LAE LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIES– 2011
The Louisiana Association of Educators believes that all educational employees deserve reasonable working conditions, salaries, and benefits. The working environment provided to educational employees is also a learning environment for our students. Educators have made tremendous progress over the last decade in educating our students.  Today, we are faced with relentless and barbaric attempts to dismantle public education and to stall progress and build on our successes.  The Louisiana Association of Educators will not 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 in Louisiana.
 
LAE will support:
• Legislation that improves a tax system to provide sufficient revenue growth to meet its constitutional obligations to fully fund pre-schools, K-12 schools and all public higher education institutions. In order for a wise and prudent investment in public education to be sustainable, policymakers must evaluate and reform the current tax structure for Louisiana.
• 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.
• Legislation that has appropriate induction programs that will ensure effectiveness and efficiency between pre-service and public school employment. Data shows that an effective mentoring program can reduce first year attrition rates to less than 10 percent.
• Legislation mandating unencumbered individual teacher planning time, reduction in paperwork, limiting the number of meetings, and providing time for teacher-driven collaboration and professional learning. Giving teachers adequate classroom 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 for instruction.
• Legislation to protect and enhance pre-Kindergarten through graduate school faculty sabbatical leave.
• Teacher evaluation systems that are based upon clear standards, encourage professional growth across a teaching career, take account of organizational supports and barriers to effective teaching, empower teachers to examine their work, and are based upon multiple sources of evidence and linked to teacher professional development.
• 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 reduce or eliminate any unintended consequences or limitations placed on a teacher returning to work upon retirement to teach in a part-time or substitute position.
• Legislation to maintain safe and orderly schools and provide programs to eliminate violence, including verbal and/or physical abuse of students or education employees that disrupts the learning environment.  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.  Educational employees must have the authority to remove disruptive students and maintain discipline. Discipline must be dealt with in a uniform and effective manner.
• Legislation to protect and enhance funding of (a) foreign language, arts and humanities; and physical education programs in K-12 schools and (b) an extensive variety of foreign language programs in higher education.
• Legislation that provides all public school employees with a living wage, including annual cost of living adjustments.
• Legislation that provides adequate funding and universal availability of quality pre-kindergarten programs for all children in Louisiana and adequate funding any extension of the PK-12 school day.

LAE will oppose:
• Legislation that would create incentive or merit pay programs based on a competitive model using standardized test scores.
• Legislation that would move the Teacher Retirement System toward a defined contribution system.
• Legislation that creates a system that bases a teacher’s evaluation on a student’s test performance. 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. Teacher evaluation policies should be developed that are evidence-based, supported by research, and use multiple measures.
• Legislation that reduces teacher participation and input in the school district’s decision-making process for waiver of state laws under Title17.
• 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.
• Legislation that would authorize the expenditure or appropriation of federal and state funds away from traditional public schools upon state take-over; or legislation that would authorize funding schemes that negatively impact traditional public school programs and student populations upon state take-over of traditional public schools.