker. The story was that an elected official claimed that the National Association of Counties had verified the authenticity of a doctored photograph of the President of the United States and then distributed it to its members; Mr. Coco, then an elected official, was unwittingly calling into question the integrity and the credibility of a venerable public service organization. And he was absolutely wrong. It was amateurish.

Mr. Coco, as a Police Juror, also fought, at least initially, to ensure that federal disaster relief funds distributed to Rapides Parish in the aftermath of Hurricane Gustav would disproportionately benefit the least-affected areas, and as far as I can gather, his position at the time had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with his disdain for Mayor Jacques Roy, who was fighting to ensure an equitable dispersement of funds. Again, Mr. Coco was absolutely wrong, and again, it was amateurish.

And of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention how Steve Coco once publicly called on me to be fired for having the audacity to truthfully report that he, as a public official, had been receiving gratuitous radio time and advertisements. I suggested that he was an “unpaid employee” of the radio station with which he was associated, and Mr. Coco shot back, challenging me to offer proof. It was easy enough: I simply had to direct Mr. Coco to his own campaign finance disclosure forms.

I’ve called him out in the past, and I’m more than happy to continue calling him out: Mr. Coco is not fit to serve on the Alexandria City Council. He is a self-aggrandizing hack, an insult to anyone who believes in journalistic integrity, and a man who has repeatedly and publicly lied about basic facts. And I know I sound harsh, but here’s why: Yesterday, only a few days after he qualified to run for Alexandria City Council, Steve Coco took to his website and suggested that there were widespread rumors that my friend and former boss, Mayor Jacques Roy, is “distracted by some serious personal problems.“

Pardon my French, but Steve Coco: You are full of shit. I’ve always known you’re full of shit, but this really takes the cake: Floating the rumor that Jacques Roy has “serious personal problems” in order to brandish your own candidacy for City Council. It’s shameful, despicable even.

Unlike Steve Coco, I actually know Jacques. He’s family to me. Even though I’ve been in Dallas for over a year, we still talk at least once a week. I went on vacation with him and his family a couple of months ago, something I’ve done every year for the last five years. You, Mr. Coco, don’t know what you’re talking about, and publicly accusing someone of suffering from “serious personal problems” is a mighty strong accusation. It’s high-time that someone finally disputes the bullshit rumors that you and Greg Aymond have attempted to float throughout the last few years and to call you out for what you really are: Just like Mr. Aymond, you are a divisive, mean-spirited liar, a sophomoric and sloppy writer, and an intellectual lightweight.

And in November, we’ll remember, once again, that Steve Coco is also something else: A loser.

A User’s Guide to Governor Bobby Jindal’s School Voucher Program 13

by • Education

Six months ago, when Governor Bobby Jindal began rolling out his education reform initiative, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial praising Jindal’s ambitious agenda, comparing it, earnestly, with then-Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s vision of an American colony on the moon. The paper called Jindal’s proposals on education reform his “moon shot,” providing me with the perfect opportunity to write a post titled “Bobby Jindal Is Mooning Louisiana.” “Bobby Jindal Is Mooning Louisiana” quickly became the most popular post I’ve ever written, and, to me, it was a clear sign that Governor Jindal’s agenda, while praised by his friends on the right and in the conservative media, was likely to become hugely controversial.

At the time, I was concerned that Governor Jindal’s critics were readily playing right into his hands. While Jindal and his hand-selected Superintendent of Education, John White, were attempting to pass the nation’s largest-ever school voucher program, many of his critics were seemingly more concerned with the Governor’s plans for tenure reform, which allowed Jindal to easily deflect the substantive questions about privatization and focus, instead, on counterattacking teachers unions as more concerned with money than school children. It was, without question, an unfair and offensive depiction, and I have to believe that many of his critics, including the leaders of those teachers unions who were suddenly being defined by the Governor and members of his administration as uncaring and self-interested, were caught off-guard by the Governor questioning their integrity. After all, when Bobby Jindal was on the campaign trail, he paid lip-service to the need to increase teacher salaries, which remain among the lowest in the nation.

But as I wrote back in February and as I continue to believe today, with all due respect to our fine teachers, the real threat that Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan poses to public education has very little to do with his efforts to change the teacher-pay matrix and the ways in which we award tenure; the real threat is that Jindal intends on using taxpayer dollars to create a parallel, unaccountable, privately-owned, profit-motivated system of religious schools. And by divesting tens of millions from the public school system and investing these public dollars into religious schools, Governor Jindal’s program will guarantee the firing of hundreds, if not thousands, of Louisiana teachers. Already, Lincoln Parish has announced the layoffs of thirty public school teachers as a direct result of the voucher program.

