A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

People like their own public schools

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I just read a post by Steve Hinnefeld reporting on recent polling about attitudes about schools. While attitudes about schools in the abstract are very negative, people like the schools where they send their own kids.

In the recent Gallup poll, 76% of parents said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the school attended by their oldest child. But, among all respondents, only 36% were satisfied with the nation’s schools, tying the all-time low. That’s a huge gap: 40 percentage points.

Gallup has been polling about education since 1999, and the divide between parents and others has been a consistent finding. Most parents have always given high marks to their own children’s schools, but they tend to be more skeptical of the nation’s schools. People with no direct experience with schools are the most likely to give America’s schools low grades.

I don’t know exactly what that says when real-world experience with a thing is largely positive while thinking about the same thing in the abstract ends up being significantly more negative. I suppose that means that a lot of fiction about schools is being thrown at people which persuades them until they actually find themselves dealing with the objective reality. For those Lord of the Rings fans out there, I have the image of Gríma Wormtongue whispering into the ear of Theoden; turning him into a bitter, decrepit old man who sits around inside all day. This, in turn, poisons the atmosphere of Rohan and saps its strength.

So, I don’t know, maybe turn off the cable news, get outside and go find a way to volunteer with your local school system.

Political Activists Hinder Mental Healthcare for Students

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Dylan Peers McCoy, writing for WFYI, has a report on the need for mental healthcare among Indiana’s students and the political activists who are standing in the way. Per the article:

Mental health needs are at a peak among U.S. children and teens. A 2021 national survey found that nearly half of Indiana high schoolers felt persistently sad or hopeless — the highest rate in two decades of surveys. The same survey found that three out of every 10 Indiana students said they had considered suicide.

…

Yet despite the growing need, the kind of mental health support Dodds found at school is facing an onslaught of criticism from conservative parent activists. They say schools should focus on academic instruction. And they caution that mental healthcare and social and emotional learning may promote ideas that conflict with parents’ values.

“A small but loud and politically savvy group of — and it’s not just of parents, it’s really of political activists — are hijacking and spreading a lot of misinformation about mental health and social emotional learning in schools and really leveraging people’s fear,” said Sharon Hoover, co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health.

In Indiana this year, Republicans passed a law that restricts school districts’ ability to survey students as to their mental health and emotional well-being. It has to do with a push against “social and emotional learning” which helps students with skills such as managing their emotions and feeling empathy for others.

I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, but this right-wing push against social emotional learning seems to be kind of a buzzword driven thing. Activists sort of project their anxieties onto some jargon, turn it into something it’s not, and then crusade against the straw man they have created. In this situation, I think they’ve associated the approach to mental wellness with their usual uneasiness over things having to do with gender, race, and interpersonal relationships. So maybe they think they’re fighting a shadowy cabal of educators trying to convince their kid that they are really transgender or maybe that they should be ashamed of being white. But really they’re taking away a tool that might help kids feel a little less miserable as they’re learning to navigate the world.

7th Circuit Affirms District Court Injunction on Use of School Bathrooms by Transgender Students

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The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has a very thoughtful opinion pertaining to use of school bathrooms by transgender students. The outcome was that the 7th Circuit affirmed District Court opinions in two cases that entered injunctions against Martinsville schools and against Vigo County School District which require the schools to allow the Plaintiffs, transgender boys in both cases, to use the boys bathroom in the schools.

They based their opinion on a few things:

  • A) There is 7th Circuit precedent from a Wisconsin case that supports this result.
  • B) The precedent stands for the proposition that when Title IX prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex,” it is talking about “sex” in the social context (i.e. gender) and not just as a biological matter;

  • C) There is already a split in opinion between the 4th and 11th Circuits on the subject of whether Title IX means “sex” solely as a matter of biology. The 7th Circuit and the 4th are currently aligned in thinking “sex” means something more than just chromosomal make up. Shifting gears and joining the 11th Circuit would still leave a split among Circuits. One way or another, the Supreme Court or Congress is going to have to reconcile the split.

  • D) When considering injunctions, courts are required to balance harms. The students have pointed to very real harms they are experiencing by being required to either use the girls’ bathrooms or the unisex bathroom in the nurse’s office. Meanwhile, the schools are “fighting a phantom.”

