Louisiana

National Council on Teacher Quality Report Card: Louisiana Teacher Policy

Legend

	Best practices.
	State meets goal.
	State nearly meets goal.
	State partially meets goal.
	State meets a small part of goal.
	State does not meet goal.
Full Report – National Council on Teacher Quality

Meeting NCLB Teacher Quality Objectives: C

	Goal A Equitable Distribution of Teachers
	Goal B Elementary Teacher Preparation
	Goal C Secondary Teacher Preparation
	Goal D Veteran Teachers Path to HQT
	Goal E Standardizing Credentials

Teacher Licensure: D

	Goal A Defining Professional Knowledge
	Goal B Meaningful Licenses
	Goal C Interstate Portability
	Goal D Teacher Prep in Reading Instruction
	Goal E Distinguishing Promising Teachers

Teacher Evaluation and Compensation: C

	Goal A Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness
	Goal B Using Value-Added
	Goal C Teacher Evaluation
	Goal D Compensation Reform
	Goal E Tenure

State Approval of Teacher Preparation Programs: C

	Goal A Entry Into Preparation Programs
	Goal B Program Accountability
	Goal C Program Approval and Accreditation
	Goal D Controlling Coursework Creep

Alternate Routes to Certification: C

	Goal A Genuine Alternatives
	Goal B Limiting Alternate Routes to Teachers with Strong Credentials
	Goal C Program Accountability
	Goal D Interstate Portability

Preparation of Special Education Teachers: D

	Goal A Special Education Teacher Preparation
	Goal B Elementary Special Education Teachers
	Goal C Secondary Special Education Teachers
	Goal D Special Education Teacher and HQT

Political contribution statistics from 2004 political cycle.

Statewide Unions

Louisiana Federation of Teachers
Total Revenue: $ 1,794,264
Total Expenses: $ 2,350,482
Total Assets: $ 826,009

Louisiana Association of Educators
Total Revenue: $ 3,606,946
Total Expenses: $ 3,217,005
Total Assets: $ 3,659,187

Data obtained from the Internal Revenue Service's Master Data File 2005-2006.

For this massive new project, the Center for Union Facts filed freedom of information requests with dozens of America’s major school districts.

 From the stacks of paperwork that ensued, we have calculated a variety of statistics that document how teachers unions – and the laws and policies they defend – keep bad teachers in classrooms. Read on to discover just what all that dues money pays for in many cities around the country.

Caddo Federation of Teachers and the Caddo Association of Educators: Protecting Bad Teachers

Caddo Public Schools, the district for schools in and around Shreveport, features two teacher organizations connected to state and national unions: the Caddo Association of Educators (a local of the Louisiana Association of Educators, part of the National Education Association) and the Caddo Federation of Teachers and Support Personnel (a local of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, part of the American Federation of Teachers).

According to school district records, however, "tenure" policies defended by these groups and their parent unions mean that practically no teachers are ever fired by the Caddo Parish school system.

Caddo Public Schools has approximately 1,317 teachers with "tenure" (such status is available once a teacher has been in the system for three years, and it is enshrined in a state law defended stridently by the above unions). Original research by the Center for Union Facts into school district records indicates that, between the school years ending in 2003 and in 2007, only three tenured teachers were fired by the district. That means that Caddo Public Schools fires about 0.04 percent of its tenured teachers annually.

And the tenure system defended by the unions means that these people had to go pretty far to get themselves fired. Here are quotes from the school board's termination proceedings for each of these union-defended teachers:

• "willful neglect of duty and dishonesty by … making inappropriate comments of a sexual nature to a female student and by engaging in improper physical actions and touching of the body of the student and by implying and suggesting to the student that she be untruthful about the occurrence of these incidents by not reporting them to her parents or to anyone else in authority"
• "incompetency, willful neglect of duty, unprofessional conduct and dishonesty"; "submitted copied/falsified/forged pages on his students which established [he] was not individualizing instruction" for his special education students; "demonstrated a pattern of explosive, abusive and threatening behavior with school administrators and special education staff … none seemed to feel safe meeting with him alone"; "refused to participate in a post observation conference with his Principal and Instructional Specialist; became very hostile toward and made threatening comments to both of them; making it necessary for him to be escorted off the campus by the security coordinator"; "filed a false report with police against his principal stating to the police (911) that he was being beat up by the principal, and that again, it became necessary to have him escorted off campus by the school security coordinator"; "inappropriate and significant use of the school board owned computer to access sexually obscene or pornographic websites and to download and/or store obscene and pornographic images on the computer"
• "failed to take appropriate action to prevent and/or stop a fight between two students which resulted in a female student being stabbed in the back with a pair of scissors by a fellow male student", apparently due in part to "use of a personal cell phone during class"; "facilitated and encouraged the continuation of the fight by her actions, inaction and/or aided in its provocation"

It's easy to believe that the vast majority of Caddo Parish's public schoolteachers are doing a good job, but it's a near-impossibility that fully 99.96 percent of its tenured teachers deserve to be in front of kids; any group of people that size is bound to have at least a few more bad apples than the ones mentioned above. The best explanation, in our opinion, is that by protecting an outmoded employment system in the legislature and by turning tenured teacher termination cases into equivalents of a criminal trial, the state and local teachers organizations have made it nearly impossible to fire bad teachers.

Source: Caddo Parish School Board
Data current as of December 20, 2007