A room full of St. Charles Parish Public Schools teachers and school administrators waited in the Professional Learning Center in Luling last Wednesday. The crowd had been notified upon arrival that State Superintendent John White was delayed by a lightning storm battering Interstate 10 east of Baton Rouge. The room buzzed with conversation as the wait continued. The local educators were anticipating a talk from White on sweeping changes to the state’s education system that were signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Bobby Jindal.
The speech was a stop in a circuit White is continuing through the state including visits to a diversity of communities in which he sometimes squeezes in two visits per day. Each two-hour session includes a speech and a chance for educators to ask questions. Inevitably White’s tour takes him through some of the worst school districts in the state, but along with the worst White also visits some of the higher performing districts such as St. Charles.
After a thirty minute delay White and State Sen. Gary Smith arrived.
Smith took the mic first to introduce Superintendent White.
“We live and work and we play here and we don’t always see the other parishes. And when we get to Baton Rouge we have to deal with the other 63 parishes and some of them are good. We’re 12th out of the 63 other parishes, but we have a lot of parishes that are very poor, very understaffed and very needy in public education out there,” Smith said. “There is one thing I don’t think anybody in this room can speak against and it’s that we have to make a change in public education for the whole for the state of Louisiana. Forty-eighth in the nation is not cutting it. That’s not where we want to be. That’s not where we want to be for our children. That’s not where we want to be for the future businesses that are coming here.”
White followed the introduction with his presentation titled Louisiana Believes concerning what should happen as the state progresses the school system.
“What I’d like to talk to you about tonight is a brief proposal. It is a draft. I’d like your feedback on the draft,” White said. “It is a plan for how we take things and make this work.”
White’s presentation first recapped the progress Louisiana has made over the past ten years despite being one of the lowest ranked states in educational achievement.
White included statistics showing the percentage of students who were at a basic level in their grade and above increased greatly amongst four target populations including those in special education, coming from low-income families, African-Americans and students in New Orleans. White said because of the strides of “at risk” student populations the number of schools today ranked as D and F is at 44 percent whereas in 1999 that number would have been 80 percent.
“You can be OK with the fact that we need to change and still acknowledge the successes of the past at the same time,” White said. “A plan for changing Louisiana isn’t a plan about ‘Well, it’s time to start changing Louisiana.’ It’s about keeping the improvement going.”
White then moved on to what the state needs to do to improve saying one of the largest problems with Louisiana is that it now has the lowest number of households with at least one parent who has a two or four year degree. He called for the cycle of not graduating enough students from college to be broken. In that vein White said all children in the state will take the ACT and that it will be used as a statewide measure on how ready children are to meet college benchmarks.
“We are going to become an ACT state,” said White.
Another way, according to White, to measure college readiness is to increase the number of children taking international baccalaureate assessment tests and advanced placement courses that are currently limited to one-third of students.
White also decried the fact that only 60 percent of students were judged as being ready for work or for college.
“We don’t even know what is happening to the other 40 percent of our students,” White said.
Then White moved into the territory of teacher evaluations.
“The reality I think is that the teacher evaluation thing has been a political discussion,” he said. “It has not really been a discussion of the substance of teaching and learning in terms of outputs and observing practice. And the discussion about standards for student work by and large has been a political discussion. ‘Should we have national standards or should every state do it themselves?’ rather than a discussion of ‘What do we call great student work?’”
When it was the teachers turn to ask questions teacher assessments were high on the list.
White said only one percent of St. Charles Parish School teachers were rated ineffective each year and that those teachers could only be fired if they received an ineffective rating two years in a row. Even then evaluations were only half of the decision in the termination process and that the other half would be decided by administrators.
Some teachers expressed concern that teaching students who are “at risk” who they felt they could make the biggest difference for would cause them to suffer because they would be more likely to be rated ineffective. White said in a case like that there are different standards that come into play and teachers are given more leeway.
In addition, high performing public schools who take in students from failing systems under the voucher system may receive a slightly different evaluation standard.
“We understand at BESE that you are getting a reward for being a B school and that you may be taking in students who may lower the grade of the school and we’ll take that into consideration,” White said.
Schools who choose to bring in other students would initiate an action through the principal whose superintendent would have to sign off on it.
The dialogue continued and teachers expressed concerns that student assessments were sometimes contradictory, take time away from school work and also more adequately reflect test-taking skills and not the true knowledge of students.
White promised teachers he would continue to look at student assessments and try to find ways to make the testing better for all involved.
White said the overwhelming number of students statewide would stay in the public school system and that policies for schools would only change slightly at first, but that they would keep changing until the right path was found.
White concluded by leaving teachers with his email address to allow the ones who were unable to ask their questions due to time restrictions to contact him.
Superintendent of St. Charles Public Schools Dr. Rodney Lafon said he was impressed with the meeting between White and the teachers.
“I was extremely proud of our teachers and administrators by the kinds of questions they raised because the questions were more pointed at about instruction and student learning–was this really the best thing for kids?” Lafon said. “Especially a couple of principals made the point. ‘Are we doing too much testing and not having enough time to teach?’”
In the end the educators began to move slowly out of the hall with Dr. Lafon and some of the school board members ringing the exits shaking hands with those headed into the wet night. Looking up one could see White out in front of most of the others moving quickly away from the crowd and on to his car and very likely back to Baton Rouge to rest and prepare for the next crowd in the next day in the next town.
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