Importantly, these religious schools are not constrained by the teacher qualification requirements imposed on public schools; that is, teachers in private schools, who are typically paid less than their public school counterparts, aren’t required to be certified or even knowledgeable in their subject matter. Moreover, these religious schools do not have to adhere to the same core curriculum that Louisiana requires for its public schools.

In ostensibly attempting to establish a program that allegedly would provide parents with the opportunity to use public dollars to remove their child from a struggling or “failing” public school, Governor Bobby Jindal and Superintendent John White have actually facilitated the creation of a separate and unequal system of religious schools, schools that are not held to any real accountability, schools that are not required to employ certified teachers, schools that do not have to adhere to the same curriculum standards. And in so doing, Governor Jindal and Superintendent White are ensuring a substantial disinvestment from the public schools most in need and the elimination of hundreds of jobs. Under this scheme, the failure of public schools becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

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But that is only one part of the story. Policy and ideological objections to school vouchers aren’t new, and they’ve been debated and litigated all over the country, with mixed results. There’s something strikingly unique about Bobby Jindal’s plan. When it was up for debate in the Louisiana legislature, Governor Jindal and his allies ensured that his critics were all but shut out of the debate; they relied on procedural maneuvers to pass the bulk of his plan in the middle of the night. And once passed and signed into law, Governor Jindal and Superintendent White began implementing this plan in a way that could only be described as embarrassingly incompetent.

They didn’t think it was necessary to enforce standards for the schools they qualified for funding. The process became a free-for-all, with fly-by-night schools applying and then being qualified for millions in taxpayer subsidization, without ever being subjected to any scrutiny whatsoever.

When Superintendent White published the list of the schools that had qualified for voucher funding, the story suddenly began to take shape. My friends at The Daily Kingfish were actually the very first to report on the fact that the overwhelming majority of voucher funding was awarded to schools created by or associated with a church, 92% in total. It took the mainstream media over a month to catch up.

And then, a funny thing happened: We started really investigating the schools on the list. The Monroe News-Star broke the story of the New Living Word School, which received more voucher spots than any other school in the state and which relies on DVDs instead of teachers and is housed in a church gymnasium. John White approved increasing New Living Word’s enrollment by 258%, without ever even stepping foot in its campus. A few days ago, we learned that New Living Word, in order to accommodate the massive influx of new students, will be dividing its chapel into four classrooms.

After the story made national headlines, leaked e-mails revealed that Superintendent White had proposed to his colleagues that they create a news story about the process by which schools qualified for vouchers in order to “muddy up the narrative.” In almost any other state, the explicit acknowledgment by the head of a state agency to manufacture a false story to the public would be grounds for termination, but John White kept his job. And, instead of apologizing, he feigned outrage that his private e-mails had been released to the media.

About a week after the New Living Word story broke, The Town Talk reported that another school that Superintendent White had qualified for $400,000 in vouchers was led, in part, by a woman who previously pled guilty to extorting thousands of dollars from the school.  That school, thankfully, has subsequently been disqualified.

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The slow drip of the news about the merits of these voucher schools piqued my interest, and it also piqued the interest of my friend Zack Kopplin, the Baton Rouge native who is currently a sophomore at my alma mater (and his parents’s alma mater), Rice University.  We swapped stories, including this one, which was published on AlterNet on June 18th. According to AlterNet, some of the schools that had qualified for vouchers in Louisiana were using textbooks that advanced, among other things, the idea that the Loch Ness monster was alive and well and that, therefore, its existence disproved the theory of evolution.

Zack, for those of you who don’t know, had previously made national and even international news, as a high school student, for challenging the Louisiana Science Education Act, a pernicious piece of legislation, endorsed by Governor Jindal, that implicitly allows the teaching of new earth creationism in the science classroom. When Zack read about the textbooks that some of these voucher schools were using, he immediately recognized the implications. I sent him a link to John White’s “master list” of approved voucher schools, a list that, only a few days ago, was taken offline, and he spent the next week parsing the list, identifying schools that raised suspicion, and then exhaustively researching each and every one of those schools.

