Teacher protest closes schools in Louisiana

Steve Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, said he expected between 500 and 1,000 teachers at the Capitol on Wednesday.

“The governor lit this fuse,” Monaghan told The Times-Picayune on Tuesday. “The governor chose to run his bills this week, not us. How can you expect, if we want to have a democracy, for people not to show up? The problem is not teachers exercising their rights; the problem is government trying to keep them from doing so.”

Jindal’s office questioned why teachers would come to the Capitol to protest a week before standardized tests are administered to decide whether some students advance or graduate.

“The reality is that action is needed now,” the governor’s office said in a statement Tuesday. “Forty-four percent of Louisiana’s public schools received a grade of D or F last year. Louisiana’s 4th and 8th graders ranked among the bottom in English and Math when compared to other states. In 2010 there were 230,000 students in Louisiana below grade level – one third of all students in public school.”

Jindal’s office issued a press release last week that said more than 100 local elected officials, including school board members, sheriffs, parish presidents, mayors and city council members endorse his school reform plan.

According to the Times-Picayune, the package of bills would:

“dramatically curtail tenure protections for new teachers and make it easier to fire existing ones; shift hiring and firing power from school boards to superintendents; pave the way for a significant increase in public charter schools; and create a program that uses the public school financing formula to pay private school tuition for certain low-income students.”

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