Zuckerberg in Louisiana: Mega-Corruption Case Study

 

How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/t...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) July 27, 2026 at 7:29 AM

Louisiana Resident Speaks Truth to Idiocy

 

A Louisiana resident who identified himself as Marshawn delivered a fiery, emotional speech to lawmakers during a state Senate hearing over redistricting Monday, accusing Republicans of trying to “cheat” Black voters out of political power. 

 “The MAGA party is the last breath of the Confederacy,” he told lawmakers. 

“If y’all could give us less than zero seats, you would do it.” 

Marshawn’s testimony came as Louisiana Republicans advance a new congressional map after the Supreme Court weakened key protections in the Voting Rights Act. 

 “There will be no more of your party,” he said. “The midterms gonna come, y’all gonna get wiped out,” he said. 

 #Louisiana 

#Redistricting 

#VotingRights 

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ASD's Mentor, the RSD, Is Near the Bottom in ACT Scores, Even in Louisiana

Mercedes Schneider recently took a brief furlough from plumping Diane Ravitch's pillows and celebrating their many accomplishments to do what Mercedes does best when she is not, otherwise, preoccupied with imagining herself as the next grande dame of anti-reformy talk groups.  

Mercedes provided us with a version of the state's Excel file on all of Louisiana's ACT scores, including the corporate Recovery School District--which is comprised of charters, the majority of which are in New Orleans.  The same information is provided here, with a bit more detail.

Tennessee, Michigan, and Virginia have devised state takeover/privatization plans based on the Recovery School District Model, which "celebrated" a decade of damage to the idea of humane public education in 2014, ten years after Katrina.  So it is interesting to look now at how these chain gang are doing with their testing, since they have now had a chance to move kids from 2nd to 11th grade, where they take the ACT.  

Even in Louisiana, which usually occupies a place somewhere between Guam and Mississippi in educational accomplishment, the RSD is near the bottom--fifth from the bottom, in fact.  

The RSD ranked 66th out of 70 systems in the state!  

The Louisiana state average ACT was 19.2, and the RSD average was 15.6.  

As you can see, too, the local rock star, KIPP, scored below average among the worst scoring schools of the fifth worst scoring system in one of the worst scoring states in the U. S and its territories.  

Are you listening, Tennessee?  Can you see this, Memphis?

Louisiana Withdraws from PARCC and Jindal Moves to Block Pearson Test Purchase

In the latest bad news for the Oligarchs' Common Core enterprise, Bobby Jindal has moved to sever the head from the Common Core monster in Louisiana.  He knows that without the Pearson tests that PARCC is force-feeding the states without the benefit of a bidding process, the Core will disappear within a couple of years.  

Jindal's office has notified the State Department of Education that purchasing the Pearson tests without bidding is a violation of state law.  So even though corporate stooge and State Supt., John White, says the state will keep on teaching to the standards, there will be no test, apparently, until the bidding process is opened up.  

If I were holding Pearson stock, I would put my Sell order in today.   From Times Picayune:

Jindal's plan to ditch Common Core in Louisiana is multi-pronged. He has contacted the consortium to remove the state from the the testing combine, and he wants to block the Education Department, which White runs with state school board oversight, from buying the new tests.

The governor said Louisiana's agreement to buy the test doesn't comply with state law. It calls for the state to enter into a contract without going through a competitive bid process, he said, so the consortium must be considered against other options. Jindal said competition would surely result in a different exam because the consortium "is, at least anecdotally, more expensive than many of the other tests offered out there."

Jindal also notified the National Governors Association that he was removing Louisiana from the Common Core development group. That does not end the use of the standards but is more of a symbolic gesture.

The governor acknowledged he can't scrap Common Core entirely without the support of the Legislature or the state school board. He said he intends to urge lawmakers, who just concluded their 2014 session, to act in 2015.

At this point, that would be an uphill battle. Lawmakers refused to ditch the standards this year, despite having several opportunities. Legislators involved in education said their colleagues didn't seem interested in following Jindal's lead.

