We’re far past the days when Huey Long won the governorship by promising free school textbooks for every child. Now it’s all about education reform. Where do today’s candidates stand?
“We label a lot of things in Louisiana ‘reform’, that don’t really offer or deliver much improvement,” says Democrat John Bel Edwards, who opposed the 2012 state education reforms, including school choice. The Republicans all support school choice.
“The voucher program I think has merit, and more importantly the charter school project, if you will, is working,” Jay Dardenne says.
David Vitter states, “I strongly support charter schools, voucher scholarships. I would continue that policy.”
“I never believe that a child’s zip code ought to be the final determiner of whether or not that child gets a good education,” says Scott Angelle, sounding much like his former boss, Bobby Jindal.
The candidates are also divided 3-to-1 on Common Core, but not along party lines. Dardenne supports it; the rest say they’re opposed.
Edwards says, “I have been consistently, and from the beginning, against the wholesale adoption of Common Core standards in the state of Louisiana.”
Instead, he touts his support of a compromise measure passed by the Louisiana legislature earlier this year. It formed a task force to review the state's educational standards. The review may result in the modification or replacement of Common Core.
“Certainly the Legislature was right to pass a resolution to go back to the drawing board. That was the right thing to do,” Angelle says of the compromise.
“That is going to allow us to look at those standards, determine what’s right about them, what’s wrong about them, what needs to be changed. And I think we’ll proceed from there,” Dardenne says, while acknowledging he has doubts about changing the standards just as teachers and students are fully utilizing them.
But Vitter says, “It could lead to a good result, but quite frankly the early indication is that it’s headed to Common Core by another name. I would veto that. We’re going to get out of Common Core. We’re going to get out of the PARCC test.”
6:03 a.m. - An earlier version of this story stated that the legislature formed a committee to develop an alternative to Common Core. It has been revised to clarify that the legislature formed a committee to review the state's standards, which include Common Core. The review process may result in modifications to Common Core, or a replacement to the standards all together.