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Chas Roemer, a member of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, challenged the scholastic establishment to make Louisiana the leader in virtual education without raising the budget, and he lashed out at BESE for bureaucratic inaction. “The politics is so thick you can barely breathe,” he says of board meetings filled with teachers union members, school district staff and others with a “vested interest” in keeping the system from changing too much. Roemer outlined his ideas for overhauling K-12 education at the Baton Rouge Press Club today. Those ideas include giving parents a choice to pull students from failing schools, using student-based budgeting to make costs transparent and focusing on site-based management to empower individual school staff to effect change and become accountable for student success. “The Saints won the Super Bowl because they expected to win,” he says. “Too many don’t believe our kids can learn. If they don’t believe in the kids, why would the kids believe in themselves?” He also called for creating a separate board to approve charter schools, 77 of which are operating in the state, as an alternative to taking over underperforming institutions, 32 of which were seized in the past couple years. “There are consequences for failure,” Roemer says.

He pointed to New Orleans College Prep as a model charter school where “100% at-risk students” are labeled not as first-graders but class of 2024 members to inspire them to graduate from college. Quoting a teacher there, Roemer says, “My goal is to have these kids love to learn, not shrug their shoulders, not roll their eyes.”

One of Roemer’s budget proposals is to fire the bottom 5% of teachers and use $100 million in salary savings to give raises to the top 25%. He also proposes reallocating $40 million in annual stopgap funds for four years to invest in virtual education, where students could learn at home and districts could spend less on brick-and-mortar expenses and more on teacher salaries. “Treat teachers like professionals,” he says, adding that the burden of paperwork should be reduced and alternative certification should be emphasized. He also wants to limit the number of BESE meetings per year to six to make sure members focus on learning success: that is, rather than arguing over whether the state superintendent should visit Portugal, they should discuss whether students can find the country on a map.