"The Legislature has spoken loudly on this issue," said Sen. Conrad Appel, R-Metairie, chair of the Senate Education Committee.

Still, getting rid of the Common Core test would go a long way toward getting Louisiana to ditch the standards altogether, Jindal said. "Common Core is, to my mind, defined by the test," he said.

The Head Start Enron Trader Initiative: The Arnold Foundation in Indiana, Louisiana, NYC, Texas, and Beyond

By Doug Martin

The national news has painted Enron’s retired trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold as a Jesus figure since he and his wife announced they were going to cover the government costs of funding Head Start during the government shutdown (better known as the good cop/bad cop ploy by both parties to throw senior citizens, kids, and the poor and middle class under the bus), but the Laura and John Arnold Foundation's main goal is school privatization.

The Arnolds, dishing out the couch-change of $10 million for Head Start, say this money is a loan and they will want the money back.  But the whole thing was merely a publicity stunt meant to digress from the shady things John Arnold has been up to lately.

When the news broke on the Head Start deal, a few attuned people were seeing through the smoke and mirrors.  As David Sirota points out, John Arnold, worth a mere $2.8 or $3.8 billion (depends who you talk to and when, and as if the difference matters), is a major con-man:

What do you do after a week’s worth of embarrassing revelations about your craven effort to slash the pensions of unsuspecting middle-class retirees? If you are a billionaire former Enron trader, you manufacture a self-congratulatory spectacle by offering a bit of pocket change to low-income kids – and you get to rest assured that the national media will suddenly ignore your pension-looting ways and dutifully portray you as a benevolent hero.

Such is the breathtakingly cynical P.R. strategy of John Arnold. After a week of revelations about his scheme to help Wall Street and the conservative movement loot public pensions, the former Enron trader made headlines yesterday by handing over a rounding error of his billion-dollar fortune to the federal Head Start program ostensibly to help float it through the government shutdown.

Theresa Rosado, the illustrator for my forthcoming book Hoosier School Heist and a fine researcher, was onto the Head Start funding trail from the get-go, emailing me to let me know that Walmart scholar Stuart Buck worked for the Arnold Foundation. Josh McGee, an economist in the Dept. of School Reform at the University of Arkansas, too, crunches numbers at the Arnold shop because economists know nothing about education but everything about making the big bucks.  For his work for the Arnolds, McGee was paid $122,501 in 2011 (see page 40 in PFD).

Here are a few corporate schoolers who pocketed Arnold Foundation money in 2011 (see page 44 in PFD):

$100,000 to hedge fund-operated Education Reform Now, Democrats for Education Reform’s sister.

$118,000 to the venture capitalists and billionaires at the NewSchools Venture Fund

$2.1 million to Stand for Children, who used hedge fund money to buy Illinois Democrats and Bain Capital to attack teachers in Massachusetts.

$7 million to Students First

$1.1 million to Teach for America Houston

$5 million to Teach for America’s national branch

$75,000 to the Texas Charter Schools Association

$2.5 million to The  New Teacher Project, imported to Indiana (and other states) with Mind Trust and Bill Gates money.  

$52,500 to the Thomas Fordham Institute, the rightwing outfit set to help the Center for American Progress  eliminate elected school boards across the country.

The Arnold Foundation also backs KIPP Schools and last year funneled $15 million into the school privatization movement in New Orleans, giving cash to the Bradley/Walmart front group the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, New Schools for New Orleans, and the NYC Relay Graduate School of Education, which takes teacher evaluation to a new level, so that Masters degrees are only given to teachers in training who show that their students from low-income communities can do well on standardized test scores.  

