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Louisiana Gov. Jindal Fights Washington War on School Vouchers
Saturday, 25 Jan 2014
By Andrea Billups and Jennifer G. Hickey

Gov. Bobby Jindal is battling to protect Louisiana’s fast-growing school voucher program from an all-out attack by the Obama administration.

The Justice Department claims the state’s private schools are defying a decades-old federal desegregation order.

In November, a judge ruled the Department could monitor Louisiana's voucher program, even though 90 percent of the 6,750 students who use the Louisiana Scholarship Program are minority, and 85 percent are black.

The Louisiana Scholarship Program originated in New Orleans in 2008 and Jindal expanded it to other parts of the state in 2012. Now 126 nonpublic schools participate in the program.

Eligible students must come from a family whose income does not exceed 250 percent of the federal poverty threshold. Students must be entering kindergarten or must transfer from a public school that has a poor rating from the state, according to the Louisiana Department of Education.

The Justice Department sued the state in August, first seeking a permanent injunction to stop the program. That request for an injunction was later halted and the DOJ dropped the lawsuit, but the department continues to seek a broader role in monitoring the program, including requiring a 45-day review before each student who receives a voucher scholarship can begin school.

Now Gov. Jindal is pushing back against the federal intervention in his state's educational system.

Jindal filed a 38-page response to the ruling earlier in January, asking a judge to overturn a 1976 "white flight" case that prohibited giving public funds to all-white private schools. In the filing, the state noted that private schools must be certified by the Justice Department as nondiscriminatory before allowing voucher students to enroll.

"The state strongly believes that it is equally wrong to block scholarship awards to eligible children of other races, but there is a special irony in the fact that the United States would inflict this harm on so many black children and families, all in the name of Brown v. Board of Education," attorneys wrote in the filing.

Jindal decried the Justice Department's overreach in a statement, noting he was "shocked" by the DOJ's attempt to seek racial composition profiles of private schools that take voucher students.

"President Obama’s Department of Justice has admitted it cannot prove that Louisiana school choice is violating desegregation efforts, yet it continues to seek the ability to tell a parent their child cannot escape a failing school because their child is not the 'right' race," Jindal said.

"The Department of Justice proposal reeks of federal government intrusion and proves the people in Washington running our federal government are more interested in skin color than they are in education," Jindal said.

Some education policy experts say the Justice Department's involvement in Louisiana can only harm the very children who need help the most.