The more he uncovered, the more obvious it became that he was sitting on a much bigger story than AlterNet had initially reported. And for me, it also raised some serious questions: I have no doubt that Zack is a preternaturally smart and savvy guy, but here’s a 19-year-old college sophomore on summer break conducting the due diligence on voucher schools that should have already been done, months beforehand, by the Louisiana Superintendent of Education and his staff. Zack found that at least twenty of the approved schools teach new earth creationism instead of science, but, truthfully, that was only the tip of the iceberg. Many, if not most, of these schools advance a virulently anti-scientific curriculum. And most disturbingly, if a student objects, many of them reserve the right to expel the student on religious grounds, meaning that these schools, literally, will be pocketing taxpayer funding from students against whom they will discriminate on the basis of religion. It’s a foregone conclusion: Under Jindal’s plan, we will be spending public dollars to help prop-up schools that discriminate against students because of their religion.

This, most assuredly, is not the country that Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

Religious discrimination is not the only issue. Schools may also discriminate against students on the basis of sexual orientation. And because voucher schools are not required to accommodate disabled students and students with special needs, many worry that the program will ultimately create a unconstitutional “separate” education system for the disabled.

After Zack published his findings (which were immediately republished here and on The Daily Kingfish), it took around a week for the mainstream media to pay attention, but once they did, they were relentless. And there are no signs of letting up.

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Superintendent John White, however, would, understandably, prefer to change the subject as quickly as humanly possible. He doesn’t want to admit that he and his entire department completely and utterly failed to properly scrutinize the schools they qualified for massive taxpayer subsidization. While arguing that he simply wants to ensure that parents are armed with all of the information needed to provide them with the ability to make a “choice” on their child’s education, Superintendent John White has removed the list of schools that he qualified for vouchers from the Department of Education’s website, and currently, he is refusing to cooperate with the request for records pertaining to his selection process. He’s also been accused of subverting the state’s open meetings laws by improperly participating “walking quorums” with BESE board members.  Again, in almost any other state in the country, this man would have already been fired, but this is Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana; he’s Bobby Jindal’s Superintendent, and this is Bobby Jindal’s “moon shot.”

A few days ago, after the Louisiana Supreme Court refused to grant an injunction against the voucher program, John White quickly declared moral and legal victory, when anyone with a shred of honesty and an ounce of integrity would readily recognize that the court’s refusal had nothing to do with the merits of vouchers and was based, entirely, on John White’s disingenuous affidavit that an injunction would create a $3.4 billion deficit. I wrote about this a couple of days ago, and yesterday, Mike Hasten of Gannett backed me up.

Yesterday, we also learned that Superintendent White is finally acknowledging the need to more thoroughly scrutinize the private schools he approved for voucher funding, telling Mr. Hasten, “Conditions have changed such that the nonpublic approval process now has greater importance.” Nothing about these schools has changed; the only conditions that changed, as far as I can tell, is that John White’s decisions have been repeatedly criticized by the state and national media.

In the last two weeks, not only has this story been the subject of headline articles in every major news publication in the State of Louisiana, it’s also been featured in The Washington Post, Esquire Magazine, The Huffington Post, “Hardball” with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters. In addition, the story was also picked up by prominent education policy scholar Diane Ravitch,  Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, LSU professor Bob Mann, and the website Above the Law, among others.

The coverage has been intense and interesting, and with only a couple of minor corrections, the national coverage has been, for the most part pitch-perfect.

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As awesome as I think it is that Zack’s research on creationist schools and my research on the profiteering prophet (which inspired a brilliant and hilarious editorial by Clancy DuBos of The Gambit and another great report by Lafayette’s The Independent Weekly) have made statewide and national news, it also worries me. Again, if a couple of college students on summer break can easily learn more about the schools that qualified for public subsidization than the department that approved them for funding, then, clearly, our leaders and elected officials are not doing their jobs.

In Louisiana, when people attempt to divert attention or weasel their way out, we call it “crawfishing.” And apparently, Governor Jindal and Superintendent White, just like crawfish, prefer muddied waters.

Thomas Jefferson: A Must-Read on Religious Freedom Reply

by • Education • Tags: , , ,

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

By Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States of America

An Act for establishing religious Freedom.

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,

That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;

That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;

That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;

That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;

And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right

- Thomas Jefferson

 

Superintendent John White’s Bogus Legal Argument 2

by • Education

On Wednesday, the Louisiana Supreme Court, as expected, refused to grant an injunction blocking the implementation of Governor Bobby Jindal’s controversial voucher program, and, perhaps not surprisingly, John White, the Louisiana Superintendent of Education, and the paid consultants at the Louisiana BAEO gloated about the decision, crowing that the courts had “once again” affirmed the righteousness of school vouchers.

