Newt Gingrich wants the U.S. to return to the moon, but as challenges go he has nothing on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s school reform plans.

Mr. Jindal wants to create America’s largest school voucher program, broadest parental choice system, and toughest teacher accountability regime—all in one legislative session. Any one of those would be a big win, but all three could make the state the first to effectively dismantle a public education monopoly.

In an attempt at praising Jindal’s “reform” efforts, The Wall Street Journal unwittingly reinforced something most rational people already understand: Like Gingrich’s pitch for a colony on the moon, Jindal’s plan for education is irrational, untested, grandiose, and absurd. But at least they got one thing right: While Jindal and company attempt to convince us that they’re merely proposing scholarships, the simple and obvious truth is that they are calling for “America’s largest school voucher program.” Let’s get this out of the way: Jindal’s voucher plan is comically infeasible and impractical. From The Times-Picayune:

Under Jindal’s plan, about 380,000 students would qualify to receive state aid for tuition at a private or religious school, (Senator) Landrieu pointed out.

But even if every private elementary school in the state could immediately grow its enrollment by 10 percent to accommodate an influx of voucher recipients, only about 8,000 seats would be available. Include private high schools and that figure rises to about 11,200.

Jindal, by the way, did not dispute these numbers. He didn’t dispute that his voucher plan cannot and will not work, that there is no possible way he could ever deliver on his promise. Instead, his spokesperson said that Senator Landrieu was “missing the point.” No, no, she’s not. She’s speaking precisely on point: Jindal cannot deliver right now.

Thus far, unfortunately, teacher unions and the superintendents are playing right into Jindal’s hands. The teacher unions are harping on teacher pay and benefits; the superintendents, who stand to gain even more discretionary powers, are distancing themselves as quickly as possible, hoping to appear as apolitical as possible. I wonder, though: Are any of these people aware of the end-game here? Because Jindal’s proposals about performance-based pay and tenure are just window-dressing. On their own, they’re radical, to be sure, but not nearly as radical as Jindal’s end-game. Ultimately, Jindal’s goal, as The Wall Street Journal notes, is not merely to create the country’s “largest voucher program;” it’s about using taxpayer dollars to establish an undemocratic, unprotected parallel education system.

Senator Landrieu points out that we simply don’t have enough private-school openings to accommodate even a fraction of the kids to whom Jindal plans to give vouchers. She’s right, and on its surface, this makes Jindal’s plan foolish. Except vouchers aren’t really the issue either. Surely, Jindal is smart enough to know his numbers simply don’t add up, that there is no possible way he could ever deliver vouchers to even 5% of the kids who qualify. It’s a sham. And it’s meant to be a sham. It’s meant to provide the Governor with the ability to establish a threshold of public dollars per student that Louisianans would be willing to contribute toward the development of a parallel charter and for-profit education system and infrastructure. And he’s aiming at $8,500 per student per year. Again, this is precisely why Mr. Jindal unveiled his program in front of the largest group of business lobbyists in the State of Louisiana; there is a ton of money to be made in privatizing public education.

Mr. Jindal’s proponents will likely point to the charter school model created in New Orleans after the storm. There are many good people doing exceptional things in charter schools and in the Recovery School District, but sorry, it’s absolutely absurd to attribute any marginal successes in New Orleans education to a business model. When charters fail and when charters go bankrupt, which is the case more often than proponents would have us believe, it can be abruptly catastrophic for students and their families. And because of the way most charters are structured, there is little to no accountability when they fail.

I, for one, am tired of Bobby Jindal “experimenting” with Louisiana. Despite the fact that his diploma is from one of the finest public high schools in the country, Baton Rouge Magnet, I don’t believe he is an advocate for public education. For months, my buddy Zack Kopplin, a fellow graduate of Baton Rouge Magnet, pestered the public and the media about the Louisiana Science Education Act (the LSEA). If you need any evidence that Mr. Jindal doesn’t care about the quality of public education, then all you need to do is look at the LSEA, a pernicious and likely unconstitutional piece of legislation that allows public schools to substitute science with religion, a piece of legislation that was brought to you and funded through the generous contributions of the radical religious right– groups like the Discovery Institute and the (in my opinion, shady) Louisiana Family Forum. Mr. Jindal, a Biology major from Brown, likely knows better; he was even criticized by his own college biology professor. But while Mr. Jindal doubled-down on the radical right and signed a bill undermining the integrity of science education in our public schools, Zack did something else: He received endorsements from over 71 Noble Prize laureates calling for a repeal of the law. You know how many Nobel laureates have endorsed Governor Jindal? None. Zero.

When he signed the LSEA, Governor Jindal wasn’t guided by any metrics of academic performance; he wasn’t concerned with preserving the integrity of the institution of public education. Mr. Jindal was merely playing politics. And so it is with his proposed overhaul of education.

