It’s tough to keep Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards from giving Louisiana the middle-fingered salute when he’s determined, and that’s why the new Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will have to fix the mess of its predecessor, amplified by Edwards.

Last month, BESE narrowly passed into regulation a new policy that relaxes graduation requirements by allowing for an appeal process for failure to achieve (very low) minimums on standardized testing. Of the few states that have this component in their requirements, Louisiana was the only one that didn’t have an appeals process for that component.

Now it does, but this has numerous deficiencies as part of a extremely subjective, nebulous process with little accountability. Those aspects were brought forth in a House Education Committee meeting after publication in the Louisiana Register. State law allows specified committees to perform oversight of specified kinds of regulations five to 30 days after the Register published, which may then veto the regulation in question.

But the Administrative Procedure Act also gives the governor ten days to cancel that, which Edwards did, even as the 8-3 vote to do so contained some Democrat support. It echoed from almost two years ago Edwards’ veto of the House Health and Welfare Committee’s veto of a regulation to force Wuhan coronavirus vaccinations onto school children unless their parents affirmatively opted them out, for intellectually unsustainable reasons – which he subsequently ditched in time for the next school year

The Senate version could take up the matter and replicate the House’s attempt, but the timing is such that Edwards would be in office still and have the chance to respond as he did previously. So, the rule will go into effect as a final sop by Edwards to protect educrats and elected officials from facing accountability.

Probably the state needs an appeal process, but tightly constructed. Research indicates testing has superior predictive power than other instruments for education’s future impact on an individual’s life prospects and that it contains no significant bias favoring or disfavoring any demographic group. “Test anxiety” is not any permanent, immutable characteristic of individuals but a mental state that can be ameliorated through individual will and actions. And if a student has a disability that impacts learning and explication of that learning, procedures already exist for individual accommodation plans that will shape testing of that student’s knowledge.

That leaves a narrow subset of students who could point to idiosyncratic factors that might mitigate the impact of standardized test results which could benefit legitimately from an appeals process. That’s what the new BESE membership should work on.

And it’s extremely likely to do so in scuttling the new plan. As a result of new members like the House Education Committee chairman GOP state Rep. Lance Harris, who will assume a BESE post next year and who led the effort in the committee to veto the regulations, and Republican incoming governor Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry’s three picks for BESE who surely will bring a different view than the three Edwards appointees who voted lockstep in favor of the change, the only question is how quickly that will happen.

It’s too late for this academic year, but hopefully for the class of 2025 something will be in place negating the last pernicious action of Edwards impacting Louisiana education.