Jindal has been resisting the Obama administration’s efforts to monitor the program. Court: La. must report voucher data

The Department of Justice has prevailed — at least in part — in a long-running and politically charged battle with Louisiana over the state’s private school voucher program.

Starting this fall, Louisiana must provide the agency with timely information about the racial background of participating students each year so the Justice Department can monitor the program’s effect on school segregation, a federal judge ruled Tuesday night.


The department could use that information to try to challenge some voucher awards.

“We welcome the court’s order, as it rejects the state’s bid to resist providing even the most basic information about how Louisiana’s voucher program will affect school desegregation efforts,” Attorney General Eric Holder said. “This ruling ought to resolve, once and for all, the unnecessary dispute initiated by the state’s refusal to provide data.”

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Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been strenuously resisting the Obama administration’s efforts to monitor the statewide voucher program, which subsidizes tuition at private and religious schools for thousands of low-income and middle-class students. Jindal, a likely candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, has repeatedly accused Obama of crushing the dreams of students who want only to escape their failing public schools.

“Who could be against giving choices to parents?” Jindal said at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. “Eric Holder and President Obama.”

Jindal claimed victory on Tuesday night, sending out a press release titled: “Ruling in DOJ Suit is a Win for Louisiana.”

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He noted that the DOJ did not get everything it wanted in the ruling — namely, the right to review student demographic information for a full 45 days before the state could let families know whether they’d been awarded vouchers to help them pay private-school tuition. Instead, Judge Ivan Lemelle gave the DOJ just 10 days to review the information.

“I am pleased that the court rejected President Obama’s Justice Department’s attempt to establish a review period where bureaucrats in Washington would be able to reject scholarship awards solely because the child is not the ‘right’ skin color,” Jindal said.

Though the governor had previously vowed to take the fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, he said on Tuesday that he was satisfied the ruling would not not burden the state or obstruct the voucher program. But he vowed to “remain vigilant that the Department of Justice will not take advantage of the information sharing process and use it as a means to further obstruct school choice.”

Under the court order, the state must send a spreadsheet with extensive information on each voucher applicant, including name, address and race; the public school, if any, the child attended the previous year; and the private school he or she would like to attend with the voucher. If the state is planning to award the child a voucher, it must also provide the name of the private school he or she will attend.

The Justice Department may use the information in “federal school desegregation cases in Louisiana,” the judge ruled. That latitude could allow the DOJ to seek to challenge distribution of some vouchers if its lawyers determined that sending the students to private schools would disrupt federal efforts to keep the public schools integrated.

Jindal and other leading Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, have made the legal battle with the DOJ into a cause celebre on the right.

At CPAC last month, Jindal described the case as an assault on the American dream — and on the poor children of Louisiana.

“Essential to the American dream is making sure every child gets a great education, but many children are trapped in failing schools,” he said.

Holder started the fight last year when he sought an injunction to halt the voucher program out of concern that sending thousands of students to private schools would upset the racial balance in some public school districts.

Last November, however, Holder abandoned his effort to block the program and instead demanded information on each participating student. Jindal responded angrily, saying it would be a “tremendous burden” on the state to provide that information. Obama, he said, was trying to “red tape the program to death.”

Louisiana also published an analysis asserting that the program did not hurt — and may actually help — school integration.

About 7,000 children, most of them minorities, attend private schools using the vouchers. Students are eligible if they live in households with incomes of up to 250 percent of the federal poverty line – or about $59,000 a year for a family of four. Older students must also be enrolled in a school rated C, D or F on the state’s A-F grading scale to qualify for a voucher.

Children about to enter kindergarten are eligible if they meet the income guidelines, regardless of the quality of their neighborhood schools.

The legal fight has taken many twists and turns over the past few months, as both sides have dug in their heels and ratcheted up the rhetoric.

Perhaps anticipating more disputes, Judge Lemelle spelled out in a five-page order exactly how and when the state must turn over information about voucher students, including the detail that “all Microsoft Excel spreadsheets will include the delineated data separated by appropriate columns and rows, with a corresponding data dictionary/key.”