    “Gender-affirming facility access does not implicate the interest in preventing bodily exposure, because there is no such exposure. . . . There is no evidence that any students will be exposed to A.C. or vice versa. Common sense tells us that the communal restroom is a place where individuals act in a discreet manner to protect their privacy and those who have true privacy concerns are able to utilize a stall.”

Judge Easterbrook concurred in the result but not in the opinion. He thinks they should follow precedent and, therefore, affirm the injunction. That said, he thinks the 11th Circuit is probably right that the authors of Title IX probably had biological sex in mind when they wrote it. Even though he holds that view of the law, he observes:

Like my colleagues, I’m puzzled that the school districts did not act on the logical implication of these orders. Much of life reflects social relations and desires rather than instructions encoded in DNA. Nurture and nature both play large roles in human life. Classifying as ‘boys’ youngsters who are socially boys (even if not genetically male) is an act of kindness without serious costs to third parties.

 

2023 West Lafayette Community School Corporation Referendum

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West Lafayette Schools will be putting their school tax rate referendum on the November ballot. If you are a voter in the District, please vote “yes.”

Introduction

West Lafayette Schools get 18% of their current funding through a referendum approved property tax rate. Voters in the district need to renew this rate periodically or it goes away. Of the 290 school districts in Indiana, West Lafayette ranks 288th in support from the State under the State School Funding Formula. To maintain the kinds of schools we want, we need to renew the referendum property tax rate.

The State changed the way schools were funded in 2009. The new funding mechanisms put West Lafayette at a disadvantage.  In response, to adequately fund our schools, the community took advantage of the new (in 2009) referendum tool, adopting a tax rate in 2010 and again in 2017. Absent money from the referendum tax rate, our schools would not  be able to provide the quality of education our community wants. The rate is up for renewal again in November 2023. Non-renewal would mean an 18% reduction in funding, fewer teachers, larger class sizes, and fewer opportunities for our students.

West Lafayette gets less education funding from the State than just about any other school district, even as our district has the highest expectations and ambitions for the quality of education in our community. Renewal of the referendum means that we leave the current tax structure in place and can maintain our excellent schools. The tax rate will remain the same as it has been since the first referendum was approved in 2010. When the time comes, please vote “yes” to approve the referendum.

Vote “yes” to continue the excellence of West Lafayette’s schools. The tax rate will stay the same. State law requires that we vote to renew it periodically.

School Funding in Indiana

In 2008, the Indiana General Assembly substantially restructured its property tax laws. This was in response to an Indiana Supreme Court decision which required the State to change the way it handled real estate assessments. For a variety of reasons, this led to a politically unpopular level of real estate taxes and prompted the State to shift away from real estate taxes in favor of a greater reliance on other types of taxes such as income taxes and sales taxes. This had a significant impact on how schools are funded.

Each school district has three main funds: the education fund, the operations fund, and the debt service fund. School districts like West Lafayette which have adopted a referendum tax rate also have a fourth, referendum fund.

Education Fund – funded by the State through sales taxes

As part of this transition away from real estate taxes, because schools had relied so heavily on such taxes, the State took over the bulk of school funding and increased the statewide sales tax to pay for it. Money provided by the State goes into each school’s “Education Fund.” This is the fund that pays for expenses allocated to student instruction and learning.

The State uses a per-student formula to determine how much money it will put into a school’s Education Fund.  This formula is revised every budget year. But, generally, there is a base (foundation) rate which is the same for every school district. Added to this is a “complexity” rate which is tied to a district’s socioeconomic condition. (The number of students eligible for free and reduced lunch subsidies are pretty well correlated with the size of a district’s complexity rate.) (Edit 7/12/2022: I believe I’m out of date on the “complexity rate.” Starting in 2020, the base amount is supplemented with a special education grant, a career and technical grant, and an honors grant — West Side’s supplemental funding above the base rate remains small compared to other districts.)

Because West Lafayette is in better shape economically than most of the rest of Indiana, our supplemental funding from the state above the base rate is small. Consequently, our school district gets the third least amount per student. In 2022, the State contributed $6,470 per West Side student; an amount which ranked 288th out of 290 school districts in the State. The median rate is around $7,250 and the highest per student rate is IPS with $11,281 per student. West Lafayette has approximately 2,420 students meaning the State’s contribution to the Education Fund under this formula would be around $15.6 million. There are some other State contributions that add to this fund and, for 2023, the certified Education Fund budget was $17.5 million.

