A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

The Indiana Dept. of Education Gets Letters

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There is an interesting discussion brewing between State Rep. Randy Truitt and the Indiana Dept. of Education, reported upon by Mikel Livingston. Based on concerns expressed to him by educators in Warren and Tippecanoe County, Rep. Truitt has questions about whether the Indiana Dept. of Education’s implementation of education legislation actually reflects the language and intent of that legislation. The Indiana Dept. of Education is working on a formal response, but its response to the newspaper was that (and I paraphrase) those silly teachers are telling tall tales.

Rep. Truitt’s letter is here (pdf). By way of disclosure, I know Randy, I like him, and through working with him a bit, I’ve grown to respect him a lot. I think if he ran the state based on his own preferences, I’m not sure I’d find a lot to disagree with him about. My primary quarrel with him is that he’s one member in a large body, and it’s politically necessary for him to go along with initiatives of his colleagues that I don’t care for. By contrast, I don’t know Tony Bennett, head of the Department of Education; and I do know that I’ve disagreed fairly sharply with some of his policy initiatives — intentional or not, I feel like his initiatives undermine local control and seek to undermine the public school model in favor of a private one. (And, for that matter, I’ve not had warm feelings about Truitt’s challenger, Rick Cornstuble, who has mixed feelings about Truitt’s efforts in this matter.)

Rep. Truitt’s concerns include reports that, rather than retaining local control, teachers would be evaluated from Indianapolis without the evaluator even necessarily observing the teacher directly; that it would be possible for the Indiana Dept. of Education to override local evaluations of a teacher’s performance. He is concerned that the State Department of Education does not recognize itself as being subordinate to the General Assembly; that it’s a tool to implement the will of the General Assembly, not the other way around.

Another concern is that the for the IREAD-3 test, schools are evaluated on which students happen to be in their school at the moment of the test, with no consideration as to how much or little that school had to do with that particular student’s education. If the kid moved from a bad school yesterday but fails the test in your school, that’s on your school.

Here is a passage I liked:

If our educators are required to be evaluated by data and are required to be given a school grade, quite possibly our IDOE leaders should be equally accountable for the state data. They should be graded on the number of turnaround schools they have. This would be a motivator to encourage IDOE to work to prevent these rather than give the perception that educators currently have, which is the IDOE wants to take over more schools faster. One great idea is to give our local schools (our community) the flexibility to improve instead of waiting to some arbitrary length of time and then give that same flexibility to an outside source with no community “skin” in the game.

The entire letter is worth a read — particularly by those who are more knowledgeable about Indiana’s education system than I am. I can get the sense of the concerns, but I’m not in a position to evaluate the details.

A Tale of Two Cities (Lebanon & Zionsville): School Finance Edition

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Carol S. Corner, writing for the Indiana Property Tax Reporter has a very interesting comparison on school funding as between Lebanon and Zionsville. The post is entitled Indiana Tax Reporter: The Indianapolis Business Journal Compares the Zionsville School District Seeking a Referendum with Lebanon’s Schools that are Fiscally Healthy. (It references the Indiana Business Journal, so I guess I don’t know off hand how much of the Property Tax Reporter post is attributable to the IBJ.)

Zionsville has a more high end, residential population while Lebanon is more blue collar with more industry and warehousing. Changes in the last 5 years or so, significantly those having to do with the imposition of property tax caps have resulted in Lebanon having a much better school funding situation than Zionsville.

That outcry led the Indiana General Assembly to overhaul both property taxes and school funding during its 2008 session. Beginning in 2009, homeowners could be taxed no more than 1 percent of the assessed value of their homes. Farms could be taxed up to 2 percent of their value and businesses could be taxed up to 3 percent of their value.

At the same time, the state of Indiana raised sales taxes statewide and used the extra money, in part, to take over all financing of schools’ general funds. Districts with healthy property tax revenue now can use those funds only to pay for buildings and buses, not to pay teachers or to fund educational programs.

Then came the recession, which ultimately led Gov. Mitch Daniels to cut school funding $150 million, meaning all schools were getting less per student for their educational programs than before.

The Legislature’s 2008 actions “changed the game,” said Dax Norton, a Zionsville resident who is executive director of the Boone Economic Development Corp., based in Lebanon.

“The General Assembly basically said, ‘If you want to continue to survive, if you want to continue to innovate, you’re going to have to play the economic development game.’”

(The outcry being primarily from citizens in high-end, under-assessed older homes who were abruptly being asked to pay property taxes based on the actual market value of their homes.)

Anyway, the whole article is an interesting read. I recommend it.