This, of course, is not, at all, what happened.

John White, in his capacity as Louisiana Superintendent of Education, testified under oath that if an injunction against the voucher program was granted, then his department would be forced into deficit spending. And, conveniently, there’s a law in Louisiana that prohibits courts from issuing an injunction against the government if the head of the agency says the injunction would result in deficit spending.

The decision was a procedural one.

Justices upheld lower court rulings that determined a judge can’t issue an injunction stalling the voucher program because of a 1969 law that bars injunctions if a state agency chief says that would cause a deficit in the department.

Jindal administration leaders, including White, have said in affidavits that the Department of Education would face a deficit if the laws creating and funding the voucher program were blocked.

Make no mistake: John White’s testimony is patently absurd, but Jindal’s attorneys backed him up, telling the court that an injunction against school vouchers would create a $3.4 BILLION deficit. That’s billion, with a b.

Superintendent John White and Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater made just such a claim, saying that enacting an injunction on the voucher program, for which 8,000 students have already applied, would lead to a $3.4 billion hole in the state’s education budget.

The figure stems from the $3.4 billion Louisiana currently spends on state aid for school operations via the Minimum Foundation Program. Jimmy Faircloth, who represented the state during Tuesday’s hearing, said it was “unavoidable and factually inescapable” that the proposed injunction would lead to the ten-figure deficit. “It’s just indisputable,” he said, according to Baton Rouge newspaper The Advocate.

However, as Brian Blackwell, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said, “That’s just kind of crazy. … There’s no way that not spending money can cause a deficit. When you don’t fund something, you can’t have a deficit. There’s no deficit if you can’t spend.” Blackwell pointed out that the funds have already been sent to the Department of Education and that an injunction would merely prevent the money from being distributed.

Additionally, because the size of the state’s Minimum Foundation Program has grown since 2011, Blackwell notes — according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune — that using last year’s funding formula, which Louisiana would utilize if the state legislature could not agree upon a new one, would leave tens of millions of dollars as surplus for the DoE.

Absent a trial about the facts, the courts have done what they’re tasked to do: Rule on the law. As Superintendent White and Governor Jindal’s attorneys have long realized, the law is relatively clear-cut: If  John White says that an injunction results in deficit spending, then the injunction cannot be granted. Put another way, if one side claims, under oath, that an injunction against the voucher program would create deficit spending and the other side claims, under oath, it would actually result in a surplus, that becomes a question of fact. The court can’t grant the injunction unless there’s been a trial on the facts, and although such a trial is inevitable at this point, it’s likely several months from even beginning.

So while John White claims victory and suggests that Wednesday’s decision validates his position, the truth is that the Louisiana Supreme Court never ruled on the merits or the fact of this case. They’ve merely accepted Superintendent White’s sworn testimony. I hope readers understand the distinctions here, because the positions taken by both Jindal and White are obviously dishonest: There is no conceivable way that an injunction against the voucher program would result in deficit spending. The voucher program, by definition, is concerned with giving away taxpayer dollars, and most assuredly not about generating revenue for the Louisiana Department of Education.

The mere suggestion that an injunction would result in a $3.4 billion deficit should insult and offend even those who support the program, and the statement should be understood for what it truly is: A nakedly political and manifestly false machination, the most damning evidence yet of Superintendent White and Governor Jindal’s willingness to misrepresent the facts and exploit the law in order to ensure their own short-term political victory. No rational person could possibly believe that an injunction against a brand-new school voucher program would result in deficit spending, let alone a $3.4 billion deficit.

Superintendent White and Governor Jindal both know, full-well, that if an injunction had been granted, the Louisiana Department of Education’s budget would merely be held to the same strictures and criteria as it was last year; that is, it wouldn’t change at all. This isn’t a matter of fact; it’s a matter of law and process.

Either way, in a few months from now, when these issues of fact are finally in front of the courts, remember that the only reason the Louisiana Supreme Court refused to order an injunction is because John White said it would have caused a deficit in his department. And when the facts finally are revealed, remember that John White once praised the court for validating his “message.” Remember, that for the last couple of months, it’s been easier and much more convenient for Superintendent White to duck behind the political rhetoric of “parental choice” than face the reality of his own massive administrative and oversight failures.

Jindal’s Voucher Program Does Not Provide Real Parental Choice: Part One Reply

by • Education

During the last few weeks, as Governor Bobby Jindal crisscrossed the country on a failed campaign to become the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, back in Louisiana, critics of his ambitious, expansive school voucher program have finally exposed the program for what it is: A hastily-constructed and likely unconstitutional scheme to provide millions in taxpayer dollars every year to the radical religious right, new earth creationists, and at least one self-proclaimed prophet.