The Arnolds must gush over NYC’s Relay Graduate School of Education, which was founded by KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and Larry Robbins, the owner of Glenview Capital hedge fund.  Just a month before Relay School of Education was accepted by the Board of Regents, Robbin’s Amy and Larry Robbin’s Foundation donated $500,000 to the Regents Research Fund, with help from Bill Gates, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and others, to help the State Education Department through a new “Fellows” program to implement Race to the Top evaluation guidelines for teachers and principals, curriculum, and other things the Business Roundtable first called for in 1989.  Many of these “Fellows” were recruited from Teach for America, the College Board, and other corporate-friendly groups, and were paid upwards of $189,500, as was the case of Kristen Huff, who spent seven years doing assessment design and product development for the College Board, which in 2006 made $500 million from products dealing with testing, as Jim Horn has noted.

Filthy rich hedge fund managers out to privatize education and make more money off of loans to charter schools and stealing from teachers pensions love to help each other out in the name of “benefiting children.”

And the Arnold Foundation is out for Hoosier kids, too. In Indiana, the Arnolds joined billionaire Obama supporter Eli Broad, the racist and poor-bashing Bradley Foundation, rightwing Gleason Foundation, and Dell to fund the Teacher Prep Review, which is highly endorsed by the former mayor of Indianapolis and Eli Lilly official Bart Peterson’s Mind Trust and the hedge fund supported Democrats for Education Reform Indiana. In October 2012, along with Eli Lilly, the Joyce Foundation (the school privatization outfit where Obama used to work), and the Lumina Foundation, the Arnolds financed Indy Mayor Ballard’s corporate school blueprint What’s Possible. 

What is the Lumina Foundation?  It’s a private outfit that promotes the skills-gap myth nonstop so that the public schools at all levels can be turned into corporate workforce training grounds so the filthy rich don’t have to pay their own money to train workers.  The group’s leader is John Mutz.  A past trustee for the Hudson Institute, former Republican lieutenant governor of Indiana, previous Conseco official, and one-time president of PSI Energy, John Mutz was Lilly Endowment’s president from 1989-1993. He was also a director at the GEO Foundation’s 21st Century Charter School, an Indianapolis Charter Schools Board member, and co-chair of the billionaire Betsy DeVos-run front-group, All Children Matter, in Indiana.

John Mutz and the Arnolds must really get along well. The Arnold Foundation loan money will be used to keep Head Start open in six states: Florida, Mississippi, Connecticut, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, as his Teach for America/New Teacher Project money allows real teachers to get the axe around the country and kids to be shipped off to charter school factory farms to be shot up with test bubbles then placed into a society that is already too sick to function.

 

 

 

 

 

Louisiana Constitution on Trial and Schools on the Chopping Block

Louisiana has the highest number of black student retentions in the nation to go along with the highest black incarceration rate in the U. S.  The private prison industry is worth $182 million a year when beds are full, and "Louisiana's incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran's, 13 times China's and 20 times Germany's."  To say that it is a police state is hardly an exaggeration, and the charter reform schools in poor black areas are run like junior penitentiaries.  

The State hired a new State Superintendent a couple of years back, a former English major from UVA with TFA credentials. The state's latest scam to privatize public schools, and it comes in the form of a state school voucher program. Now it's up to the Courts:

BATON ROUGE, La. — A Baton Rouge judge will hear arguments next week over whether Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's statewide taxpayer-funded school voucher program and other sweeping education changes were properly created by lawmakers.

After months of behind-the-scenes legal haggling since a lawsuit was filed in June, the court hearing is set for Wednesday. District Judge Tim Kelley set aside three days for the case.

Two statewide teacher unions and dozens of local school boards say the voucher program that is using tax dollars to send children to private schools and other new education funding plans are unconstitutional.

They argue it's illegal to pay for the voucher program, home-schooling, online courses, college tuition and independently run charter schools that won't be affiliated with local school systems through the public school funding formula.

They also claim lawmakers didn't follow the constitutional requirements for filing and passing the education programs and their funding.

