Jihadi Jindal

So after Jindal accuses Attorney General Holder of trying to stand in the way of poor black children from getting to go to private schools just the way old George Wallace stopped the then Vivian Malone from going to the University of Alabama*, Holder sends Jindal a copy of John Lewis's Walking with the Wind with a bookmark at the page where Lewis notes that that Vivian Malone, later Vivian Malone Jones, who passed away in 2005, was Holder's sister-in-law, and Jindal responds with the following.

Dear AG Holder.Thx for your note. Watch this vid from parents who u r trying 2 block from having an equal opportunity http://t.co/dukN6O1kaW
— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) March 7, 2014

Cute video about more or less how God sent Jindal to Louisiana so these women could avoid sending their kids to the awful New Orleans public schools, but I've often wondered how many kids these programs rescue in this way, and so I put the question to Dr. Google. [jump]

*DOJ contends in an ongoing if not very active lawsuit that Jindal's private school voucher program tends to affect racial balance in some school districts under desegregation orders.

It turns out that the Louisiana Scholarship Program sends about 5,000 Louisiana children to private schools out of a total school population of around 712,000, or one one-hundred-forty-second of the total, 0.7%. Governor Jindal thinks he's a great big civil rights hero for doing something that might help less than one percent of a population that is 21% poor, second worst (behind Mississippi, of course) in the nation.

Vivian Malone Jones. Didn't say "Give me an equal opportunity that's denied to 99% of the population."

Governor Jindal thinks it would be just immoral to spend a bunch of money on the crappy schools taking care of 99.3% of Louisiana children, though he doesn't mind funneling some of that money to the charter operators that take care of about 49,000 or 6% of the children, with pretty ghastly results (as reported last November by Michael Deshotels, h/t Diane Ravitch) to pay untenured teachers with no pension plans and pocketing the savings thus generated.

This is a school system in such deep dysfunction that the state school board hasn't been able to agree on a new funding formula for schools since 2008 (ooh, guess who won his first gubernatorial election that year!). Although the per-pupil funding is officially frozen, nobody has managed to calculate what it is! By the way, the private schools the vouchers get you to aren't exactly Philips Exeter either:

Louisiana’s voucher program is comprised, in large part, of unaccountable and completely unregulated schools, many of which rely on thoroughly discounted, ahistorical, and anti-scientific curricula....

Perhaps some in Louisiana are under the impression that the voucher program allows kids to attend prestigious private schools like Jesuit and Newman in New Orleans or STM in Lafayette; those schools, however, are not participating. Instead, the overwhelming majority of voucher schools have names like “New Living Word,” “Light City Academy,” “Cenla Christian Academy” and “Family Worship Center Academy,” among others, many of which are brand new and at least one that is entirely comprised of voucher students.

And there's Jihadi Jindal complaining that Attorney General Holder is trying to deny an "equal opportunity" to that 0.7% of the cohort he's tried to take care of by sending them to what are, in essence, a bunch of fundamentalist Christian madrasas. Really? What's equal about it?

Governor George Wallace (Calvin Hanna/AP). Didn't insist that 13 school districts comply with desegregation orders (that's what Holder is asking).