On the day his House Education Committee was to take up one of the most contentious bills of the legislative session, Chairman Don Trahan, R-Lafayette, announced, "Today we are going to talk about the "V" word . . . scholarships!"
That national proponents of education vouchers for public school students to attend private schools have to resort to vocabulary substitution reflects the difficulty of getting state legislatures and local school boards to adopt the policy that has proven to be so emotionally charged and divisive.
Yet the cause of social conservatives is meeting with more success this year in the new, more conservative environment of the Louisiana Legislature. The voucher/scholarship bill has passed the House and is due up for final passage in the state Senate as early as this week. Following the most rancorous House debate of the session, the measure passed due to passionate lobbying efforts by the Jindal administration, though with barely a peep from the governor himself. That seems to be his approach on hot-button issues, not to risk personally getting out front until success is at hand.
After years of voucher bills going nowhere in the Legislature, Gov. Jindal adopted a cautious strategy of starting very small: $10 million (out of a $3 billion state education budget) to fund 1,500 scholarships for K-3 students from designated "failing" schools only in New Orleans. Though most voucher supporters are white conservatives, the lead sponsors are African-American Democrats from there, Rep. Austin Badon and Sen. Ann Duplessis.
That didn't soften the sharp edges of House debate. A legislative opponent labeled voucher backers "Judases," to which a newspaper publisher responded that, if so, the representative was "Satan in the flesh." A voucher group's media campaign singled out a leading opponent, Speaker Pro Tem Karen Carter Peterson of New Orleans, as a hack politician betraying her own people. More than one legislator accused the Jindal administration of strong-armed lobbying tactics and of promising construction projects for votes.
Even that old reliable weapon--resentment toward New Orleans--has been used by opponents who point out that combined state-local funding (but mostly state) per student is $12,900 in New Orleans, compared to about $7,000 per student in other parishes. That's on top of $140 million in new school construction and renovations in Orleans Parish, mostly from federal hurricane recovery funds.
No wonder the governor has not wished to jump into the middle of this fray himself. Yet, despite the hyperbole and bombast on both sides, vouchers are not the biggest idea about the future of education in Louisiana. Less controversial but more promising are charter schools, which quietly are taking slow but deep root across the state.
Charter schools are public schools controlled not by the central board office but by the parents and faculty at each. Often they are operated by for-profit or non-profit organizations, including national companies, local groups and the education colleges of state universities.
Post-Katrina New Orleans has become a giant charter school laboratory, proportionately the largest in the country. The charter school movement is spreading across Louisiana, right behind the failing-schools movement, which no longer is confined to New Orleans. As the state begins taking over failed schools in Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Monroe and Alexandria this year, more will turn into charters.
Charter schools can go where vouchers never will, to the small towns and rural areas that don't have many private or parochial schools. For that and budgetary reasons, even if this bill passes, vouchers will never become widely available to middle-class families, which ultimately limits its political appeal.
Because charter schools are still viewed by school boards and local administrators with suspicion if not hostility, state law limits their number to 42, which Rep. Trahan seeks to increase to 70 with a bill moving through the Capitol. He would prefer no cap at all, merely approval by the charter-friendly Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, but this bill moves the next new big thing in public education closer to broad acceptance and use than vouchers will ever get.