West Lafayette is nearly last in per pupil funding received by the State. We need to renew our local referendum rate if we want to maintain the quality of our schools.

Operation Fund – funded by local real estate taxes

The school Operation Fund is funded by revenues from local real estate taxes. Schools are inevitably going to have non-classroom operational expenses (e.g. buses, administration, utilities, and a lot of other things needed to support the classroom operations). These sorts of expenses are paid for using the Operation Fund. The 2023 certified budget for this fund was $5.8 million.

The revenues in this fund come from local property taxes which are subject to Indiana’s tax cap laws. (Generally, the total local taxes assessed on a property cannot exceed 1% of the assessed value for residential property, 2% for rental property and agricultural property, and 3% for other kinds of commercial property.)

Debt Service Fund – funded by local real estate taxes

The Debt Service Fund pays for capital expenses, usually bonds and long-term leases for building construction and renovation. Construction costs are an inevitable fact of life for school corporations. Buildings only last so long and sometimes schools need greater capacity. Indiana’s municipal funding rules do not generally permit schools to accumulate taxes in order to save up prior to doing major construction. Therefore these expenses are usually paid for through bond issuances or (for arcane historical reasons) long-term leases with a municipal building corporation (which are functionally the same thing as bonds.)

The 2023 certified budget for WLCSC’s debt service fund was $6.2 million. Revenues in this fund are not permitted to be used for non-capital purposes such as teacher salaries. Occasionally when school funding is discussed, people argue that teachers could be paid more if the school buildings were not so nice. Leaving aside the fact that kids don’t learn well in squalor, taxes imposed for the debt service fund are not permitted to be used for operational purposes such as increasing teacher pay.

The taxes levied to support the debt service fund are also subject to Indiana’s tax cap laws. (1% cap on owner-occupied residential, 2% cap on rental and agricultural property, and 3% on other commercial property). In Indiana, debt service on bonds is usually protected. Therefore, if the tax caps cause a shortfall in revenues, bonds will get paid and the shortfall will be taken out of the other funds. For West Lafayette, this means that the Operation Fund bears the brunt of these “circuit breaker” credits. Due to tax caps, the Operation Fund  gets reduced by approximately 31% of what would otherwise be generated.

Referendum Fund – funded by local real estate taxes

The Referendum fund consists of money from a referendum approved tax rate. This is the rate that will be on the ballot because the State requires it to be renewed by voters periodically. This rate is not subject to the tax caps. In 2010, when the district first approved the rate, the voters approved a referendum tax rate of up to $0.43 per hundred dollars of assessed value. Even though the rate was approved at up to that level, in practice the school board never approved a budget imposing a tax rate that high. The approved rate ends up being a maximum. The actual amount is based on the budget approved by the school board each year.  Between 2010 and 2017, the budget approved by the school board each year never included a referendum rate that exceeded $0.37 per hundred dollars of assessed value. Therefore, when it came time to renew the tax rate, the maximum referendum rate on the ballot was lowered by the school board from $0.43 to $0.37 per hundred dollars of assessed value. (This did not stop the Journal and Courier from running a headline at the time suggesting that the School Board was trying to raise taxes.)

Money in the current referendum fund (approved, as it was, via the process in place in 2017) can be used for any lawful school expense. Historically money from that rate has been used in West Lafayette for student instruction and learning. In recent years, the State created certain incentives making it beneficial for the schools to spend less State money on non-instructional operations. (As a political matter, it’s more popular to declare that money is spent on instruction rather than on the more mundane administrative expenses that make instruction possible). So, West Lafayette removed some operational expenses from the Education Fund and began paying for them from the Referendum Fund and moved some educational expenses from the Referendum Fund to the Education Fund.

Changes in the referendum process since 2017 require the school to specify the uses in the referendum question. The upcoming referendum will likely specify that revenues will be used “for the purpose of retaining and attracting teachers and staff and funding academic programming and operating expenditures.” Functionally, this would appear to permit paying for expenses that would otherwise be payable out of the Education or Operation funds but not for expenses that would be payable out of the Debt Service fund.

Referendum funds make up 18% of the School’s total budget. If the referendum rate goes away, so does 18% of the school’s funding and, with it, manageable class sizes and many of the programs that make West Side great.

The Property Tax Bill

The referendum tax rate has an impact on local real estate tax bills. Those can be confusing, so it might be useful to look at how the tax bill works.