The inconvenient truth, ironically, is that public schools in Louisiana have improved during the last few years. Our graduation rates have increased by nearly 6% since 2001; we’re closing the so-called “achievement gap;” test scores are up. There’s no reason to suddenly panic, and certainly, there’s no basis for attempting to completely overhaul the entire education system.

Louisiana, we don’t need to be, once again, turned into Bobby Jindal’s experimental laboratory. We tried that once before, when he was Secretary of the DHH, and it didn’t work out well at all.

Mr. Jindal, despite his impressive academic pedigree, is and has always been manifestly and vehemently opposed to a robust and successful public education system. Our charter schools in New Orleans may be performing better than comparable schools were before the storm, but, really, so what? Who is to say that our public schools wouldn’t have rebounded just as well, had they only been given the same resources, priorities, and treatment as our charters? We strip money from public education, give it to private and quasi-private charters, and then, we wonder about why charters are out-performing public schools. We’re being dangerously naive.

Louisiana is still at the bottom of many public education rankings, and without any doubt, there is a lot of work to be done. But think about this: Every single state that is ranked higher than Louisiana is working with the same toolkit. They’re not giving millions and millions of taxpayer dollars to build a parallel system of education more adept at maximizing private-sector profits (no, this is definitely Bobby Jindal’s “moon shot”); they’re beating Louisiana because they’re investing in themselves. We, on the other hand, are being led by a man who seems all too eager and willing to privatize the most important public institution in the United States of America- the right to an education.

If Bobby Jindal wants to reform public education in Louisiana, then he needs to go back to the drawing board. If he is serious, then he needs to begin talking with educators instead of business lobbyists and radical fundamentalists. If anyone should profit from public education, it should be the people who actually invest their own money, not those who use public dollars for the expressed purpose of dismantling public education.

And if not, Jindal will continue to moon all of us, as he flies toward America’s newest extraterrestrial colony, a slab of rock hurling around the earth, a place that appears in phases and adheres to its own cycles, a land called Gingrich.

From David Dinsmore’s comically ignorant and completely misleading article, which was, evidently, paid for by Gannett (bold mine):

This respect comes despite a very public and somewhat ugly battle with Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy’s administration over funding for Cenla Pride.

Things became so heated and controversial, Jones said, that she caught blame from some people after they perceived Roy’s decision to shut down the Bolton Avenue Community Center for two years as a personal shot against her. Those who worked with her in the neighborhoods, the city and even within the organization began keeping a distance.

“It’s obvious that I can’t make a positive impact in the city of Alexandria now or in the foreseeable future,” said Jones, adding that she had begun planning for her resignation prior to the funding battle.

Dinsmore: FAIL.

The Bolton Avenue Community Center was not “shut down… for two years.” That is an egregious, ridiculous lie. The Bolton Avenue Community Center has never been “shut down.” Portions of the center were temporarily closed FOR RENOVATIONS; that is, the City spent precious money improving the facility. Despite Ms. Jones’s solipsistic revisionism and Mr. Dinsmore’s inexcusably sloppy journalism, Mayor Jacques Roy never “shut down” the facility; instead, he dramatically improved it, and if Mr. Dinsmore had done even a tiny bit of homework, he would have learned of other, more ambitious plans.

I don’t know Bettye Jones personally, but I know, personally, that what she told David Dinsmore of The Town Talk was a complete and total lie. And Mr. Dinsmore should have checked her obfuscating and self-promotional lies before he reported them as fact in the newspaper.

Bettye Jones also told radio talk show host Tony Brown that she was providing $200,000+ worth of services to the City of Alexandria for only $40,000. Prove it, Bettye. Prove it. You can’t.

Tony Brown, a man who is (hilariously) alleged to have 2 MILLION listeners every day, may believe you, but I don’t. Also, to Tony Brown: I doubt I am the only one who thought it was ridiculous that you introduced Ms. Jones as a white woman, like a novelty; it’s as if you were tacitly acknowledging your own racial biases. Some of us prefer to live in the present, and others, like you, prefer to continue fighting the battles of the past.

Regardless, Bettye Jones is and will always be her own worst enemy. The simple and plain truth is: The City decided to defund her salary, because it wasn’t receiving an adequate return on its investment. And this decision wasn’t made by a white man; it was made by an African-American woman.

I wish Bettye Jones the best of luck, but I think David Dinsmore owes the readers of The Town Talk a full-throated retraction. Nothing less. He blatantly misrepresented and misreported the truth.

He can begin with answering this question: Have you, David Dinsmore, ever been inside of the Bolton Avenue Community Center?

I pulled into a choice parking spot directly in front of the entrance to the restaurant, and at that moment, suddenly and unexpectedly, I became awash with anxiety. I put the car in park, took the keys out of the ignition, and opened the door.