Stokes on SB 305 – Education Financing

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Kyle Stokes at State Impact Indiana has a post entitled The Boring School Financing Bill That Could Change Everything. The bill is SB 305, introduced by Sen. Breaux which would increase from once to twice per year the dates on which school attendance is counted for purposes of funding.

Consider this: Two count dates would mean — for the first time ever — Indiana districts wouldn’t get a constant level of state funding through the school year. If the bill passes, funding levels would fluctuate with the natural ebb-and-flow of students entering and leaving schools through the year, making every district’s budget process much less predictable.

Apparently what they have now uses a five year rolling average. The new bill would be more of a “real-time” approach tied to the idea that the money should follow the kid. Such an approach does not, in my mind, reflect the realities on the ground where fixed costs are not easily adjusted and where some kids are simply more expensive to educate than others (not to mention my opinion that education is a public good and not a personal entitlement.)

The Stokes’ story has some good analysis from the lawmakers and those involved in making policy on why the legislation will likely pass if the right-to-work roadblock can be lifted.

School Voucher Implementation Off To Bumpy Start

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Mikel Livingston, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has an article about the implementation of the recently passed school voucher law, HB 1003, in the Lafayette area.

I expect they’ll work them out. Parents are calling schools and unable to get all the details about the vouchers. Some of the private schools are concerned about the accreditation requirement. And, of course, a lawsuit has been filed challenging the validity of the voucher law.

I’ve discussed some of this in prior posts, but it’s probably worth mentioning again. I had an exchange with Abdul over at Indiana Barrister, and we had a fundamental disagreement about what public school money is actually for. He had a vision where that money was, in effect, for the benefit of the individual students and, by extension, the student’s parents. For my part, I think we’re using those public funds in an attempt to buy an educated populace. With those very different visions of what the money is for, we naturally reach different conclusions about the desirability of a voucher system.

Under the first view of things (I hesitate to call it the “Abdul” view in case I have not accurately described it), it’s the student’s education & it’s the student’s money. They should be able to spend it how they please. Under my view, the public is attempting to buy an educated populace – not solely out of the goodness of its heart; but because an educated society is more pleasant to live in, easier to manage, and less prone to crime.

In the voucher debate, there is a lot of discussion about the fairness of allowing the student to “choose” their own school and to having a particular amount of money allotted to each student. But, this sort of entitlement model does not address the fairness of taxing, for example, the childless to pay for the education of those who have decided to have kids.

Taxing the entire community to pay for education makes sense only if the entire community has a skin in the game. And they do. A broad base of educated people is beneficial to the entire community. Where the two models diverge is if we set up a system where the entitlement model results in worse education for a substantial portion of the population.

Voucher proponents insist this won’t happen. Quite the reverse, they assure us. Free market pixie dust will result in better schools for everyone. The pressure of competition will make the bad schools improve their product. However, in my opinion, this ignores the fact that a market system only works where one party is able to walk away from the transaction if its cost is too high for the party’s liking. So long as we are committed to universal education, the freedom to walk away is not present.

One of the dirty little secrets of public education is that kids are not widgets that are equally expensive to educate. Some are pretty easy, almost taking care of their own education. Others require constant attention and, what’s worse, through their disruptiveness threaten to make the easier ones more of a challenge. But, it’s a “stitch in time saves nine” scenario. Take care of those kids now, and it’s a bit of a hassle with better behaved kids effectively subsidizing their education. Fail to take care of those kids now, and you’ll be carrying them in your jails and/or unemployment rolls for a long time to come.

I foresee vouchers resulting in a dynamic where the cream gets skimmed off the top by private schools, leaving the public schools with the more difficult students and less money to deal with them. Since no such idle rant about education would be complete without a modest proposal from someone who knows little about educating, I have one. We should try a voucher system available only to those students in the bottom percentages of their schools. These are the ones who aren’t, for one reason or another, thriving in the public school. And, it would also alleviate the concern about the cherry-picking dynamic. There. Problem solved.

Gov. Daniels versus the State on Education

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Nikki Kelly has an article in the Journal Gazette contrasting some of Gov. Daniels education priorities with a recent poll on the public’s preferences for education.

Much as I like needling Gov. Daniels, I’m also skeptical of the value of polls on people’s policy preferences. People who are smart enough in their own areas of expertise don’t necessarily have the time or inclination to be informed on details of government policy.

But, for whatever it’s worth, people favor financing struggling schools more generously than those with rapid population growth. Gov. Daniels goes the opposite direction. Coincidentally, I’m sure, older schools with more challenging student populations tend to be in areas that are more likely to vote for the Democrats. Schools in high growth areas tend to have more children of affluent people who are more likely to vote for Gov. Daniels.