A real estate tax bill for a homeowner starts with the gross assessed value of the home. In rough terms, this should be something like the market value of the home. That assessed value is reduced by a series of deductions (most commonly, the homestead deduction, the “supplemental standard” deduction, and a mortgage deduction). The gross assessed value minus the deductions results in the net assessed value. The net assessed value is multiplied by a tax rate to generate the amount of tax owed. The tax rate consists of the combined tax rates of the taxing jurisdictions in which a home is located – generally, the city, the county, the school district, the township, the library district and the solid waste management district. If the resulting tax bill exceeds (in the case of an owner-occupied home) 1% of the gross assessed value, then the tax caps kick in and generate a “circuit breaker” credit in an amount sufficient to lower the tax bill to the cap amount.

I know, I know. This stuff gets confusing.

Let’s take as an example, a home with a $200,000 gross assessed value. That property is entitled to a homestead deduction of $45,000. It is also entitled to a “supplemental standard” deduction of 35% of the assessed value (after the homestead deduction). That would be another $54,200 deduction. A mortgage deduction of $3,000 would result in total deductions of $102,200 and a net assessed value of $97,800. (The $200,000 gross assessed value minus the combined deductions.)

The net assessed value is multiplied by the tax rate to determine the amount of tax owed. Each parcel of real estate exists within the jurisdiction of multiple taxing units. Most (but not all) real estate in the West Lafayette school district also exists within Tippecanoe County, the City of West Lafayette, the West Lafayette Library District, Wabash Township, and the Tippecanoe County Solid Waste Management District. Each of those jurisdictions impose a tax rate. Tax rates are expressed in terms of dollars per hundred dollars of assessed value. For 2022/pay 2023 (taxes in Indiana are assessed in one year and paid the following year), those tax rates were:

  • County 0.4156
  • Township 0.0026
  • School 1.2555*
  • City 0.8729
  • Library 0.1768
  • Solid Waste 0.0503
  • Total: 2.7737

*Of the 1.2555 School tax rate, 0.37 comes from the referendum, 0.5375 comes from the debt service fund, and 0.3480 comes from the operations fund. Because the referendum fund is not subject to tax caps, only 0.8855 of the school tax rate and 2.4037 of the total tax rate is subject to the 1% tax cap. That becomes important in a moment.

The $2.7737 per $100 of assessed value is multiplied by the $97,800 net assessed value ($978 * 2.7737) to generate a tax bill of $2,712.68. There is yet another tax deduction having to do with a local income tax imposed in Tippecanoe County for the purpose of providing property tax relief. That provides another deduction which amounts to about $223 and a tax bill of $2,489.68. Now the tax caps kick in. For an owner-occupied residence with a gross assessed value of $200,000, a 1% — $2,000 – cap applies.

Recall that $361.86 from the referendum ($978 * .37) is outside of the tax cap. The remaining $2,127.82 ($2,489.68 – $361.86) is governed by the cap. Because of the cap, the taxpayer gets an additional “circuit breaker” credit of $127.82 resulting in a total tax bill of $2,361.86. If the referendum rate were not in place, the total tax bill would be $2,000.

West Lafayette’s Need

The referendum fund will generate approximately $7 million or about $2,900 per student for West Lafayette Schools in 2023. This represents approximately 18% of the school’s $39 million annual budget. Reducing the budget by 18% would have a severe impact on our students and on our community. It would mean fewer teachers, larger classes, and a reduction in art, music, and extra-curriculars.

The referendum question that is likely to appear on the ballot would specify that money from the referendum rate would be “for the purpose of retaining and attracting teachers and staff and funding academic programming and operating expenditures.”

A variety of factors make West Lafayette a good candidate for the referendum rate:

  • Low State funding. West Lafayette gets the third lowest per student funding in the State.
  • Landlocked District. The State funds schools on a per-student basis. West Lafayette already has the highest population density in the State. There is not a significant opportunity for further development in the school boundaries that is likely to add substantially more students.
  • High real estate values. The “supplemental standard” tax deduction is a percentage of a property’s value, meaning that addition of this deduction by the General Assembly removes more assessed value from the West Lafayette school district than average. High values also mean that, in general, the residents of West Lafayette have greater wherewithal to fund a referendum rate.
  • TIF Districts. A TIF District is an economic development tool that (more or less) sets a base assessed value for a specified geographic area at a particular moment in time. When that assessed value grows, the additional tax revenue is used for economic development rather than for other tax purposes (such as for school funding.) More of West Lafayette than average is locked up in TIF Districts. In West Lafayette, 39% of the net assessed value is in TIF districts compared to a statewide average of 9%.  This means that growing assessed value does not assist the operations fund or the education fund. Referendum rates are not subject to the TIF limitations.
  • Rental properties. West Lafayette has more rental properties than usual. They are subject to a 2% tax cap rather than the 3% cap that applies to other types of commercial property.
  • Textbook and curricular fees. A new wrinkle in State law this year is that schools are prohibited from charging fees for textbooks and other curricular materials. The State will provide some funding to compensate for the lost revenue, but at the time I write this, it seems likely that state funding will fall short of the lost revenue.

Conclusion

As Caleb Mills said on the subject of Indiana education in 1848, “There is but one way to secure good schools, and that is to pay for them.” But there is a related quote from Dr. Mills that is even more relevant to the referendum question: “Awaken the public mind, and concentrate it on the question, ‘Am I not interested in the proper education of all that are socially and politically connected with me?’” 

A good education is not just a benefit to those students who happen to be in the school district at the moment. Quality schools benefit the community generally. They attract people who want the best for their children. They produce adults who are productive, creative, and give back to the community. Whether you have students in the schools or not, our great schools make West Lafayette a better place to live.

The State provides West Lafayette with less education funding than other school districts in Indiana. By voting “yes” to the referendum question, we will ensure that the tax rate remains the same and our schools will continue to be funded adequately.

(I drew a great deal of information from Dr. Larry DeBoer’s May 22, 2023, presentation to the West Lafayette School Board. His power point is available here.)

RDP! Vote “Yes” and keep our schools strong.

 

Purdue Exponent on Perennial Cursive Legislation Attempts

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The Exponent has an article on Sen. Leising’s perennial efforts to mandate cursive in Indiana’s schools. It’s of local interest since Rep. Klinker joined her in a sort of compromise measure to have schools report data on cursive instruction. The article didn’t really give any voice to the people (like me) who oppose a cursive mandate, so I thought I’d go ahead an comment yet again on the issue.

Knowing how to read and write cursive is not as important as it once was. Even when I was a kid, the time spent on the subject was out of line with its value. Now, cursive has much less value than it once did. Schools should decide for themselves how much time is justified as compared to other subjects. The proponents concerns are generally over-wrought appeals to emotion. “They won’t be able to read the Constitution!” There are digital copies and if it’s really important you can teach them to read the Constitution in a fairly rapid amount of time. But, keep in mind, almost none of us could make sense of Magna Carta and it’s pretty foundational to Western Democracies. “Kids won’t be able to sign their names!” As the article involved demonstrates, this can be taught in a matter of minutes.

I think cursive is on its way out. As more and more people find the form of communication archaic, the burden will shift to people inclined to write in cursive to communicate in a different way. I think I still have some 5 1/4 floppies in the basement, but I would never transmit information using them, expecting that a recipient will have a 1541 floppy drive available. Also, not really in this article, but a lot of times proponents will dive into arguments about memory and motor skills. Those benefits are largely realized when the form of writing is printing rather than cursive.

The bottom line is that time is a limited resource. Time spent learning cursive is time not spent learning something else. I trust my local teachers and school officials to weigh the costs and benefits a lot more than I do the folks in the General Assembly.

General Assembly Sneaks in School Library Obscenity Language at Last Minute

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Casey Smith, writing for the Indiana Capital Chronicle, reports on the last minute amendment to HB 1447 in the waning hours of session to combat the non-existent “problem” of obscenity in school libraries. There just isn’t a scourge of obscene material floating around our school libraries. The idea that we need to adopt a law creating a procedure to deal with obscenity in school libraries is one of those “the question is an accusation” kind of dynamics. “They wouldn’t need a process if there wasn’t a significant problem would they?”

The language slipped into the bill requires a school to have a process to handle complaints by a parent or community member requesting that a school library remove material that is obscene or is harmful to minors under the respective statutory definitions for each. “Harmful to minors” largely tracks the obscenity language but is slightly broader, so I’ll quote it here:

A matter or performance is harmful to minors for purposes of this article if:

(1) it describes or represents, in any form, nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sado-masochistic abuse;

(2) considered as a whole, it appeals to the prurient interest in sex of minors;

(3) it is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable matter for or performance before minors; and

(4) considered as a whole, it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

It’s good that the new language limits the complaint process to community members or parents of students. It’s also good that the standard is basically an obscenity standard rather than merely something that a person finds offensive.