Today, we learned that Penny Destugue, the President of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), announced that she would be asking her board to delay implementation of the program for at least six of the pre-qualified schools until the State more adequately and thoroughly vets schools approved for vouchers. Apparently, unlike Governor Jindal, BESE President Destugue has bothered to read the news about the voucher program. She’s read the stories about the program qualifying a school in Ruston that relies on DVD instruction instead of teachers (a school that, by the way, was approved for more voucher spots than any other in Louisiana). She’s read about the millions of dollars the program will spend on schools that teach new earth creationism instead of science. By now, President Destugue has probably heard of the school in New Orleans that is operated by a man who thinks he is a prophet and an apostle, and hopefully, she’s also heard of the schools that blatantly discriminate against students and teachers on the basis of religion and sexual orientation.

And after learning all of this, President Destugue is doing what any reasonable person would do in her position: She’s raising a red flag.

In my previous post, I wrote about Governor Jindal and Superintendent John White’s failure to properly deliberate on the schools they qualified for voucher funding and why that could spell trouble. Superintendent White is now attempting to withhold public records documenting the process by which he and his staff used to evaluate schools; Mr. White, disingenuously asserting a “deliberative process” exemption, says he will eventually release these records, but only after students have already enrolled in these schools. It’s an insulting position. On the one hand, Superintendent White argues that “parental choice” is his paramount concern, and at the same time, he is completely unwilling to provide parents with the same information upon which he relied in qualifying schools for vouchers. If Superintendent White truly cares about “parental choice,” then he’d be more than happy to give parents every ounce of information he could possibly provide them.

But that’s not the only problem with Superintendent White and Governor Jindal’s position on “parental choice.”

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Governor Jindal doesn’t have much patience for lawyers. When problems arise, Governor Jindal is more interested in taking swift, decisive action than hearing from attorneys about the nuances and potential legal ambiguities of his decisions. Jindal, remember, wrote a memoir, Leadership in Crisis, about this very thing, his instinct to act first and ask questions later. But as the voucher debacle proves, there’s a pitfall to such bravado. While some may admire Jindal for “leading from his gut,” to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, more often than not, this style of leadership, leadership that values impulsivity for the sake of political expendiency instead of leadership that values policies that contain a deliberative process to ensure fairness, fails. It’s laziness and a dereliction of duty.

In Governor Jindal’s case, the actual goal is and has always been empowering and enriching his base on the religious right, but the pitch is “giving parents the choice to pull their children away from failing schools.” And fortunately for him, he’s been enabled by an equally impulsive Superintendent of Education and a whole host of astroturf corporate lobbyists who are paid to pose as grassroots activists. Among African-Americans, Jindal has been helped by a DC-based, corporately-funded non-profit group, the Black Alliance for Educational Options (the BAEO), which suddenly appeared from thin-air in Louisiana in order to sell Jindal’s voucher plan to inner-city, majority African-American neighborhoods by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing, outreach, and organization.

They were all well-prepared, at first, to fight back against their critics: sweeping through the initiative in the legislature during the middle of the night, shutting out protesting teachers and critics from the deliberations, and shrewdly framing the debate about unions instead of the real issue, vouchers.

Several months ago, I wrote about how I thought the teachers unions in Louisiana were foolishly off-message with their responses to Jindal’s education reform, but it’s also true that Governor Jindal smartly kept these unions off-message. In rushing through the biggest privatization scheme for education in our nation’s history, Governor Jindal was able to “move the target” by insisting that his critics were not concerned with vouchers; they were fighting him, he implied, because he wanted to reform teacher tenure. He made his critics look like self-interested bureaucrats who cared more about collecting a paycheck than the future of our children. In so doing, he caught his critics off-balance, at once attempting to suggest that they were genuinely motivated by their care and hope for public education while, at the same time, also defending their jobs, their benefits, and their salaries. While his critics pivoted to respond to accusations and implications about their own integrity, Governor Jindal and the legislature easily breezed through the centerpiece of his agenda, a massive voucher system.

Governor Jindal and others had brilliantly scripted how they were going to pass “education reform,” but they hadn’t given a minute’s notice to how they were going to actually implement these reforms. Jindal rolled out his “victory” on education reform as he campaigned across the country for Mitt Romney, and in exchange, Mitt Romney put Jindal on his Vice Presidential short-list and showered praise on him as an exemplar and innovator of best practices in education.

