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LaPolitics: The Legislature again did not pass a new Minimum Foundation Program formula this year, which means the current school funding formula stays in place. What are the implications of that?
Barry Erwin, president and CEO of the Council for a Better Louisiana: That was unfortunate, because it’s been a couple years since we’ve had a new one. In this year’s version, BESE included some additional funding for differential teacher pay, in-school tutoring, some school operational costs, and work-based learning programs. If the MFP had passed they would have been baked into the formula. The good news is that the Legislature did find a way to fund much of that from other sources. The bad news is that the funding is just one time, and we’ll have to look for dollars to sustain these efforts every year.
The Legislature did set up a framework for educational savings accounts, which CABL generally supports, but left it for the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to work out the details. What do you expect to see from that process?
BESE will have a lot of work to do because they have to set up many of the rules, clarify how they will hold private schools accountable, collect and report a lot of data, and figure out how much money will be available to families. I think the first year will be relatively easy because you will probably see mostly students in the current voucher program transferring into the ESA program because they’re prioritized, and there should be little cost involved there. After that, it becomes sort of a wait and see, because the new fiscal cliff will be upon us and it’s unclear just how much the Legislature will want to appropriate in new money to a program that is potentially extremely costly and just getting started.
More than a month ago, CABL warned the Legislature to be careful about expanding the governor’s power. What is your assessment of what lawmakers ended up doing in that area?
Well, they didn’t go as far as they talked about when all of this started, so that’s good. But we have two areas of concern. One is that the governor will be able to appoint the chairs of about 150 boards and commissions where he already appoints a majority of the members, which includes all of the higher education boards. The accrediting agency [for higher ed] warns against what it deems to be undue influence on higher education management boards from external sources, so this could be a real problem when it’s time for accreditation. The Legislature also gave the governor and themselves more appointees to the Board of Ethics and removed the vetting process that required them to choose from a list submitted by the state’s private colleges. This means the governor will have more direct influence over a politically sensitive board that is supposed to be as independent and free from politics as we can make it.
What is the most important piece of legislation that passed this year that no one is talking about?
I would point to a few complementary bills [House Bills 244 and 267 and Senate Bill 508] that really focus on helping our kids with math. Our math scores are extremely low, and we know if kids don’t get the basics of math in the early years, they will likely struggle forever. So these bills really focus on identifying students who are behind in K-3, providing interventions, ensuring high-quality instructional materials, and notifying parents. They also expand opportunities for high-dosage tutoring, which is critical. We have used some of the same strategies with early reading and seen some positive results.
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
