利奥·拉文塔尔在周六路易斯安那州的选举日提前离开了。当投票站为民主党现任州长约翰·贝尔·爱德华兹和共和党千万富翁商人兼教育活动家埃迪·里士满之间备受关注的竞选打开大门时，退休的新奥尔良公立学校教师拉文塔尔站在杰斐逊大街上举着竞选标语。
与此同时，数百英里外的华盛顿，唐纳德·特朗普总统在推特上发布了对里士满的最后一击。总统为这个自称“保守局外人”的人努力竞选，在第二轮选举前的一个月里，他三次前往路易斯安那州。
和特朗普一样，里士满是一个有建筑背景的富商，他的大部分竞选活动都是基于他和特朗普在意识形态上的相似之处:支持商业、反对税收、支持基督徒、反对移民。“听听这位候选人的话，你肯定会听到两件事:商业和总统。”当地电视台WAFB的候选人里索尼简介开始了。
谁也猜不出“特朗普冲击”的支持会像密西西比泰特·里维斯那样对里士满有利，还是像肯塔基州州长马特·贝文那样失败。但是他的竞选与贝文有一个明显的相似之处:两位候选人都是当地教师工会的祸害。
拉文塔尔，这位前学校老师，周六既没有为里索尼也没有为爱德华兹竞选，尽管他说“那场比赛可能更重要。”相反，他正在为该州众议院候选人拉票。作为新奥尔良教师联合会的前执行副主席，拉文塔尔在得知她的对手得到了路易斯安那州儿童联合会的资助后选择了他的候选人，他称该组织是路易斯安那州教师工会的“复仇女神”，也是埃迪·里索尼的激情项目。
2019年11月14日，路易斯安那州博西尔市，在世纪链接中心的集会上，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普与共和党州长候选人埃迪·里索尼交谈。特朗普总统在集会上带头支持路易斯安那州共和党州长候选人埃迪·里索尼，他正寻求推翻现任民主党州长约翰·贝尔·爱德华兹。
2011年，里斯波内和他的妻子花了75万美元进行生产实验根据小拉马尔·怀特的报道，这是一部有点误导性的纪录片，宣传卡特里娜飓风后几年路易斯安那州向教育私有化的转变《河口简报》。第二年，时任政府官员鲍比·金达尔(Bobby Jindal)颁布立法，创建了全国最大的学校代金券计划，其中低收入家庭可以申请国家资助，将他们的孩子送到私立学校。
同年，即2012年，里士满帮助建立了美国儿童联合会路易斯安那分会，该分会自称是一个“致力于促进、保护和扩大私立学校选择和机会奖学金计划”的倡导团体左翼监督机构“资源观察”(SourceWatch)将该联盟描述为“一个保守的501(c)(4)暗钱集团，通过美国立法交流委员会(ALEC)和其他途径推动学校私有化议程。该组织由亿万富翁DeVos家族组织和资助。
代金券制度的想法是将面临经济困难的家庭从劣质公立学校中解放出来，否则这将是他们唯一的选择。截至2019年，将近7000名路易斯安那州儿童参加了代金券计划。代金券计划不但没有增加他们的机会，反而让州政府每年损失4000万美元，同时将学生引入更差的学校，联合调查报告发现了。
“路易斯安那州的项目构思不太好。教育部长贝茜·德沃斯(Betsy DeVos)在5月6日说，Rispone非常努力地开发这个系统。
尽管爱德华兹在他的上一次竞选和第一个任期内成功赢得了教师工会的支持——实施了像教师全面加薪1000美元这样的政策——但他们的善意可能不会像肯塔基州选举那样成为驱动力。
新奥尔良联合教师工会曾是该州最大的地方工会，自2005年以来，其成员急剧减少。卡特里娜飓风过后，该州暂时接管了该市遭受重创的公立学校系统。与该措施相反，许多机构通过成为特许学校来寻求自治，在2018年州政府将对新奥尔良公立学校的监督交还给当地学校董事会后，更多的公立学校选择了这一选择。Laventhal说，特许学校的工作人员必须决定是否选择加入工会，这一举措经常被管理者劝阻，因为特许学校不需要向教师提供医疗保健和退休计划等与工会学校同等的福利。
在新奥尔良，和该州其他地方一样，不断向特许学校和学费凭证转变得到了路易斯安那州中小学教育委员会(BESE)的支持，该委员会“通过法规和颁布政策，管理其管辖下的学校的运营，并对其教育项目和服务进行预算监督。”董事会由八名民选成员和三名委任成员组成。
自从成为州长以来，爱德华兹在路易斯安那州的教育政策上没有他的前任们有那么多的发言权，这要归功于“富裕的学校选择政策倡导者前所未有的、协调一致的支出激增”，这“确保了...怀特说:“BESE仍然勉强控制着帮助金达尔制造这次惨败的那群人。”。怀特报道说:“埃迪·里索尼和他的妻子亲自出资20万美元，帮助选出一批支持学校选择的BESE成员。”。
“在埃迪·里索尼的支持下，鲍比·金达尔破坏了我们的国家；削减高等教育比全国任何地方都多，削弱了我们的经济，造成了20亿美元的赤字。但是爱德华兹州长已经收拾了金达尔的烂摊子，让路易斯安那州朝着正确的方向前进。我们正在投资教育，扩大劳动人民获得医疗保健的机会，并发展我们的经济。如果埃迪·里索尼赢了，他会带我们回到金达尔失败的政策。路易斯安那州不想回去，”爱德华兹的竞选发言人埃里克·霍尔告诉记者新闻周刊通过电子邮件。
试图联系Rispone的活动没有得到回应。
TRUMP'S 'OUTSIDER' CANDIDATE IN LOUISIANA GOVERNOR'S RACE HAS A LONG HISTORY OF INFLUENCING POLICY
Leo Laventhal was out early for Louisiana's Election Day on Saturday. As polling stations opened their doors for the closely-watched contest between incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, and Eddie Rispone, a Republican multimillionaire businessman and education activist, Laventhal, a retired New Orleans public school teacher, stood on Jefferson Avenue holding a campaign sign.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away in Washington, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to post one final push for Rispone. The president has campaigned hard for the man who calls himself a "conservative outsider," making three trips to Louisiana in the month leading up to the runoff election.