But the obnoxious element is that it requires the process include a public hearing at the governing body at its next public hearing. So, it encourages grandstanding and, by setting a limited time table for the hearing, discourages deliberation.  I think my inclination would be to set up a system with a rigorous screening process that requires the person making the complaint to make an initial showing in their complaint filing that the material of which they complain meets the “harmful to minor standards.” In other words, you have to make a credible presentation showing that the material you’re complaining of meets all four of those elements necessary for something to be “harmful to minors.” If you can’t make the initial showing and you’re just complaining about non-obscene material that you happen to find offensive, then this process is not for you; and you don’t get your complaint elevated to the level of a public hearing in front of the school board.

Just thinking outside the box, I wonder if you could create some kind of opt-in mailing list of community members who want to know when someone is trying to remove materials from the library and, as part of the process, the person making the complaint has to send notice of their intention to everyone on that list so that those concerned citizens would have an opportunity to attend the hearing.

Anyway, this is another entirely unnecessary law. In this case, it seems designed to reinforce the unfounded notion that our kids are under attack by shadowy, lurking forces that would corrupt them. Maybe in the school library! (Incidentally, I was just watching a documentary on Judy Blume. People lost their damn minds about her books 50 years ago. So, history may not repeat, but it rhymes.)

State Budget: $1.1 Billion in Private School Subsidies; Public School Funding Won’t Keep Up with Inflation

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Casey Smith, writing for the Indiana Capital Chronicle, has a report on the nearly final state budget’s impact on education. Some of the key take aways:

  • The General Assembly will appropriate $1.1 billion over the two year budget cycle to subsidize private schools. A family of four making $220,000 per year will be eligible for the subsidy.
  • The public school appropriation, increasing by 5.1% over two years, likely won’t even keep up with inflation (assuming inflation will be more than 2.6% per year.)
  • A pilot program in Lake, Marion, St. Joe, & Vanderburgh requires schools passing referendum funding in those counties after June 30 of this year to share their referendum taxes with charters. I’ll be shocked if that doesn’t expand statewide in the very near future.
  • Somewhat good news is that when eliminating text book fees, instead of making schools absorb those costs, the budget includes $160 million per year for those fees. (Back of the napkin math – Indiana has somewhat over 1 million students, so I guess that’s something like $150/student for fees depending on the details of how that’s allocated.)

With the inclusion of people in the $154,000 – $220,000 income bracket and elimination of some other barriers, the private school subsidy is expected to increase from 53,000 students to 95,000. (Compare this to 4,500 back in 2011.) Keep in mind, vouchers do nothing to improve educational outcomes.

Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

While failing in its stated goals, the Indiana General Assembly’s approach to privatizing public education is accomplishing its actual goals: 1) subsidize religious education; 2) weaken teacher’s unions; and 3) redirect public money to private interests.

Public schools are going to need referendums so the General Assembly can subsidize Brebeuf.

Hicks on Quality of Life and Economic Opportunity

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Economist Michael Hicks (who you should follow on Twitter if other aspects of that platform have not yet driven you away) has an eye opening column in the Muncie Star press on the connection of quality of life to economic opportunities entitled “Economic opportunity now in high quality of life places.” As I summarize this, any errors are my own, so you’d be well served to read the piece. But, in the past, quality of life was tied into other variables (e.g. housing capacity and availability of jobs that pay well) in terms of attracting population. In the Midwest, our housing capacity situation is better than what’s usually available in other locations. And jobs are more mobile than they once were — when manufacturing was booming, people had to come to the plant. The types of jobs that tend to be growing these days are easier to do remotely or to move to locations having a lot of qualified people. So, quality of life is the main thing attracting people.

And it seems to be those quality of life issues important to younger people which would be more significant; because they’re the ones more likely to move. The kinds of things that stand out: great schools, low crime, a welcoming social climate, and local recreational opportunities. Oceans, a warm climate, or mountains would probably help, but: a) we can’t do much about that; and b) they don’t seem critical. A business-friendly tax climate isn’t the make or break issue that a number of our politicians would like us to believe. In fact, if it’s a choice between low taxes or high quality of life, the smart money is spending it on quality of life.