“Hey, Lamar, do you want your cell phone?” my roommate Saaid asked. I’d left my phone in the car, in the cupholder between the driver and passenger seats.

In the years that followed that moment, I’ve learned about mystical experiences, astral projection, psychedelia, the collective unconscious, and glossolalia. I even earned a degree in Religious Studies. But there’s no substitution for sober intuition: It’s jarring, discombobulating, paranoiac.

“Yeah, I need my phone,” I said, and then I followed with a matter-of-fact statement I’ll always remember (pardon my French): “Something fucked up is happening to my family.”

Before I could even order dinner, my phone rang. It was my Aunt Jean.

“Where are you?” she asked. “Are you in public? Are you sitting down? Your mother needs to tell you something, but you need to be in the right place.”

“I’m leaving right now,” I told her. I grabbed the keys to my car and bolted out of the restaurant. I was wide-eyed and trembling. Until that moment, I’d never realized that the adjectives “shaken” and “heartache” referred to real physical reactions.

My roommate caught up with me in the parking lot. “You’re our ride,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“I’m sorry. I have to go. I think my father is dead.”

“Give me your keys,” he said. “I’ll drive you back.”

As it turns out, in retracing the timeline of events that night, my father died at the same time I pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot, the same time I suddenly felt a surge of anxiety. And no, it’s not as if it was imminent or expected. My father was only 41 years old.

Still, if there is any moral or magic to this story, it is this: That maybe, just maybe, it is possible for us to forge human connections that transcend our understanding of the physical world, that maybe we can be deeply connected to our loved ones, that maybe synchroncity is real and possible.

And maybe, if we’re all lucky enough, as Etta James sang, “life is like a song.”

In my first post on Governor Jindal’s recently announced proposal for education reforms, I focused on my own experience as a student in Louisiana public schools. While I will always value and appreciate the education I received, I also understand, personally, the real and pressing need for reform. I don’t fault Governor Jindal for seeking fundamental reform; I fault him for completely misdiagnosing the problem and for failing to believe in the promise of a robust, equitable, and successful public education system.

When Jindal announced his sweeping package of proposed reforms, he wasn’t in front of a group of educators and students; the speech wasn’t delivered in a high school gymnasium or a middle school auditorium. It was at the annual meeting of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), which describes itself as “the largest and most effective business lobbying group in Louisiana” (emphasis mine). That’s right: His bold and sweeping vision for education reform wasn’t addressed to public school teachers and students; it was rolled out in front of the largest group of business lobbyists in the State.

Despite the transcendent rhetoric about the economic value of a quality education, the backdrop chosen by Governor Jindal perhaps unwittingly reinforced something many already know: With the right set of policies in place, there is a ton of public money to be made by privatizing education. Some may suggest that this is perfectly acceptable, that it’s about establishing a set of incentives to create “entrepreneurial partnerships” in the free market. And wow, that would sound great, if it were even remotely true.

I wonder what Governor Bobby Jindal thinks about the United States government’s bailout of the automobile industry. Considering his hypocrisy on the stimulus act (opposing it vociferously while criss-crossing the State doling out oversized checks in front of the cameras), I imagine he’d be hard-pressed to provide a direct answer. Because even a man opposed to spending money for volcano monitoring would be hard-pressed to come up with an argument about why the federal bailout of the automobile industry was a failure. Because it wasn’t, and neither, for that matter, was the stimulus, which Jindal milked, more than practically anyone else, for maximum political advantage.

Why do I bring this up in the context of educational reform? Because, for some, when the government loans money to keep private-sector businesses afloat during a time of severe economic calamity, it’s engaging in an insipid form of socialism; it’s undermining the free market. Yet when the government gives money to the private-sector so that it can monetize and capitalize off of public assets and public institutions, it’s somehow capitalism at its core. I’d suggest that you cannot have it both ways. You cannot claim that loaning public money to private companies in peril is socialism, while also holding that giving public money for private companies to undermine and cannibalize public education is capitalism.

That’s what the real fight is about.

Many of Jindal’s announced reforms focus on teacher pay, hiring and firing practices, and tenure. I may disagree with Governor Jindal vehemently on a number of issues, but I have never doubted his political acumen. There’s a good reason he front-loaded his education reform speech with talking points on employment and personnel policies: That’s the fight he wants to have; it’s the one he knows he can win.

For one, on many of these issues, the Governor is actually right: No one questions that we need to reform the ways in which our education system rewards good teachers and gets rid of bad teachers. The question, though, is and has always been: What’s the best and most objective matrix for determining an individual teacher’s success? It can’t simply be how well a teacher’s students performed on a standardized test in any given year. And Governor Jindal wisely acknowledged this, though he didn’t ever explain how, exactly, he planned to evaluate teachers based on “student achievement;” it’s an amorphous and subjective term, and if Jindal were more serious, he would have explained what he meant.

