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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Louisiana Believes Course Choice Providers Should Defraud the State | Crazy Crawfish's Blog

Louisiana Believes Course Choice Providers Should Defraud the State | Crazy Crawfish's Blog:

Louisiana Believes Course Choice Providers Should Defraud the State

It’s become increasingly clear that Louisiana believes that a certain amount of fraud, waste, and graft is a good thing, and a lot of any of these things is a whole lot better!
From the outset, Course Choice (ala carte online courses children can take to supplement their educational diets paid for by tax payers) has been fraught with what most states would consider scandalous and irresponsible - at best. Providers of Course Choice do not require certifications to teach or offer classes, and the rigorous approval John White has alluded to in various interviews is simply copying the names of the courses(from adobe .pdf files provided by vendors) into a spreadsheet, and then verifying that the names are entered correctly into the Course Choice database. A former DOE staffer related this story about verifying Course Choice providers and their credentials.
I was at one meeting last fall. Ken Bradford, Dave Lefkowith, and others from the “content team”