"This is about protecting the constitutional rights of all Louisiana's school children -- not just a select few. Our state Constitution promises that every child in Louisiana will be provided with an educational setting that will give them the opportunity to develop to their full potential and that's exactly what we're trying to protect," Joyce Haynes, president of the Louisiana Association of Educators, said in a statement about the case.

John White, English Major, the Oligarchs' Boy Superintendent for Louisiana

John White got his BA in English at UVA before he joined TFA and, in white missionary fashion, learned to teach on poor people's children in Newark.  A stint as a TFA exec in Chicago followed, and then came five years as one of Klein's brigade of callous Corps members in NYC, trained to do what their "thought leaders" commanded.  The positivized White impressed Bloomberg and Klein for his glassy-eyed devotion to shutting down city schools and running Klein's relocation war room on schools, and before you could say Martin Seligman, Little John was placed in charge of one of Bill Gates's self-serving plans to slash the number of required teachers by plugging children into computer screens for up to half of the school day.  Called the Innovation Zone (iZone) (cute), it could spell twilight zone for teachers and children.

Now freshly minted from Eli Broad's corporate training school (Class of 2010) for future superintendents who are trained how to use their power to hand over their systems to the Business Roundtable, Little John was quickly moved to the front of the line to replace Paul Vallas just weeks ago as head of the Recovery School District in NOLA, despite the fact that White has never even been an assistant principal.

But don't unpack your positive psychology books so fast, John, for Bill, Eli, and Arne would like to put you in charge of your own state, or at least in charge of their own state:  Louisiana.

With the LEAP test in Louisiana newly-loaded with a set of fresh targets for the final bombing sorties on the state's struggling public schools, the Oligarchs figure they have as perfect an opportunity as they will ever get to use Little John to put into play his their portfolio school plan, with corporate welfare charters, public funding of private religious schools, schools with computers replacing half the teachers, and, of course, the greatest scam of all, the virtual charter schools, where children get virtually nothing for their education time.

So will John White's adventure become a repeat of his past on a grander scale in Louisiana, where he will now learn (unless the citizens wake up) how to be a state superintendent on poor people's children, even though he has never even been a school principal?  But, then, John White has the whole hosts of mentors.  Too bad none of them are educators.  That doesn't bother Arne, however.  In fact, it must remind him of his own silver spoon beginnings in Chicago, when none other than Paul Vallas took Arne under his wing to teach him how to sweeten no-bid contracts while ignoring the public part of the public schools.  Another generation of thought leaders in the making.

At the behest of Gov. Bobby Jindal, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been talking up White's credentials in calls to potential swing votes on the state board of education, which must elect a new state superintendent with at least eight of 11 votes. White is Jindal's pick to replace Paul Pastorek, who officially left the job last week with about seven months left in his term, At Jindal's suggestion, White would see out those remaining months while also serving in his current role as head of the Recovery School District, which oversees a majority of schools here.

Duncan has contacted at least two members of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education: Louella Givens, who represents New Orleans, and Linda Johnson of Plaquemine. . . .

The fact that Jindal's pick is also Duncan's pick offers us assurance that The Pick has been vetted by the U. S. Chamber of Horrors' Business Roundtable, where both parties sit down together to feed on that endless supply of campaign cash.

Fascism is on the move in Louisiana, America's leading state for incarcerations, where Jindal has a plan to sell off the state prisons to corporations.  It's reassuring to know that all those repeated LEAP failures will have a roof over their heads in the coming decades.

Louisiana's Pastorek Plans to Funnel RTTT Bribe Money to Charter Schools

The Charterites have a sweet plan emerging in Louisiana to reward corporate charter schools with Duncan's RTTT bribes that were ostensibly intended to help public schools. Rather than focusing on arm-twisting school systems to charter conversions or restructuring, State Superintendent Paul Pastorek plans to simply bribe starving school systems into ripping up their collective bargaining agreements to allow pay per score evaluation and pay plans. Those systems unwilling to go along simply get no money, while charters, with no collective bargaining agreements to begin with, can suck up all the dough that public schools should be getting. From the Times-Picauyne:

. . . .State Superintendent Paul Pastorek told state lawmakers this week that the shift to focus more heavily on "building great (school) leaders and teachers" stems from revised information released by the U.S. Department of Education, which will dole out the unprecedented competitive grant money.