Like Trump, Rispone is a wealthy businessman with a background in construction, and a great deal of his campaign has been based on his their ideological similarities: pro-business, anti-taxes, pro-Christians, anti-immigration. "Listen to this candidate and you're guaranteed to hear about two things: business, and the president" began local TV station WAFB's candidate profile of Rispone.
Whether the "Trump bump" endorsement will pan out for Rispone, as it did for Tate Reeves in Mississippi—or flop, as it did for Gov. Matt Bevin in Kentucky— is anyone's guess. But his campaign bears one marked similarity to Bevin's: both candidates were the scourge of local teachers unions.
Laventhal, the former schoolteacher, wasn't campaigning for either Rispone or Edwards on Saturday, though he said "that race is probably more important." Instead, he was canvassing for a candidate to the state's House of Representatives. A former executive vice president of the United Teachers of New Orleans, Laventhal had chosen his candidate upon learning that her opponent received funding from the Louisiana Federation for Children, an organization he called the "nemesis" of Louisiana's teachers unions—and a passion project for Eddie Rispone.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Republican candidate for governor, Eddie Rispone, during a rally at CenturyLink Center on November 14, 2019 in Bossier City, Louisiana. President Trump headlined the rally to support Louisiana Republican gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone, who is looking to unseat incumbent Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards.
In 2011, Rispone and his wife shelled out $750,000 to produce The Experiment, a somewhat-misleading documentary promoting the shift toward education privatization that occurred in Louisiana during the years immediately following Hurricane Katrina, according to reporting by Lamar White Jr. for Bayou Brief. The next year, then-Gov. Bobby Jindal enacted legislation to create the country's largest school voucher program, wherein low-income families could apply for funding from the state to send their children to private institutions.
That same year, 2012, Rispone helped establish the Louisiana branch of the the American Federation for Children, which describes itself as an advocacy group "dedicated to promoting, protecting, and expanding private school choice and opportunity scholarship programs." Left-wing watchdog SourceWatch described the federation as "a conservative 501(c)(4) dark money group that promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other avenues. The group was organized and is funded by the billionaire DeVos family."
The idea of the voucher system was to liberate families facing financial hardship from shoddy public schools that would otherwise be their only option. Almost 7,000 Louisiana children were enrolled under a voucher program as of 2019. Instead of improving their chances, voucher programs have cost the state $40 million per year while funneling students into worse schools, joint investigative reporting has found.
"The Louisiana program was not very well conceived. It has discouraged many schools from participating in it, and in fact has encouraged some schools that probably would not have been parents' first choices," Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said on May 6 of the system Rispone worked so hard to develop.
Though Edwards successfully won over the teachers unions during his last campaign and his first term—implementing policies like a $1,000 across-the-board raise for teachers—their goodwill may not be the driving force as it was in the Kentucky election.
The United Teachers of New Orleans, once the largest local labor union in the state, has seen its membership shrink drastically since 2005. After Hurricane Katrina, the state temporarily took over management of the city's battered public school system. In opposition to the measure, many institutions sought autonomy by becoming charter schools, a choice even more public schools opted for after the state yielded oversight of New Orleans public schools back to the local school board in 2018. Charter school staff must decide whether or not to opt in to union participation, a move that is often discouraged by administrators, as charter schools are not required to offer teachers benefits like health care and retirement plans on par with those mandated for unionized schools, according to Laventhal.
In New Orleans, as elsewhere in the state, the continual shift toward charters and tuition vouchers was supported by Louisiana's Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), which "adopts regulations and enacts policies governing the operations of the schools under its jurisdiction, and exercises budgetary oversight of their educational programs and services." The board is made up of eight elected and three appointed members.
Since becoming governor, Edwards has not had as much say in Louisiana's education policy as his predecessors, thanks to "an unprecedented and coordinated surge of spending by wealthy advocates of expansive school choice polices" that "ensured the ... BESE remained narrowly in the control of the very group of people responsible for helping Jindal create this fiasco," according to White. "Eddie Rispone and his wife personally sank $200,000 to help elect a slate of pro-school choice BESE members," White reported.
"With the support of Eddie Rispone, Bobby Jindal wrecked our state; cutting higher education more than anywhere else in the country, crippling our economy, and racking up a $2 billion deficit. But Gov. Edwards has cleaned up Jindal's mess and gotten Louisiana moving in the right direction. We're investing in education, expanding access to health care for working people, and growing our economy. If Eddie Rispone wins, he'll take us right back to Jindal's failed policies. Louisiana doesn't want to go back," Edwards' campaign spokesman Eric Holl told Newsweek via email.
Attempts to contact Rispone's campaign yielded no response.
