The New Living Word School Kerfuffle Is An Education In Itself
Tom Bonnette had an outstanding piece here yesterday about the New Living Word School, the church-sponsored school in Ruston run by Rev. Jerry Baldwin which opened up 315 spots for kids who would qualify for school vouchers under the recently-passed education reform program.
It seems that the educational establishment and their political stooges are having a festival of sorts over the revelations in a Monroe News-Star piece last week about the fact that New Living Word School is still an educational startup. Its facilities aren’t as nice as the public schools are, it uses a great deal of DVD instruction in the classroom, and it doesn’t have the physical space to accomodate 315 new students if it were to get them.
And all of these factors are being used to trash the voucher program as a whole. Sen. Mary Landrieu, who has mounted a campaign of passive-aggressive sniping against the reform plan, took aim yesterday with New Living Word School as a poster child for how bad the voucher program is…
The senator said she supports education reform and strategic use of vouchers, but Landrieu said Jindal’s package passed during the current legislative session “was much too broad.”
It seems that the educational establishment and their political stooges are having a festival of sorts over the revelations in a Monroe News-Star piece last week about the fact that New Living Word School is still an educational startup. Its facilities aren’t as nice as the public schools are, it uses a great deal of DVD instruction in the classroom, and it doesn’t have the physical space to accomodate 315 new students if it were to get them.
And all of these factors are being used to trash the voucher program as a whole. Sen. Mary Landrieu, who has mounted a campaign of passive-aggressive sniping against the reform plan, took aim yesterday with New Living Word School as a poster child for how bad the voucher program is…
The senator said she supports education reform and strategic use of vouchers, but Landrieu said Jindal’s package passed during the current legislative session “was much too broad.”
“You see what happened at the school in Ruston,” she said. “I kept telling (the Jindal administration) that it had to tighten up the language in the voucher bill. Vouchers should be part of the reform movement, not the entire reform movement. Public money shouldn’t be leaving the system with no accountability.
“The idea is to provide a way out for children who are stuck in failing schools to move to established, well-run private institutions to provide better education than what they were getting