Thanks to Lefty, Dave Lefkowith, John White’s data scam is starting to take on a clearer shape. I just got another document from good ole Lefty from another new vendor called Cambium Education and Sopris Learning. It appears John White is planning to provide all of our student data to yet another inBloom-like vendor for DIBLELS data. This one will host quite a bit of data bases on reports they plan to make available to us in the RFP sent to Lefty on April 5^th. I will include the intro letter as well as the names and descriptions of some of the reports this vendor is offering to produce for us, which would require quite a bit of our children’s data to produce.

Cambium1

Cambium2

I thought I recognized the name Vivian Fox, the signatory on the RFP proposal, and went back through the hundreds of pages of sideways and upside down scanned image files DOE supplied us in response to a FOIA request. (Technically they filled the request, but searching for terms on an image file is impossible and any viewing program you use has to constantly be reoriented to compensate for the “accidentally” erroneously scanned images.)

Well as I was looking through it something I’d seen before but never quite registered caught my eye. This update by Ken Bradford, White’s newly created Assistant Superintendent of Content, sent to John White on January 2^nd, 2013.  (I think everyone White doesn’t name a fellow is some form of Superintendent.  I hear Lefty is sporting one of those titles on some of his business cards.)

According to this document there are over 1800 individual college level (Board of Regents) offerings and over 1200 technical course offerings, which did not exist last year.

Let that sink in.  How on earth could anyone validate 3000 new courses in less than a year? How could anyone hope to adequately review the credentials of the vendors providing them or hope to monitor them in any fashion whatsoever?  Is it any wonder we already have allegations of fraudulent enrollments?

John White claims there is a “rigorous approval process.”  According to this internal e-mail the process involved typing the names of 3000 courses from .pdf documents into an Agilix database, and then comparing those results to an Excel spreadsheet.  Sounds pretty rigorous to me!  I wonder just how many people and hours went into reviewing all these providers and course offerings?  Did DOE officials meet all of them in person, any of them?  Of course there is that “final rinse” they run by John White.  I’m sure John White will take any responsiblity for any problematic vendors and classes that get by his personally attended rigorous approval process. . .

Now back to this e-mail: According to this e-mail as of January 2^nd DOE had over 23 MOU’s signed for just Course Choice vendors!

We’ve heard before from John White that vendors/partners will have no access to student data? John White has not been able to produce a single MOU for inBloom, for which by some accounts he provided all of our data. These vendors, which could number in the hundreds, if not thousands, would have no need of an MOU if they were not using student data, would they? If the data was just used for registration purposes and safely locked up in our data garage why the 23 plus hundreds of additional potential MOUs? So many MOUs that they had to define a process to collect and update their vendor files with them all as a daily task way back in January!

John White may have emptied out the inBloom database, but that was just a sacrificial lamb. Course Choice is inBloom multiplied one hundred fold and it is already being used and abused by these vendors. John White and Chas Roemer assured us our children’s data was safe, but they lied. In the end their subterfuge may prove to be right about one thing though. . .

If you provide private data to everyone, and everyone has access to it, well then it’s hard to claim that it’s private anymore. Isn’t it?

Problem solved.

I wish I had something witty to say about this, but I’m sincerely stunned by the magnitude and sheer audacity of these two and the problems we are already beginning to see. It’s time for some resignations and/or criminal investigations.  Why are we even allowing a program that has no defined funding and has been ruled unconstitutional over and over, even by a 6-1 decision in our Supreme Court, to continue?  I’m not paying for it, John White and Chas Roemer haven’t offered to pay for them.

Pull the plug on vouchers and Course Choice now.

Don’t let Chas run the same excuse he made for voucher students, that Louisiana has a moral responsiblity to fund them.

Roemer said the money is due sometime in May and that the state has a moral and legal obligation to pay.

Our elected officials have a moral responsiblity to pass laws that are Constitutional, and when they don’t they should have the decency to fire themselves since they aren’t the ones that will have to pay for their incompetence, we are.  Do the moral thing Chas. . .  White.  Fire yourselves.  You owe it to all those students and parents you mislead and all the taxpayers you shafted with your ignorance and arrogance.

If you wanted our input, the public, we would have told you ”no.”  That’s why you didn’t ask with a Constitutional Amendment.  Now we are telling you “it’s time to go.”  You would be wise not to ignore us twice.