Education is Louisiana's top priority today! There is excitement, energy, and hope about education in Louisiana, a state traditionally ranked near the bottom of the 50 states on educational quality and effectiveness. This state is also near the bottom on measures of the wealth and health of its citizens, but a turnaround is underway. Historically, one common perception of Louisiana has been that of a state defined by opposites which often fall along racial and socioeconomic lines: those who send their children to private schools and those who cannot; those who are powerful and those who are not; those who have professional careers and those who have jobs in agriculture, the service sector, or the oil industry. Today, however, people from these diverse groups are working together to improve education by facing the challenges, barriers, and inertia head-on.

Educational leaders in Louisiana are taking an approach to reform that focuses on the entire educational system to ensure that change takes place in an integrated way, rather than progressing in a piecemeal fashion. They are looking to the national reform movement for guidance and support in improving the quality of education for all students in the state. Teaching in Louisiana is expected to improve as teachers are given more resources, responsibilities, and opportunities to learn new skills. Students should have improved educational experiences as problems throughout the system are addressed. Let's look at how the story of education in Louisiana unfolds.

Economic Realities Lead to Support for Educational Reform

Economic realities have helped mobilize the general public to support educational reform in Louisiana. The oil and gas industry plays a pivotal role in the state. Louisiana is the third largest U.S. producer of oil and natural gas and is a center of petroleum refining and petrochemical manufacturing. During the oil boom of the 1970s and early 1980s, oil and gas accounted for 30 to 41 percent of the state's revenue, adding $1.6 billion to state coffers in 1981-82. Times were good; there was little incentive for the state to diversify its industrial base. However, what was good for the state economy was not necessarily good for public education.

The ready availability of well-paying, low-skill roughneck jobs in the oil patch reduced the incentive for many students to complete high school. This attitude is often blamed for the state's high literacy rate, low national test scores, and low graduation rate (5). Those who controlled the purse strings share a similar attitude toward investment in education; spending for schools and teacher salaries in Louisiana was ranked lower than nearly all of the 50 states. The oil industry has thus been described as having a "profound impact on attitudes [of policymakers, voters, and students] toward education" (5, p. 4).

This history of low funding for public education has also been attributed to the high rate of private and parochial school attendance among the state's affluent and nonminority students. Many middle- and upper-class families, including state decision makers, have traditionally sent their children to these schools--it is a way of life in Louisiana--and thus, had relatively little interest in increasing financial support for public schools (7). Another factor contributing to the traditionally low rate of spending on education may be the large rural population in the state, which is said to be leery of change in general and to have had a limited interest in pursuing educational change.

During the mid-1980s, oil prices declined. Oil companies reduced their exploration and drilling activity and laid off workers. An economic crisis resulted--high unemployment coupled with a poorly educated workforce. The state's income from oil and gas plummeted and has never recovered to boom levels. [In 1997, oil and gas revenues contributed only 12% or $723 million of total state revenues.] This situation changed the public view of education, as many people realized that diversifying the state's economic base was critical and that "a well-trained work force [was] the key to attracting and maintaining new industry" (5, p. 5). Writing in 1990 about the impact of this shift in attitude, education leaders said, "change became inevitable--not merely tolerated, but demanded . . . . The changing mood of the last decade, driven by a deep economic crisis, has now created a consensus that compels reform" (5, p. 5). The challenge was to find ways to put more money into education--to go against the low priority placed on school funding (1).

There was a general economic upturn in the country during the mid-1990s. Louisiana reported increases in available jobs in most sectors, with decreased reliance on oil and gas. Unemployment dropped from 13.1 percent in 1986 to 6.9 percent in 1995. The oil industry stabilized, but at a lower production level and with fewer high-wage, low-skill jobs (10). Despite the overall gains, Louisiana still has one of the highest percentages of persons living in poverty in the nation (19.7% for all persons and 31.0% for children in 1995 [7, 10]). Related measures--the general health of the population, rate of violent crime, infant mortality rate, and child well-being--add to the picture of a state facing problems on many fronts (6). Improving education is seen as a way to change that picture.

Education visionaries are beginning to convince citizens and policy makers to improve the quality of education in the state by spending more money on education. Economic realities have helped enlist the support of the general public for reform, but questions persist. What kinds of improvements should be made to the educational system? How much will it cost? Where will the money come from? As elsewhere, these are hot topics in Louisiana.

State Population (1996)a	4,350,579
Percentage African-American	31.6
Percentage Hispanic	2.4
No. of school districtsb	66
No. of public schoolsb	1459
Percentage urban	32
Percentage suburban and large town	19
Percentage rural and small town	49
No. of public school students (1995-96)a	767,796
No. of private school students (12.1%)b	105,688
Per pupil spending (1996)b	$4,194
U.S. averageb	$5,541
Louisiana rankb	45th

The Political Agenda Pushes Educational Reform

In Louisiana, stories of power struggles between the governor, legislature, state superintendent, state boards of education, and teacher unions are common. A 1988 report on reform in Louisiana concluded that, "Those who tried to change the system have time and again seen reform measures watered down, ignored, not properly implemented, taken to court by teacher unions, repealed, mired down in turf battles and power struggles between public bodies, or not funded" (3). This is changing as education leaders in the state come together to solve the substantial problems facing Louisiana education. Each successive governor has had his own approach to educational issues, setting the tone for legislation. Mike Foster, who took office in 1996, brought education to the forefront. His agenda reflects national trends and includes setting high academic standards, developing appropriate assessments, establishing greater school accountability, increasing staff development time, turning more control over to districts and holding them accountable for results, making the charter-school law less restrictive, and providing better preparation for children to start school.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) has eight elected members and three members appointed by the governor. BESE supervises and controls the public elementary, secondary, vocational, and special schools and has budgetary responsibility for all state-appropriated school funds for K-12 schools. In July 1999, control of vocational schools will be transferred from BESE to the Board of Regents (BoR), which has responsibility for higher education in the state. Prior to 1987, the state superintendent of education was an elected official whose political position on education was often at odds with those of BESE members. In 1987, Louisianans voted to change the superintendency to an appointed position, thus reducing some of the political tension between BESE and the superintendent. A former state senator and chairman of the Senate Education Committee, Cecil J. Picard, was appointed superintendent by BESE in 1996. He heads the Louisiana Department of Education (LDE) and is responsible for carrying out BESE policies and laws affecting the public schools.

Today, there is the sense that the governor, superintendent, legislators, and board members are all on the same page, moving in the same direction, to get Louisiana out of the basement with regard to educational quality (7). Their commitment reflects the recent history of educational reform in Louisiana that began with collaboration to acquire federal grants and continues with a systemic approach to improving education.