Legislators, Educators Clash on Solutions

MAY 18, 2009 POLITICS / JOHN MAGINNIS


Preparing for the legislative session, state Education Superintendent Paul Pastorek concluded that the biggest problem facing public schools was parish school boards. Its members served too long, were paid too much and meddled in day-to-day matters that should be left to parish superintendents.

To change all that, he got behind a package of legislative bills to impose term limits on school board members, to restrict their pay to $50 per meeting and to prohibit them from trying to influence administrators' hiring and firing decisions.

A couple of North Louisiana legislators had a different view of the most pressing problem with education, the same that has plagued Louisiana for decades: that nearly 40 percent of high schoolers drop out or fail to graduate within four years.

Rep. Jim Fannin, D-Jonesboro, and Sen. Bob Kostelka, R-Monroe, came up with a not-so-new solution, an alternative curriculum track that would focus more on vocational training instead of college preparatory courses and thus would encourage struggling students to stay in school.

But the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education at first opposed the career track plan because it relaxed promotion requirements and watered down course work so as to not meaningfully prepare students for work or life.

Supporters of both approaches, one to crack down on school boards and the other to ease up on potential dropouts, set off to the Capitol to make their cases.

There, not so surprisingly, the Pastorek plan quickly ran into trouble. The term-limits bill was squashed in committee and the pay-cut proposal was deemed dead on arrival. The so-called micromanagement bill has had trouble getting a full hearing and faces stout opposition from school boards.

Meanwhile, identical House and Senate anti-dropout bills have struck a chord with lawmakers and are breezing through both bodies. They even gained the qualified support of BESE and Pastorek by requiring four years of both English and math.

But the big sticking point remains that the bills lower the LEAP test threshold for eighth graders to advance to the ninth grade and to enter the career diploma track. Instead of meeting the current promotion requirement of scoring "basic" in either English or math and "approaching basic" on the other, career track students would only have to achieve "approaching basic" on either. That means, as ninth graders, they could almost read or almost do math.

BESE members fear, rightly so, that the relaxed eighth-grade standard would wreck the hard-won accountability system by taking pressure off of students, teachers and parents after the fourth-grade LEAP test. In effect, remediation of many struggling students would end and the informal career-tracking of them would begin in the fifth grade. That's way too early to give up on the prospects of kids going to college.

If an acceptable compromise can be reached on standards for promotion, most BESE members could support the legislators' plan for reducing dropouts. Especially since it would not be that different from anti-dropout policies that the state has in place today.

There is a law on the books, largely ignored, requiring local school districts to develop a five-year curriculum plan, whether career-based or college prep, for every student.

The state also has developed a highly successful dropout prevention program called Jobs for America's Graduates, which is heavy on remediation and which partners with businesses to give students work experience while completing high school. JAG has a 90 percent graduation rate, but only 13 of 70 school districts offer it throughout the high school grades.

The state can develop anti-dropout and career option programs and make some funds available, but it is up to local school boards to make them happen.

"If every district were doing what they should be doing for the last ten years, we wouldn't be here," says BESE member Penny Dastugue. Even the Kostelka-Fannin bills allow school boards to opt out of the career diploma plan.

If school boards don't put the effort and resources into dropout intervention, there is not a lot BESE and the Legislature can do. So perhaps instead of the Legislature setting education policy, it should let BESE do that, while--coming full circle--it should also insist that local school boards do their jobs and not meddle with those of their superintendents.