For Jindal and company, the problem is, at the time, no one thought to ask, “How can we ensure we implement this constitutionally?” They were only concerned with: “How can we make sure this law reads like it’s constitutional?” And yes, there’s a big, big difference.

In the last few months, as Jindal has spent the bulk of his time campaigning for yet another position, his hand-selected Superintendent and his team have failed abysmally in ensuring the proper implementation of these education reforms. They so desperately wanted to demonstrate the public demand for vouchers that they willingly and whole-heartedly qualified funding for every single school that applied; the only schools (two or three) that have been excluded from the program were retroactively rejected.

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No doubt, Jindal and his lawyers will point to the 2002 United States Supreme Court case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris as the basis for establishing the constitutionality of the vouchers for private religious schools. At first blush, the program in Louisiana and the program challenged in Zelman may seem similar. In Zelman, the Court, in a split decision, affirmed the constitutionality of a voucher program set up in Cleveland, Ohio, a program that almost exclusively benefitted private religious schools. At the time, President Bush praised the decision as a major victory for school vouchers. But there are some key differences between Zelman and the program in Louisiana, and they’re important differences.

The issue is not whether Louisiana’s voucher program has a “valid secular purpose,” which is the first part of the Court’s five-part test.  It’s easy enough for Governor Jindal to argue that the law was created to address the problem students in “failing” public schools, and that, in and of itself, would likely satisfy that requirement.

Governor Jindal’s program may meet the criteria for the first part of the five part test; unfortunately, for him, it probably won’t pass the other four parts.

Stay tuned.

Jindal and White Award Hundreds of Thousands to Schools That Discriminate Based on Religion and Sexual Orientation 5

by • Education • Tags: , , , , ,

A couple of days ago, Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White unceremoniously announced that he intends to withhold any and all public records concerning his Department’s deliberation about the selection of voucher schools until, at least, a few weeks after the beginning of the school year. After first hearing of White’s decision to withhold records, I posited a theory, which has been echoed and independently asserted by several others: There was no “deliberative process,” and, once revealed, Superintendent White’s records will likely demonstrate that he and his staff completely failed to properly vet and scrutinize the schools they approved for taxpayer-funded vouchers.

Thanks to Zack Kopplin, we know that at least nineteen of the 119 approved schools teach new earth creationism, and thanks to Jason Berry of the American Zombie, we now also know that another school approved by Jindal and White is owned and operated by a self-proclaimed “prophet.” Several of the approved schools are in dire financial shape; one of them is still led, in part, by a woman who pled guilty to defrauding her own school.

And also disturbingly, at least two of the schools approved for taxpayer-funded vouchers reserve the right to expel a student for their religious beliefs or for their sexual orientation. Northlake Christian Elementary and High School, both in Covington were approved for 46 voucher positions, which will provide them with nearly $400,000 a year in subsidized funding. Here’s their policy on discrimination:

Northlake Christian School is non-discriminatory in its admission policies and does not offer preferential admission on the basis of race, color, gender, national origin, or ancestry.
NCS reserves the right to refuse admission or hire on the basis of religious belief and/or lifestyle choices contrary to the school Mission Statement or Biblical standards. Families, for example, who deny the deity of Christ will be denied admission as the NCS Mission Statement asserts that the mission of the school is “to assist the Christian community” and Article #3 of the school Doctrinal Statement affirms the deity of Christ. In the same way, families or students who choose to pursue or promote a homosexual lifestyle will be refused admission or hire because of the Biblical standards set forth in Lev. 18:20; Lev. 20:13; 1 Kings 14:24; Romans 1:24, 26-27; and 1 Cor. 6:9.

They’re “non-discriminatory,” except when it means they’re discriminatory.

I anticipate that some folks may read this and argue that it’s perfectly legitimate for a religious institution to set its own admissions criteria and hiring standards. I agree: It is.  That’s not the issue. Thankfully, there are federal and state laws against using taxpayer funds to discriminate on the basis of religion and sexual orientation (though, to be sure, sexual orientation is less protected).

Northlake Christian audaciously puts its policy in print, but I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination to assume that several other schools that Governor Jindal and Superintendent White endorsed for voucher funding enforce the same exact policy. And it shouldn’t be too surprising, either; after all, 99% of the schools approved for funding are religious schools.

