It’s probably a safe bet that most people have at least some vague familiarity with the federal law that was dubbed “No Child Left Behind.” What most people probably don’t know, though, is that that law was replaced this year with a new version called the “Every Student Succeeds Act” or ESSA. In many ways, […]

It was good news to hear that for the fourth year in a row the number of students earning a college-going score of 18 on the ACT test has increased. At the same time the state’s average ACT also rose to 19.5 – the highest it’s been since the state started requiring all high school […]

It has been a couple of tumultuous weeks in Louisiana with our state once again thrown into the national spotlight that seems to visit us on an all-to-regular basis – usually for things that are not good. Of course, it was provoked by two incidents the drew the country’s attention:  the controversy over a police […]

Every time a new task force is created to look at one of the chronic issues Louisiana faces you can almost hear the groans. Here we go again. Yet another task force. Haven’t we studied that issue to death? When it comes to transportation and infrastructure, the answer is certainly “yes,” but this time there […]

The headline in the Times-Picayune back in February said it all about the TOPS scholarship program: “How One Man’s Pet Project became a Louisiana Sacred Cow.” Indeed, over the years, even as costs soared and state budgets were cut, the TOPS program remained protected. Health services were cut and even higher education itself got hammered, […]

Many words could be used to describe the just-completed regular session of the Legislature. Unfinished. Incomplete. Unresolved.

From the outset it was clear that this year’s regular session was not going to be about pushing the envelope forward in public education reform – it was about preventing a return to the past. This year there were dozens of bills filed dealing with education, and the vast majority of the significant ones were […]