Likely, it’s because he doesn’t actually have a new and innovative plan for evaluating student achievement and teacher performance, aside from giving unelected political appointees (the superintendents) carte blanche authority over hiring and firing while also completely neutering the concept of tenure. I hate to break the news: This is where Jindal wants to take the fight. If the fight is over the way we hire and fire teachers, then the Governor won’t ever have to defend the real meat of his plan: Vouchers.

It’s the business lobbyists versus the teacher unions.

This is a blueprint to go backwards and keep Louisiana at the bottom in education. It’s clear that some of these suggestions come from the national education union which goes to show you that Louisiana union leaders are taking their cues from Washington, D.C., not Louisiana teachers. Simply adding more money is not the answer. We are already wasting nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money on failing schools. The reality is that we have increased K-12 funding over the past four years, but we need to be smarter about how we spend these dollars. We also shouldn’t be watering down our teacher evaluation law. Teacher evaluations must be based on student achievement. It’s common sense to reward good teachers and remove failing teachers who refuse to improve. Union leaders continue to ignore the needs of great teachers across the state and are holding them back from being rewarded. That’s offensive to our teachers.

- Gov. Bobby Jindal

To be sure, Ms. Haynes had some legitimate points. She questioned the wisdom of using the Recovery School District (RSD) as a model to be emulated statewide, pointing out that the RSD is still “at the bottom of test scores.” That’s fair, and it’s worth serious discussion considering the recent appointment of John White as the State Superintendent of Public Education.

But it’s completely lost, because Ms. Haynes then made an almost comically tone-deaf and hyperbolic comment about “white collar” folks paying teachers “like they are slaves.” Governor Jindal didn’t even need to address this; all he did, instead, was to issue a blanket criticism of “union leaders.” He should have added, “Thank you for agreeing to play on my home field and for lobbing that enormous softball right over the center of the plate.”

****

I firmly and steadfastly believe that our teachers deserve higher pay, and without any doubt, there is a direct correlation between the salaries we pay our public educators and the overall quality of our public education. But when 44% of Louisiana schools are receiving D’s and F’s, you’re not going to get anywhere by advancing the implied argument that things would be much better if teachers weren’t “paid like they are slaves.” The problem isn’t merely that Ms. Haynes employed provocative and divisive rhetoric. Slaves, after all, weren’t paid; they were treated as human chattel. Our teachers may be underpaid, but let’s be serious adults here.

Governor Jindal wants to take the fight directly to teacher’s unions, and apparently, they are all too willing to oblige. And again, why does he want to fight these unions? Why did he announce his plans for education in front of the largest group of business lobbyists in the State?

Because his plan isn’t about reforming public education; it’s about bankrolling private education, and hopefully, at a healthy profit for at least a few of the clients of LABI.

Joyce Haynes may not get it, but John Maginnis does:

Tenure may be the most personally acrimonious issue, especially when teachers back home start getting in legislators’ faces. But, judging from editorial reaction, potentially the most explosive point advanced by the governor is a massive statewide expansion of education vouchers, or “opportunity scholarships,” as re-coined by proponents. Whatever they are called, the issue will provoke the most heated debate and, on the scale proposed, could tear apart the coalition of progressive reformers and social conservatives that back Jindal’s overall plan.

He proposes offering tuition vouchers for every child in a school graded C, D or F and in a family with an income under 250 percent of the federal poverty level, which comes to 380,000 of the public school enrollment of 705,000.

In plain English, while Ms. Haynes, ostensibly representing the LAE, suggests that teachers are “paid like slaves,” Jindal is advancing and promoting a plan that, if ever fully implemented, would totally and completely obliterate public education and undermine the value of hundreds of millions of dollars in publicly-owned assets.

There are a few major problems with Jindal’s plan to provide vouchers to more than half of Louisiana school children. It’s completely infeasible. We simply don’t have the infrastructure. Governor Jindal likely understands the sheer deficiency in infrastructure– that is, the actual buildings and campuses that house our schools– would prevent the vast majority of those who could qualify for a voucher to attend a nearby private school from ever being able to use the voucher. There simply aren’t enough private school classrooms to ever accommodate such an influx of students, and the overwhelming majority of private schools impose strict caps of enrollment. Thanks for the offer of a State voucher, but this other kid’s family can give us a cashier’s check.

So, if the new Superintendent’s comments about entrepreneurial partnerships are indicative of anything, it is that Jindal and company ultimately seek to steer public dollars in education to help build and maintain a parallel, for-profit infrastructure. While our innercity schools rot, they can point to construction jobs created in collaboration with the “private sector.”

Governor Jindal is not serious about reforming public education; he’s serious about getting applause from LABI.