Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has lined up some national Republican support for his outrage that the Justice Department is trying to block Louisiana's school voucher program in districts that are under desegregation orders. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott joined Jindal for an
outrage session on Wednesday, with Bush calling the Justice Department lawsuit "purely political." If by "purely political" you mean "intended to prevent schools from being segregated," it certainly is. If you mean, as Bush went on to say, "perhaps payback for political elections of the past," then no, not really.
As the Justice Department put it in its lawsuit:
[I]n the 2012-2013 school year, the State awarded scholarships to at least 570 students from 22, or nearly two-thirds, of the school districts operating under federal desegregation orders. In 13 of those school districts, State action in issuing vouchers to students caused the schoolwide racial demographics to stray further from district-wide demographic percentages and resulted in an increase in racially disproportionate representation in 34 historically segregated schools.
Jindal has
aggressively marketed vouchers to African-American families, while describing the voucher program as a
civil rights program (presenting various forms of school privatization as civil rights advances being a
very intentional strategy of the corporate education reform movement, as Diane Ravitch has described). But many of the private schools that accept vouchers are
church-run schools, often with extremely weak academic programs and
little financial oversight, and the Justice Department lawsuit makes clear that in many districts, resegregation is the end result of the program.
The Justice Department isn't trying to block Louisiana's entire voucher program, just make sure that it doesn't undo desegregation efforts. And that's got Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush, and Tim Scott terribly upset. Probably their anger isn't because they want increased segregation in Louisiana schools. But they certainly don't think that's a concern that should stand in the way of increased privatization in Louisiana schools.