Bobby Jindal is not the first governor to make education a top priority. Few haven’t. The dean of the Legislature, Sen. John Alario, says he has voted for “every education reform” past governors have come up with. “But all of that doesn’t seem to have worked at this point,” he lamented. “So I think it is a matter of going in and breaking it all apart and seeing what we can do to make it work,” concludes the man whom Jindal has tapped to be the next Senate president and so to handle the next attempt at education reform. Frustrated as Alario may be after 40 years of dealing with education, “breaking it all apart” won’t be the words Jindal uses when he unveils his proposals for K-12 in January. For that’s what leaders of teacher unions, superintendents and school boards suspect he’s trying to do and what they are gearing up to fight. A showdown with the education establishment may be just what many of his social-conservative and business allies want, especially after their endorsed candidates nearly swept the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education elections. Yet spending more money to win BESE elections and translating that mandate into legislation are different enterprises. Read the full column here.
(John Maginnis publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com.)
