Yesterday, Federal District Judge Ivan Lemelle ordered
a halt to implementation of the state’s new voucher and teacher hiring laws in
Tangipahoa Parish, saying those laws conflict with court orders in the parish’s
decades-old desegregation case. Lemelle oversees the consent decree over that
case, and declared that, under one law, students using the program to move out
of public schools, in one of the worst performing districts in the state, to
private schools threatened funding the previous court orders requiring the
district to build new schools, to improve existing facilities and to maintain
magnet programs. He also said in regards to the other that it interfered with court-ordered
procedures for the recruitment and retention of black teachers and
administrators.
Yet any rationale behind such reasoning borders on condoning
policy-maker irresponsibility, if not signaling racist assumptions. Concerning
the funding issue, it assumes that immediate harm has come from 50 students
taking advantage of the program, which, according to the plaintiff’s rendering,
comes to a cost of the $69,393 local contribution to the Minimum Foundation
Program. This is despite the fact that overall savings to state taxpayers is $124,368.
And the Tangipahoa Parish School District’s entire budget? For 2009-10, it was over $187 million, meaning the “lost” funding represents less than four one-hundredths of one percent of the entire budget – probably less than the school members and district administrators spend on travel in a year. So there is no immediate harm. Yet Lemelle decreed there was because there might be in the future, if program participation expanded past some undefined number known only to him.
But to make this leap of faith in argumentation disregards entirely any
fiscal responsibility of the Tangipahoa Parish School Board. As reported in an excellent
piece by the Pelican Post, in recent years the district has a history of
making questionable spending choices that have had the effect of enriching
special interests more than improving educational quality. If in any way local
funding shifting out of the district threatened compliance, ample evidence
exists that different spending choices would not just compensate, but improve
the quality of education in the district. The logic here is like somebody
shooting themselves in the foot with bullets provided by the government, then
complaining government isn’t giving them enough bullets to continue the self-injurious
behavior.
Unfortunately, Lemelle has acted as a serial enabler of this. Only
recently he
forced a tax rejected by 87 percent of voters down the throats of property owners
on the basis that he deemed it necessary for that funding to be available to
the district in order to comply with the 47 year-old order. Again, no thought
was given as to how the district could alter its approach to spend in a way
designed to be more helpful to quality.
As pointed out by the state, the district actually landed around $2
million more in state MFP contributions, way more than offsetting any reduced
revenues from the new program. District officials said state-imposed costs had
gone up even more. But, again, this is a red herring: those costs did not come
from the Department of Education but were imposed by other state entities and
largely are related to past choices made by the district. In short, absolutely
no evidence was presented by the plaintiffs of how the removal of less than
$70,000 from its own resources would negate its ability to remediate the
effects of past discrimination.
Yet if this train of thought behind the ruling seems constipated, that
offered to explain how the new teacher evaluation program negatively impacts
the existing court dictate descends into reprehensible racial overtones. The gist
of this argument is the system, creating more objectivity in evaluating
performance and magnifying rewards and penalties to induce improved teacher
performance, somehow that this will discriminate against employment of blacks
in the district.
In essence, Lemelle buys the argument that to judge teacher performance
on this basis, implying that improved rigor in assessment interferes with
providing a race-neutral employment environment, is racist policy because it
disproportionately harms blacks – despite no such evidence that racial
discrimination is occurring in personnel decisions in the district or that the
remedies in place that take race into account presumably subverted by increased
assessment rigor are the only such remedies to counter alleged discrimination.
Nor has it been demonstrated that the new standards are designed to act in a racially
discriminatory way, leaving the only supporting conclusion behind the argument
that the sole inequality produced will be in terms of outcomes, i.e. black
teachers disproportionately will be evaluated more poorly than others under
this system that could reduce their representation in the workforce, and not because
of any identifiable condition or practice that is by its nature is built upon
racial discrimination.
There’s a word that describes the attitudes shown by the Board and Lemelle
in this reasoning that ineluctably concludes that blacks cannot teach as well
as whites and therefore such an evaluation regime cannot apply to them:
bigotry. And the ruling therefore asks that inferior teaching be tolerated as a
gift on the altar of political correctness.
1 comment:
You'd think an anachronistic southern conservative with a track record of the most offensive remarks on race would have the decency to spare us his rant on Brown v. Board of Education. The real story here is why aren't Louisiana schools desegregated?! That, Jeff, is the story. A second story is why are bigots like Jeff still publicly resisting efforts to desegregate? Your state's school system is an embarassment to the whole nation. And here you are still whining about integration. Of course, now that you can't attack it openly and honestly, you argue that it is your position that is the pro-integration position. Jeff, nobody believes this crap. We can see right through losers like you.
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