But it’s important: Non-discriminatory admissions policies are absolutely critical to the Supreme Court’s analysis of the constitutionality of school vouchers. (More later). In blatantly advertising its own bigoted admissions and employment policies, Northlake Christian demonstrates a few things: (1) Superintendent White, once again, failed to properly vet the schools he and his staff approved for funding;  (2) More than likely, this is because Superintendent White didn’t really vet any school; (3) Superintendent White and Governor Jindal’s failures are evidence of their dereliction of duty and complete lack of administrative oversight, oversight that may have otherwise ensured constitutional and legal compliance; (4) For this and many other reasons, Jindal’s voucher plan is facially unconstitutional.

NEWSFLASH: Jindal’s Exorcism Story Is Fictional, “Goofy.” Reply

by • Social Activism • Tags: , ,

Given the recent deluge of coverage in both the Louisiana and the national media over the essay Governor Bobby Jindal wrote in 1994, in which he details his participation in an unsanctioned (and yes, for true believers, that should make a difference) exorcism while a student at Brown University, I’m somewhat surprised to be the first person to really point this out: Bobby Jindal’s story is a complete and total work of fiction. Don’t believe me? Well, here’s how Jindal himself recently responded to questions about the essay, which was titled “Beating a Demon: Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare” (bold mine):

Jindal spokesperson Shannon Bates issued a statement from Jindal Tuesday: “I wrote a lot of stuff in high school and college. While other kids were out partying, I was reading and writing. I’m sure some of that stuff is goofy. I just hope they don’t review my grade school work.”

“Goofy” is a light-hearted euphemism for a few other adjectives, like “fictional,” “comical,” “made-up,” “satirical,” “exaggerated,” and “factually-impaired.” And when you consider that Governor Jindal, who was then a young, earnest, and recent convert to Catholicism, provided all of his characters in his essay, with the exception of himself, pseudonyms, it becomes  much more suspicious.

Although this once-in-a-lifetime and extremely rare event occurred on the Brown University campus, allegedly in front of at least a half of a dozen participants and somehow without the involvement of an ordained priest, during the eighteen years since, no one– not a single participant, including the subject of Jindal’s essay, a woman named “Susan”– has ever stepped forward to confirm or corroborate Jindal’s  riveting personal essay. Having read and reread this essay for years now, I believe it is safe and  most responsible and respectful to evaluate and criticize Governor Jindal’s essay as a piece of solipsistic and poorly-actualized  fiction: A supernatural account riddled with contradictions, fake names, and thinly-veiled sexual tension  between  Susan and Jindal, and a story that stars Jindal as the unwilling hero. Unlike Columnist John Maginnis, who suggests Jindal’s exorcism essay revealed his “heart,” I strongly  believe the essay demonstrated the ways he confronted his own fears, naïveté, and insecurities through physical and emotional  detachment; “heart” would be the last word I’d  use.

And there is likely a very simple explanation for all of this: The self-proclaimed “goofy” story is almost assuredly a work of complete fiction by a small, young, but fiercely smart convert- indeed, a kid whose native religion thoroughly embraced the notion of demonic possessions. Hinduism, it is worth noting, is the religion of his  family and a religion to which Mr. Jindal had followed until his freshman year at Brown, and both religions, Hinduism and Catholicism, accept exorcisms as a valid and powerful religious ritual.

Mr. Jindal may have been comfortable to craft a convincing-enough story that he  helped exorcize and subsequently cure his friend of cancer. But now, two decades later, he seems willing to acknowledge the story  he wrote was, essentially, a work of fiction or, to use his euphemism,”goofy.”

But, for years, Louisiana Democrats sheepishly criticized him AROUND but not ON this issue, perhaps worried it would insult our Catholic brothers and sisters. You dare point out that story, which has followed and plagued Jindal for his entire career, is a lie or merely one of those goofy stories all college kids exchange, and you risk being called discriminatory. (Or something like that).

So, I’ll try to help out here: Bobby Jindal’s “personal essay” is actually a fictional short story. The events he described never happened. He is the only person in the story with a real name; everyone else is fake. The exorcism he describes actually violates the tenets of Catholicism and, at times, borders on felony false imprisonment.  It’s not an exorcism story; it’s a story about a freaking panic attack. Kudos to the 23-year-old Jindal for getting your short story published, but it’s now time to be honest and stop cowardly stooping behind religion to whitewash your utter and complete misrepresentations. I wrote several dumb stories in college, one about a modern-day virgin birth. The difference is: I ensured people knew it was a work of fiction.

