STATEMENT FROM SUPERINTENDENT JOHN WHITE REGARDING LOUISIANA SUPREME COURT RULING May 07, 2013 BATON ROUGE, La. – State Superintendent of Education John White issued a statement today concerning the Louisiana Supreme Court ruling on Act 2: “On the most important aspect of the law, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of families. The Scholarship Program […]
May 6, 2013
If you are a journalist. . . beware trying to cover this story. This may be a story only a blogger can handle because of all the high profile political players involved. Just asking questions about this subject is liable to get you fired as one reporter unfortunately found out. Some of my earlier readers of […]
May 4, 2013
You need to read this post by Mike Deshotels. One of the reasons John White is handing student data over to private, unaccountable vendors is to make it easy for them to enroll you kids in terrible virtual courses, taught by uncertified teachers, on the state’s/your dime. Not only are these often classes taught by […]
April 29, 2013
John White and Bobby Jindal have mixed two smart sounding messages in a way designed to punish people for being poor. It sounds good when you say, “poverty is not an excuse for poor performance.” It sounds good when “we refuse to allow poverty to be an excuse for poor performance.” Who could disagree with […]
January 11, 2013
An open response by Herb Bassett (one of the researchers who has recently produced a paper the inflation of Louisiana’s SPS scores as well as LDOE’s published intent to radically inflate next year’s scores) to Superintendent John White’s reply to Deborah Tonguis’s question about the inflated 2012 Louisiana High School Performance Scores. On November 29, 2012, Deborah […]
January 8, 2013
In an e-mail response to Deborah Tonguis, 2009 Teacher of the Year, regarding the obvious inflation of SPS scores John White claims he doesn’t understand simple mathematical formulae or obvious statistical anomalies, and couldn’t possibly be expected to, since all the decisions that went into it were made long before he got there. To your point, and to […]
January 6, 2013
My apologies for publishing so many articles so quickly folks, but I’ve been getting a lot of material lately to go through and some of what it reveals is truly astounding and needs to be shared. To recap: I recently published an article on how the most recent release of SPS scores was inflated simply due […]
January 5, 2013
When I first saw a press release some months ago from the Louisiana Department of Education heralding scads of school improvement and data that showed almost all of the state’s high schools had significant gains, suffice it to say I was a tad skeptical. I know all too well of some of the tricks LDE has employed in the past with […]
November 17, 2012
John White is trying very hard to keep data from the general public and researchers. He even passed a number of edicts when he first came to DOE that forbade LDE staff from communicating with school districts via any method other than a vetted weekly or bi-weekly newsletter. I’ve been told by numerous data coordinators […]
November 10, 2012
I think it’s safe to say I underestimated just how sleazy John White and his TFA toddlers were capable of being. When confronted from multiple sources with evidence of Shadow Schools (unreported schools or formerly reported schools no longer reported for the purposes of altering accountability scores) rather than crack down on districts like St […]
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