Our public schools have made tremendous progress over the last decade. Today, we are challenged to continue that progress and build on our successes.  Louisiana cannot stand still or turn away from successful, proven programs in the name of so-called “reforms” that would shortchange our schools and set up our students for failure. Moving forward requires vision and the will to commit the necessary resources to provide a quality public education for all students.

The working environment provided to educational employees is also a learning environment for our students. Educational employees consistently list working conditions as a major reason for leaving the profession. Furthermore, the Louisiana Association of Educators believes that all educational employees deserve reasonable working conditions, salaries, and benefits. 

LAE supports:

·       Legislation to give teachers significant across-the-board pay raises that will be passed through directly to teachers to help recruit and retain appropriately certified teachers in every classroom.

·       Legislation to maintain and strengthen due process provisions regarding contractual, statutory, and constitutional rights for all public school employees.

·       Louisiana should continue to financially reward those individuals who obtain National Board Certification and voluntarily hold themselves to much higher standards.

·       Legislation that provides mentors for new teachers. Data shows that an effective mentoring program like Louisiana’s LaTap program can reduce first year attrition rates to less than 10 percent.

·       Legislation mandating planning time, reduction in paperwork, limiting the number of meetings, and providing time for collaboration and professional learning. Giving teachers adequate preparation time is essential to successful teaching and learning. Students benefit when teachers have more time to teach. Teachers need less paperwork, fewer meetings, and more time to plan and collaborate.

·       Legislation to protect and enhance the Teachers Retirement System of Louisiana defined benefit program. All educational employees should be able to make plans for their retirement without worrying about the Legislature changing or reducing benefits. Retired educational employees deserve a system that provides annual cost of living adjustments and health insurance they can afford.

·       Legislation to maintain safe and orderly schools. Educational employees must have the authority to remove disruptive students and maintain discipline. Discipline must be dealt with in a uniform and effective manner. Student violence directed at staff or students must be dealt with swiftly and those students should be immediately removed to an appropriate alternative learning environment.

·       Legislation that provides all public school employees with a living wage, including annual cost of living adjustments.

LAE will oppose:

·       Legislation that would create incentive or merit pay programs based on a competitive model using standardized test scores. There is no way to attribute a student’s test performance to the performance of an individual teacher in a given year at a certain campus.

·       Legislation that would move the Teacher Retirement System toward a defined contribution system.

·       Legislation that would create a system that bases a teacher’s evaluation on a student’s test performance.

·       Legislation that would shift public tax dollars to private entities. Vouchers would take the funding we have for public schools and give it to students to attend schools that are exempt from our accountability system. LAE believes we should use our state resources to offer every student a quality public education.

·       Legislation that turns management of public schools over to for-profit companies. Experience has shown that privatization is a failed approach that provides an inferior education to our students.