Pastorek said participating districts must have or agree to build a strong teacher and administrator evaluation process that will be used in deciding pay, promotion, professional development and retention.

"If you are going to evaluate people, use it, " he said.

Not every district will necessarily have to conduct evaluations in the same way, state department of education officials said. But at least half of a teacher's evaluation should be based on student performance. Pastorek said that rewarding teachers based on how much progress they make with individual students might encourage strong teachers to go to high-needs schools where they can make greater gains.

While Pastorek said he thought the shift away from overhauling low-performing schools would make the proposal more palatable to some, the mandate to link teacher pay to student performance might discourage districts for a whole different set of reasons.

To join the state's application, school districts need the superintendent, school board and union president -- where applicable -- to sign on. Education officials noted that linking hiring and pay decisions to student test scores might require changes to collective bargaining agreements between districts and their teachers unions.

Some charter schools that constitute their own districts are also eligible to apply. Since charters control their own employee pay and hiring decisions, opposition from teachers unions or pre-existing collective bargaining agreements are less likely to be an issue for them.

A considerable amount of money could be at stake. The state plans to apply for $300 million, which would be split between statewide initiatives and block grants to participating districts. Earlier estimates from the department of education put potential funding for Louisiana, widely considered a strong contender for a share of the money, at $250 million.. . .

The Louisiana Charter Model: Taxation Without Representation

Since Texas developed the model used to blow up American public schools under Bush II, their neighbor, Louisiana has been envious. Smaller, poorer, and even less educated, Louisiana has aspired to inspire educational atrocities of their own just like Texas, and they have. In 2000, they became the first state in the nation to use a single test to determine if elementary school children (grades 4 and 8) would be promoted to the next grade. Even our motivational speaker ex-President would applaud that one, and other states (and NYCity) followed Louisana's dubious distinction, despite what testing experts and psychologists have said about the practice as abuse. (There are big, big lawsuits coming as soon as people wake up to what has happened to childhood in America).

Now under the school leadership of Paul Pastorek, Louisiana is on the throat-cutting edge again, and this past week they earned the accolades of the Gates and Broad puppet, Arne Duncan, for their thoroughly unscientific and non-peer reviewed techniques for determining how State test scores can be used to judge teacher preparation programs. It looks as though Louisiana's State Board commissioned an entirely competent educational psychologist from LSU to step entirely outside his area of expertise to manufacture a quick and dirty way to measure the "value added" by schools of education to the LEAP scores of Louisiana children. The studies are unpublished, and as far I can tell, beyond the readership of anyone not approved by Paul Pastorek.

Now Louisiana has made history on the charter school front. Aside from their replacement of NOLA Public Schools with a charter system in the wake of Katrina (remember "thank you, Katrina, all the time" charter advocate, Phyllis Landrieu), the Louisana Senate snaked through a provision last summer to give charter schools the same funding as public schools (including local dollars), despite the fact that charters are not required to have, and often don't have, certified teachers, equal pay, buses, lunchrooms, libraries, art, drama, athletics--or in the case of virtual charters, EVEN BUILDINGS.

Local superintendents and school boards are rightfully outraged at the fact that their skimpy local tax dollars are now being siphoned off by corporate charter schools that have no public oversight or regulation from the communities that are now required to fund them. From 2theadvocate.com:

A change in Louisiana law last year is forcing local school systems to pay for many new charter schools whether they like them or not.

School superintendents are starting to fight back. Last month, superintendents flooded the state with letters of complaint directed at three proposals to create strictly online charter schools that in two cases would draw students from all over Louisiana.

