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.”
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.”
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.