SHOCKING: Bobby Jindal’s Vouchers Will Provide Over $700,000 Per Year To School Led by “Prophet, Apostle.” 50

by • Education, National News, Social Activism, Today's News • Tags: , , ,

Meet Leonard Lucas, a former, one-term Louisiana State Representative and erstwhile candidate for New Orleans City Council. When Mr. Lucas sent out a press advisory announcing his candidacy for City Council, here’s how The Times-Picayune reported the news:

Lucas, the founding pastor of Light City Church and a one-term state representative, sent out a statement riddled with grammatical errors saying he will formally announce his candidacy today  at 1 p.m. at the shuttered Schwegmann’s Shopping Center on Bullard Road.

And when Leonard Lucas isn’t butchering the English language, he’s busy trying to convince people that he’s an “apostle” and a “prophet.“

Mr. Lucas is also the proud owner and registered agent of at least three dozen different companies, the overwhelming majority of which are non-profits (or, to borrow a term from my friend Dambala, “con-profits”) listed as “Not in Good Standing” by the Louisiana Secretary of State.

Dambala excavated the bones a few months ago. Suffice it to say, Leonard Lucas is a shady, almost comically ridiculous figure. He’s named as a registered agent for numerous non-profits, yet none of those companies disclosed their 990 returns.

And all of this apparently qualifies Mr. Lucas for nearly $700,000 a year in public voucher funding for his school. Mr. Lucas’s school requested a total of 163 voucher spots at $4,555 per student. To be clear, the Jindal Administration, in the first year, has already preliminarily granted eighty spots, at a cost of $364,000. Quoting from his church’s “School of Prophets” website, which, as a reader pointed out to me, should not be confused with his Light City Academy webpage (even though both are hosted on the same domain and both appear to be organized under the same 501c3, Light City Church):

The Light City Church School of the Prophets is a training institute for those who sense the flow and pull of the prophetic upon their lives. The mandate of the school of the Prophets just as it was in the Old Testament days is to train men and women effectively in the prophetic. It is a time of proper training, mentoring, and developing of the spirit in the prophetic realm. It is a time that you are taught how to hear from God, how to speak the mind of God, and how to nurture the gift of prophecy.Those individuals that accept the challenge to attend must have an understanding that they are yielding themselves to the tutelage of Apostle Leonard Lucas Jr., who walks in the fullness of his calling and wears the mantle of an Apostle and Prophet. If you believe this is the calling upon your life, we invite you to join us for dynamic teaching and thought provoking sessions. Classes are held every Friday at 7:00pm at Light City Church, located at 6117 St. Claude Ave. Please call 504-301-4593 for more information.

And quoting from the school’s webpage (which, again, is built into the church’s website) (bold mine):

Light City Christian Academy is a small school located in inner-city New Orleans. Students may begin as early as age five in kindergarten and continue their studies until the completion of High School. We have a·90% success rate of our graduates continuing higher studies in Universities across the state. We are a state approved private school.

The Academy is the realization of the vision of Leonard and Varnise Lucas. At the inception of the Academy, their goal was and continues to be, “to educate children according to the highest academic standards possible, as well as, prepare them to become responsible, courageous leaders.”Our motto is, “Raising A Generation of Leaders.”

Apparently, upcoming events at Light City Christian Academy include catechism classes and “School of the Prophets” training. Education.com describes Light City Christian Academy as follows (bold mine):

Light City Christian Academy is located in New Orleans, LA. It is a private school that serves 53 students in grades K-12. Light City Christian Academy is coed (school has male and female students) and is Christian (no specific denomination) in orientation.

Governor Jindal and Superintendent White have, effectively, provided Light City Christian with the taxpayer funding necessary to nearly triple its enrollment, and that’s just in Year One.  If all goes according to plan, Light City Christian Academy will expand its enrollment much more dramatically, from only fifty-three students to well over 200, an expansion that will be paid for and brought to you, almost entirely, by taxpayer funding.

Let’s also put this into context: Fifty-three students in grades K-12 means an average of four students per grade, which should raise questions about the legitimacy and veracity of Light City Christian Academy’s claim of a “90% success rate of graduates continuing higher studies in Universities across the state.” What does this actually mean? 90% of its dozen or so graduates have taken at least one college course in Louisiana?

I don’t know Mr. Lucas personally, but I know this: He is not an Apostle. He is not a Prophet. And he does not deserve or merit taxpayer dollars. If anything, he deserves a thorough audit.

But in Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana, with the full support of Superintendent John White, Apostle/Prophet Lucas is the future of education.

Lord help us.