The superintendents submitted a range of complaints, including the involvement of for-profit companies in these would-be cybercharters, and whether these schools can comply with a raft of state laws.

The complaints prompted the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to postpone consideration of these cybercharters and several other charter school proposals until December.

A key underlying complaint of the superintendents is concern about how the state will determine who pays for these new schools.
The law change is also at issue in a Union Parish lawsuit scheduled to reach a Baton Rouge courtroom Thursday.

Until June 2008, the state solely paid the cost for these charter schools, known as Type 2 charters. Charter schools are exempt from many of the normal requirements imposed on public schools in hopes that they will serve as educational laboratories.

The charter schools relied mostly on the normal state-allocated per-pupil funding that pays for public schools. The state, however, also covered the sizable chunk of money that local sales taxes and property taxes normally covered through a separate annual appropriation.

The Legislature, however, changed that. An amendment on the Senate floor to an unrelated bill late in the 2008 regular session mandated that Type 2 charters created thenceforth would get not only state per-pupil funding, but would also receive a share of local sales taxes and property taxes. . . . .

Jones, president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, is blunt about what he thinks of that new law.

“It’s kind of like the Boston Tea Party all over again,” said Jones, superintendent of schools in Rapides Parish. “It’s taxation without representation.”

In this case, local voters approved sales taxes and property taxes for public education in their cities and parishes and made the local school boards the stewards of these funds.

Jones views the redirection of such money to charter schools already rejected by local school boards as an unlawful taking of public funds.

Jones said online charter schools present even more of a problem because they could siphon away local sales and property taxes from every one of the state’s 70 school districts.

Jones said superintendents, along with other public education groups, hope to persuade the Legislature to reverse course when it reconvenes next spring.

Failing that, Jones said, he expects lawsuits will arise, though he said he has no plans at present to head to court.

Keith Guice, president of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the superintendents have a point.

“I think there is a potential for litigation involving the local taxes going to schools where the tax was approved not for that purpose,” the BESE president said.

Guice, who is from Monroe, is no stranger to this controversy. Just northwest of him in Farmerville, the Union Parish school system is already in court over a new charter school.

The school system is suing the state Department of Education to try to regain more than $500,000 that it estimates is being redirected this school year to the new D’Arbonne Woods Charter School in Farmerville. A hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday before state District Judge Todd Hernandez. . . .

Stop Jindal's Backdoor Voucher Plan

If citizens do not call and write their state reps, the privatizers will have this one done before you can say dirty scumsucker. Good reporting from the Times-Picauyne:

BATON ROUGE -- Gov. Bobby Jindal will launch the second special legislative session of his 8-week-old administration today aimed at spending a $1.1 billion surplus left over from last year's budget and pursuing a widely popular effort to eliminate three taxes on business.

But during the narrow window of time for the session, Jindal is also proposing a surprise initiative that signals a significant shift in state policy by offering government support for private school tuition expenses.

Following a path that only a few other states have taken, Jindal and his top allies in the Legislature want to give parents a state income tax deduction for 50 percent of their private school tuition up to $5,000, which generally would result in tax savings of $60 to $300 per pupil. It also would give a tax break for home schooling expenses.

Although the program's overall $20 million price tag is relatively minor compared to the billions of dollars in the state budget, the program crosses a line that Louisiana has long placed between public and private school support and would create a tax break tilted in favor of those with higher incomes.

"I'm pretty confident it's something that we have widespread support for," said Rep. Hunter Greene, R-Baton Rouge, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee that will consider the proposal.

Greene has reason to be confident. A similar initiative passed overwhelmingly last spring but was vetoed by Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who said she feared "that this legislation may subsidize private schools at the expense of public school children."

With Jindal as governor, a veto is practically out of the picture. But that fact may change the calculations for some lawmakers, and the House and Senate this year are composed of many new members.

"I think it's going to be one of those issues that's pretty hotly debated," said Rep. Don Trahan, R-Lafayette, chairman of the House Education Committee. . . .

The rest here.