A lot of this resonates with the points of emphasis in the Greater Lafayette’s “Good to Great” report from 2012. I haven’t tracked these things, but I’m sure it’s a mixed bag in terms of how well we’ve implemented the recommendations in the report. But having had the study and having moved forward on some of the recommendations probably puts Tippecanoe County ahead of the curve. I’ll surely be drawing on these resources when I start banging the drum again on West Lafayette school referendum which has to be renewed in the near future. Meanwhile, Indiana as a whole is shooting itself in the foot by adopting ever more restrictive social policies, eroding the quality of our schools with privatization schemes, and lowering taxes in the hopes that we can do “cheap” better than other places that are also racing to the bottom.

House Passes SB 486 stripping teachers of discussion rights with school administration

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Yesterday, the House passed, by a vote of 63-46, SB 486 which contains, among other things, a provision that removes the requirement that school administration discuss certain items with teachers.The mandatory discussion provision has been in place, I am told, since the 1970s and was adopted as a way to head off strikes. (I’m vaguely remembering a strike in 1977 or 1978 that kept us out of school in Richmond for some period of time. I wonder if the two things are connected.) Current law provides at IC 20-29-6-7:

Sec. 7. A school employer shall discuss with the exclusive representative of certificated employees the following items:

(1) Curriculum development and revision.

(2) Selection of curricular materials.

(3) Teaching methods.

(4) Hiring, evaluation, promotion, demotion, transfer, assignment, and retention of certificated employees.

(5) Student discipline.

(6) Expulsion or supervision of students.

(7) Pupil/teacher ratio.

(8) Class size or budget appropriations.

(9) Safety issues for students and employees in the workplace, except those items required to be kept confidential by state or federal law.

(10) Hours.

(11) Funding for a plan for a remediation program for any subset of students enrolled in kindergarten through grade 12.

(12) The following nonbargainable items under IC 20-43-10-3.5:

(A) Teacher appreciation grants.

(B) Individual teacher appreciation grant stipends to teachers.

(C) Additions to base salary based on teacher appreciation grant stipends.

(13) The pre-evaluation planning session required under IC 20-28-11.5-4.

(14) The superintendent’s report to the governing body concerning staff performance evaluations required under IC 20-28-11.5-9.

(15) A teacher performance model.

(16) The use of adjunct teachers permitted under IC 20-28-5-27.

The new law would strip the requirement that a school discuss the matters at all. It would now say that the school employer may conduct discussions and, furthermore, may do it with a non-representative group of teachers behind closed doors if it so chooses. That last part gives away the game. Cherry pick your teachers, hot box them, and/or play them off against each other to get the answers you want.

School privatization has three main goals: subsidize religious education, weaken teacher’s unions, and divert public funds to private interests. This isn’t privatization, but it’s clearly in support of goal #2. Requiring discussion with someone who represents teachers as a group has been in place for 40+ years. Having teacher representatives and administrators talk regularly is a good way to make sure that issues don’t turn into problems and that small problems don’t turn into big problems. During my stint on the West Lafayette school board, I was one of the board representatives to a discussion group that met once a month. It was not uncommon for those discussions to, among other things, allow administrators to float plans they had and to tweak those plans in a way that helped teachers do their jobs better.

This is anti-teacher, union busting; plain and simple.

Hillsdale Official Holds Educators in Low Regard; Tries to Take Root in Pike Township

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This is from last year, but I kept thinking about it and only had it up on Facebook. I don’t want to rely on social media for things I might want for posterity, so I’m throwing up a quick blog post. This is relevant because Pike Township in Marion County is fighting a Hillsdale charter school that Carmel successfully excluded.

“Teachers are dumb. Give us some tax money and let us teach your kids.”

Last summer, in Tennessee, video surfaced of Hillsdale’s president showing the contempt he has for teachers.  From the article:

Among Arnn’s provocative remarks:

  • “The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
  • “They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids…. Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”
  • “In colleges, what you hire now is administrators…. Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It’s easy. You don’t have to know anything.”
  • “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement…. They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
  • “You will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like the plague.”
  • “Here’s a key thing that we’re going to try to do. We are going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.”

The article also said Arnn said “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

The “Valor” charter school trying to take root in Pike Township is a Hillsdale affiliate.