Big Step in Growing Louisiana’s Tech Economy

It’s likely that until a few days ago, most people in Louisiana had never heard of a company called DXC. But they understand what 2,000 jobs mean and that’s the number of new positions this global digital technology company is pledging to bring to New Orleans over the next five years. By any measure, that’s […]

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New School Letter Grades & a Unique-in-the-Country Look into Our Early Childhood Centers

Six years ago BESE initiated a policy to give parents and citizens a better idea of how their local public schools were performing by doing something that made total sense in the world of education – they gave the schools letter grades. The letter grades replaced a star system of tracking performance which was well-intentioned, […]

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Making Government Work Again

It’s no secret that people have a high disdain for Congress. Real Clear Politics reports that based on the average of polls it tracks, the current approval rating of Congress is about 12-percent. That’s not the lowest it’s been in the last few years, but it’s still scraping pretty close to the bottom. Why is […]

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CABL Recommendations on Constitutional Amendments

This year there are three constitutional amendments on the October 14 ballot. CABL has researched and analyzed the amendments and offers our recommendations to voters. Don’t forget, early voting runs from September 30 – October 7. Amendment # 1 Property Tax Exemption for Construction Materials This amendment provides an exemption from local property taxes for […]

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Thoughts and Prayers for Houston

It is ironic that as Louisiana marks the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, another epic disaster is ongoing just across our state line in Houston. At the same time, parts of our own state are again threatened by extensive flooding and the prospects of another extended  period of recovery. The month of August sadly seems […]

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Taking a New Look at TOPS

College students are heading back to class this week, but for close to 50,000 of them, the experience is a little different than it was at this time last year. That’s because in 2016 they were returning under the threat of a coming cut in their TOPS scholarships. It didn’t happen for that fall semester, […]

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Another Kind of Progress for Education

There was some progress on the education front this week. No, this time it wasn’t about something that happened in the classroom, though that’s the thing that really counts. Instead two things happened that will keep our education improvement efforts moving forward. The first was the news that the U.S. Department of Education has approved […]

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Will State Economy’s Improvement Finally Offer An Opportunity for Tax Reform

It’s not great news, but at least it’s encouraging. Louisiana’s economy which had been shedding jobs by the thousands for months seems to be stabilizing. Whether the slow uptick that’s beginning to materialize is enough to translate into a more stable state budget remains to be seen, but if the state’s recession is indeed over, […]

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Latest Business Rankings can give us a Roadmap to the Future

CNBC recently released its annual ranking of “America’s Top States for Business.” It would have been nice if it had contained a big surprise for Louisiana, because that would have meant we were not in the bottom 10 of states for the 7th year in a row. But sadly, no surprises. It did, however, come […]

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New LEAP Scores Tell Interesting Story about our Schools

This week the state Department of Education released the results of the 2016-2017 LEAP tests for students in grades 3-8. Overall, they show that Louisiana maintained the growth in scores that we have achieved over the last few years, but we were unable to build on them. That’s disappointing, but when looking at long-term trends […]

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