Jindal and the Core: Louisiana snubs the Manchurian Candidate
Diane Ravitch, the high-profile New York academic and blogger, is probably the punditocracy’s most relentless opponent of what’s been happening in public education here since Katrina. Charter schools and the choices they provide families, high-stakes testing to assure student achievement and teacher competence — all that stuff is anathema to her. As is the Common Core.
Failed governor turned presidential wannabe Bobby Jindal still postures as a fan of school reform — even after presiding over savage and repeated cuts to LSU and a push toward vouchering, so students can leave public education altogether and carry taxpayer dollars into religious schools of sometimes shockingly low quality. And like Ravitch, he has emerged as an angry foe of the Common Core.
Ravitch, a darling of teacher unions, is — these days, anyway — a creature of the left. Jindal, his hopes pinned on overcoming dismal poll numbers in Iowa, panders to the far right.
But are they really all that different? Not in the eyes of Louisiana voters, to judge from Saturday’s elections to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Neither Ravitch nor Jindal was on the ballot last weekend, but to the extent voters took any note of their posturing in the run-up to the election, both got handed their heads.
All three BESE candidates backed by Ravitch’s Network for Public Education — Lee Barrios, Jason France and Lottie Beebe — were spurned by voters. The more crushing defeat was Jindal’s: the implicit victory for state Superintendent of Education John White, once the apple of Jindal’s eye, now his whipping boy.
To the relief of the school-reform leadership in New Orleans, the incoming state school board, like the one it succeeds, will be peopled predominantly by folk who favor the Common Core. That is expected to be true no matter what happens in the two mop-up runoffs for BESE seats next month. That means BESE can be counted on to continue siding with White against Jindal’s effort to get rid of the Common Core — or a successor governor’s effort to get rid of White.
White, briefly superintendent of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, began preparing the state for the new standards and tests as soon as Jindal lifted him up as his nominee for the top state education job three years ago.
Summer before last, Jindal put a wet finger in the wind and decided he’d better reverse course on the Common Core, the set of benchmarks he had heartily embraced as a way to bring Louisiana schools up to par with better-performing states across the nation.
White, who has gained national visibility as an eduction leader, stood his ground and continued preparing for the Common Core. Jindal and the Core: Louisiana snubs the Manchurian Candidate | The Lens:
