Wednesday, May 11, 2011
We urge the Lafayette Parish School Board to dig deep and look far in the selection of our next superintendent. An Independent Weekly Editorial
When Lafayette Schools Superintendent Burnell Lemoine announced a week ago that he will honor his contract and retire at the end of 2011, a collective sigh of relief rose up in our parish.
Lemoine has by no means been a poor administrator of our public school system. He oversaw the successful expansion of our academy/schools of choice programs — a feather in his cap to be sure — and has served our students conscientiously.
We wish him the best and thank him for his service.
The 43-year veteran of public education did exactly what we taxpayers expected him to do: captain the ship. Unfortunately, long before Burnell Lemoine became superintendent Lafayette Parish dropped anchor. We’re adrift as other Louisiana school districts — many of them less affluent and with far fewer resources — steam past us.
Our anemic growth and persistent inability to close the achievement gap between black and white students, our tepid expectations, our increasing abandonment of public in favor of private are unacceptable.
Companies looking to locate in Lafayette Parish don’t ask, “How are your private schools?” They want effective, efficient and safe public schools.
Lafayette’s prosperity depends on an educated workforce. More students graduating high school prepared for college or vocational training means fewer students dropping out, running the streets, breaking into our homes and populating our jail.
Some in our school system, administrators and board members, have said that poor children from distressed households simply cannot be educated. We say bull, and there’s data to back it up.
Lafayette Parish has an opportunity to replace Lemoine with a dynamic leader — a superintendent who will embrace reform or, at the very least, explore new, innovative methods of closing the achievement gap, increasing the graduation rate and rekindling the public’s confidence in our school system; a superintendent who will run our school system like a chief executive, make hard decisions — often unpopular decisions — and be held accountable for progress or a lack thereof.
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| After being informed ahead of last Wednesday’s meeting that a majority of school board members opposed extending his contract, Superintendent Burnell Lemoine announced he’ll retire at the end of the year. |
We urge the Lafayette Parish School Board to pour its energy, its conscience, into selecting a superintendent who fulfills this role. Lafayette doesn’t need a good superintendent. We need a great superintendent.
We don’t need a candidate from within the Lafayette Parish School System — a lifer who has paid his or her dues and deserves a chance. We believe the LPSB should look not only outside Lafayette but outside Acadiana for a superintendent with no ties to us, no friendships, no conflicts of interest.
We believe this superintendent can be found without the needless expense of a search firm. Appoint a blue-ribbon, volunteer committee from within Lafayette Parish — business leaders, educators, professionals who have a stake in our future and who understand the mettle it takes to successfully run a $250 million enterprise.
We need long-term, stable leadership at the top. As we learned last week, the board is likely to place before voters this fall a property tax proposition for our facilities master plan. Asking taxpayers to pony up $600 million dollars — just more than half of the $1.1 billion plan — without that leadership in place is a non-starter.
Let’s get this right.
At the end of the 2010 school year, the most recent for which state-generated data are available, Lafayette Parish ranked 24th among 71 school districts in Louisiana. A few years ago Lafayette ranked 18th. A couple of decades ago, we were in the top 5. It’s not that Lafayette Parish is sliding — it’s more a microcosm of what’s happening with the United States versus the rest of the industrialized world: while our growth is stagnant, we’re being leapfrogged by others. Lafayette Parish’s growth in District Performance Score from 2009 to 2010 — 96.3 to 96.5 — was just two-tenths of 1 percent. Stagnant.
Even the Orleans Parish School System, gutted when the state created the Recovery School District following Hurricane Katrina and a system that has few schools to maintain and manage, holds a higher DPS than Lafayette — 110.3 to our 96.5.
Some of these newer leaders on the list are school districts that broke away from their host parishes — districts like the Zachary and Central school districts, Nos. 1 and 6, respectively. Each seceded from the East Baton Rouge Parish School District, which is grappling with the stress of educating an increasingly at-risk, urban population.
Currently — and this will change at the end of the 2010-2011 school year — only N.P. Moss Middle School is considered academically unacceptable in Lafayette Parish, based on the state’s criterion that a school’s district performance score must be above 60. Moss, which at the end of last year earned a 51.9 DPS — the lowest among all public schools in the parish — will cease to exist at the end of the month, becoming Thibodaux Career & Technical High School.
But the state is also raising the bar for our public schools: Currently, schools must score a 65 or higher to be considered academically acceptable. In 2012 that threshold rises to 75. Not counting Moss, there are three schools in Lafayette Parish that, if their respective scores don’t rise, will be considered academically unacceptable at the end of the 2011-2012 school year: Alice Boucher Elementary (66.5 DPS), J.W. Faulk Elementary (69.1) and Northside High (70.3). Each school, not coincidentally, is in north Lafayette and has a majority black, low-income student population, which cuts to the heart of the Lafayette Parish School System’s Achilles heal — educating at-risk students.
Lest we forget, Lafayette Parish ranks at the top of the middle third in a state that ranks near the bottom nationally. We have very little to be proud of. Yet, with Lemoine’s imminent retirement, we have much for which to be hopeful.
This newspaper has pointed out as recently as two weeks ago — and others have made a similar observation — that the LPSS does a good job of educating our best students but a poor job of educating our at-risk students, particularly black males from poverty.
But state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek counters that even our “white, wealthy schools” are hardly meeting or exceeding state expectations. According to Pastorek, nearly all schools with a performance score of less than 100 have a failure rate of more than 25 percent.
Of the 38 schools in Lafayette Parish, less than half performed above the 100 mark in 2009-2010.
