Jindal’s Louisiana Privatization Orgy

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Under Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s new privatization plan, virtually every student in the Monroe City School System and those in almost 50% of Ouachita Parish Schools would be eligible for vouchers to attend private schools, the News Star reported this week. Experts warn that the number of eligible students could far exceed the available spaces in existing private schools.

Jindal's plan provides “scholarships” for low income students currently attending poorly ranked schools, exploiting the popular mantra that poor kids shouldn’t be relegated to lousy schools. Like most Ed Deformers, he ignores the fact that virtually every low performing school in the nation is disproportionately filled with low income students and that it is primarily poverty—not the schools or teachers—that causes the low test scores and graduation rates. Rather than desegregating the schools so that all schools have similar wealth distributions, or providing poor schools with greater resources, or working to reduce or end poverty, Jindal, like his greedy cohorts elsewhere, is ignoring the causes of poor academic achievement and using the consequences to justify the redistribution of tax dollars from public schools to private ones.

Jindal’s plan uses a definition of poverty that includes far more students than those currently receiving free and reduced lunch. While there are no doubt many poor students who are either ineligible for free or reduced lunch or who fail to apply for the program, Jindal’s redefinition is most likely a cynical attempt to exploit poor families to facilitate the transfer of state tax revenues to private for-profit schools.

No Capitalist Left Behind in Louisiana

The Louisiana Senate recently voted 22-16 to allow corporations to sponsor charter schools in exchange for half of the enrollment slots and half the governing board seats, according to the Times Picayune. The House is expected to approve the bill and Governor Bobby Jindal is expected to sign it.

As is typical, business lobbies pitched the bill as an incentive to attract business to Louisiana (which it is), as if more business is equated with a better life for the masses. As we have seen repeatedly, subsidies, bailouts and tax cuts do not lead businesses to hire more people and they certainly do not lead to better pay and benefits for employees. However, in this case, it is not just teachers who will get screwed by having to work at union-free shops for lower pay and longer hours. With up to half the enrollment slots in the hands of corporate funders, the new schools could easily wind up as elite schools for the children of the rich, worsening the already extreme segregation of students based on their socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the schools’ boards could wind up under the control of single corporations, thus weakening parental and teacher influence over the operations and objectives of the schools, and increasing the chances that curriculum is biased in favor of that corporation’s interests.