Indeed, poverty, regardless of race or ethnicity, presents unique challenges to education. Poor students tend to have fewer resources at home and less parental support. They often come from single-parent households and have fewer examples around them of the benefits of a good education.
But a decent education and poverty are by no means mutually exclusive. Look no further than the Knowledge is Power Program public charter schools in New Orleans and across the country.
According to state DOE data, the average school performance score for KIPP in New Orleans is 104.2. These schools are overwhelming black and poor, yet they manage to best LPSS’ DPS by nearly eight points.
KIPP’s performance is in sharp relief to the overall RSD, which, despite far-better-than-state-average progress over the last three years, remains a bottom dweller with a DPS of 60.6 following the 2009-2010 school year. But even within the RSD, not counting KIPP, there are examples of progress. Pastorek has characterized what’s happening in New Orleans as “an experiment”: Give multiple charters in various molds a chance; scrap those that don’t succeed, embrace those that do. Learn from it.
The charter school movement in New Orleans, which has the highest percentage in the country of children in charter schools, is the basis of a documentary film by Baton Rouge native and former WWL TV reporter Ben Lemoine (see sidebar) titled The Experiment.
Nationwide, the non-profit KIPP schools, according to a recent, large-scale study, shatter the notion that poor kids can’t learn and underscore that high expectations count. While 95 percent of KIPP students are black and Latino and overwhelmingly low-income, 33 percent who completed a KIPP middle school at least 10 years ago now hold a bachelor’s degree. Eight percent of similar, non-KIPP students have a college degree.
KIPP now operates 99 schools in 21 states from coast to coast with an enrollment of more than 27,000 students in elementary, middle and high school. An astonishing 95 percent of students who complete a KIPP middle school program graduate from high school. Ninety-five percent.
Taking a cue from such data, 100 Black Men of Greater Lafayette, a civic group that neither numbers 100 nor is entirely black men, is urging the LPSS to strive for a 95 percent graduation rate for all students.
As it stands, Lafayette Parish had a 70.4 percent graduation rate in 2010. But the historical chasm between grad rates for white and black students remains: While nearly 78 percent of white students graduated, only slightly more than 60 percent of black students earned diplomas.
At our current growth rate, it will take Lafayette Parish 31 years to hit 95 percent for all students, according to a projection by 100 Black Men.
Charter schools are not the end all-be all of a better public education system, but they should be examined without prejudice and, when a model is shown to be effective, embraced.
Yet school systems across the state, our own included, continue to balk at charter schools and other reform paths being tried nationwide, afraid the ends may not justify stripping money and power away from central office.
But that may be coming to an end in Lafayette: Last week The Ind learned through a source outside the school system but close to the action that a simple majority — five board members — were opposed to extending Lemoine’s contract and would vote against the extension if it came down to it. Lemoine was notified before Wednesday’s meeting and opted to make a graceful announcement that he will retire at the end of the year. This is cause for optimism — a sign that progressive leadership may be developing within the LPSB.
We must reform the way we do public education in Lafayette. Our next superintendent must grasp that simple notion, and so must we as the system’s biggest stakeholders. Our community has the chance to stand up and demand substantial change in the form of an open-minded, non-traditional superintendent who isn’t embedded in the politics of the state’s struggling system.
There’s too much riding on it.
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| Filmmaker Ben Lemoine, center, with, from left, The Experiment’s Derick Route, Gerald Carter, Keeland Lewis, Kalani Lewis and Sam Morten |
MAY 17 Here's a column from James Gill, this time in the Advocate. Gill, who has jumped ship from the Picayune, writes about the absurdity of dueling polls in this post. The numbers are so wildly different, it is obvious that both sides are "cooking the books," he writes. In particular, he looks at Sen. Mary Landrieu, and how her recent actions in DC have been received by those polled. Gill's acerbic, amusing prose is a welcome addition to a paper so conservative as to be occasionally lacking in personality.
MAY 17 Blogger Tom Aswell continues delivering bombshells about the state education department and Gov. Jindal's education "reform" efforts. In this post, he reports that students in the Shreveport area have been signed up for a charter school without their knowledge or consent. Most interesting to Aswell is how this Texas-based charter (with ties to GOP types) got the personal student information it has, if the students didn't give it.
MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
MAY 17 Here's an interesting blog out of California by a Hollywood writer, attorney and academic named Brian Alan Lane. He blogs about higher ed, and was a whistle-blower in a scandal over false credentials. In this post, he takes aim at LSU's new top dog, King Alexander. It's convoluted and a little confusing, but it sure makes Alexander a lot more interesting than he was yesterday.
MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
MAY 17 NOLA police arrested more people Thursday accused of either being involved in the Mother's Day shooting or hiding the suspect afterward, this Gambit story reports. The NOLA police chief said he suspects the whole thing was gang-related and throws out a challenge to the gangs: he's got informants now, he says, and he knows a lot more than the gangs want him to know. The people who live in the neighborhoods terrorized by gangs are ready to talk, he says.
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And there is a bigger picture involved. Lafayette and the University are involved in master planning processes. But neither can succeed unless our public school system does as well. Our choice, and I emphasize OUR choice, for the new Superintendent to lead public education in Lafayette is critical.
"The Experiment" is a good way to get up to speed very quickly. I've seen it twice. It shows what is starting to happen in Lafayette by showing the cause and effect of underperforming schools and increasing crime. It's more relevent to us than "Waiting for Superman" because it is about Louisiana, it is about us.
Now is our chance.