People think parental involvement is more important than changes like paying teachers more. Gov. Daniels says you can’t mandate parental involvement. He’s mostly right with that, but I’d say policies he favors that put downward pressure on wages contribute to the lack of parental involvement. It’s simply tougher for parents to be involved where you need two incomes to support the family instead of being able to have one parent at home.

The last item said that the public favors, by a 2-to-1 margin, supporting current schools rather than creating more charter schools. I tend to chalk up continued support for charter schools – in the face of evidence that, on the whole, they don’t perform notably better than traditional schools – to a love of union busting.

Public Instruction

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Joy Leiker of the Muncie Star Press has an article on Superintendent of Public Instruction (But Certainly not a Creationist) Tony Bennett’s latest proposition for changing the rules about who can teach. On its face, it seems more or less plausible: cut out the bureaucracy and focus more on the substantive education, making sure the teachers have more expertise in the subject areas they are teaching.

But, not to put too fine a point on it, I don’t trust the messenger. There has been a fervor for breaking the teacher’s unions – and where proposals for education reform might tend to break the union, my cynicism leads me to believe that’s the purpose of the exercise.

I don’t know the specifics of Bennett’s proposals – my fault. But as a general rule, I would suggest that the younger the child, the more important the teacher have received education about how to teach as opposed to, necessarily, education in the particular field. It’s much more important that a first grade teacher know how to communicate with six year olds than that the teacher know differential equations before teaching the kids addition and subtraction.

My passing impression of the education system is that there is plenty of unnecessary bureaucracy and job-protecting jargon. But, efforts to cut through those things should be coupled to a commitment to paying and treating our educators like professionals. The article briefly mentions Bennett’s apparent belief that teachers can cram their continuing education in during some unspecified period of the day reminds me a bit of Wal-mart managers who locked their employees in the stores and required them to work without pay.

Indiana Education Chief: Featured Creationist Speaker

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Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Tony Bennett is listed as the featured speaker for the “Creation Evidence Expo 2009” which makes the claim that only God the Creator, and not Natural Selection, can be proved scientifically.

We at Creation Evidence Expo seek to bring change within the public school system across the United States by providing overwhelming evidence that the Genesis account of Creation is the only viable and truthful explanation for the origin of man. Therefore, it should be considered as superior to Darwin’s theory of evolution in explaining the existence of the universe and everything in it.

Another notable performing in this extravaganza are former Congressman Mike Sodrel.

Sodrel is a trucking magnate, private citizen since he was bounced out of office, and can do what he wants, but I think some intrepid young journalist ought to get the head of our state’s educational system on record as to whether he agrees that “the Genesis account of Creation is the only viable and truthful explanation for the origin of Man” and whether he holds the opinion that the Genesis explanation is superior to that of the natural selection explanation.

Sex Education

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Oseye Boyd, writing for the Muncie Star Press, has an article about sex education. The article cites polling data suggesting that the public would generally like kids to receive accurate information about birth control and preventing STDs while quoting school officials who believe the public prefers abstinence only education.

Regardless of what the study indicates, Liberty-Perry Community School Board President Keith Davis says the board’s decision to teach abstinence-only education is what his constituents want.

“I can assure you if we started teaching our kids the proper way to use birth control, we would hear from our community — I’m sure,” Davis said.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the loudest part of his constituency would freak out over the notion of teaching students about condoms and the like. The available evidence suggests “abstinence-only” sex education results in more pregnancies and STDs than medically accurate sex education. The fact is, we are doing ourselves and our children a disservice by being squeamish about talking about sex. I’m sure I’ll have to overcome some discomfort with the topic when it’s time for me to talk to my own kids. But it’s my job to make sure my kids have the best possible chances in life, and knowing how sex works and how to minimize the unwanted consequences are important bits of information. Having a child as a teen certainly has a way of limiting one’s options.

Educational Culture

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I caught a segment on NPR this afternoon featuring the W.E.B. DuBois Society and its efforts to make academic achievement a point of emphasis for black kids. One of the problems, apparently, is that there is a cultural message out there telling black kids that, if they study too much, maybe that makes them too “white.” I don’t pretend to be familiar with black culture except as it bleeds into my mostly-white world, so about the most I can say is that I’ve heard this described as an issue for academic achievement among blacks from other sources.

Certainly no one ever told me that studying or academic achievement would make me not a real white. That said, there was definitely an antagonism against learning from many of my peers. In middle-school, I distinctly remember being put down for using 25-cent words. But, it’s middle-school — your peers are going to use whatever club is closest at hand for putting you down. I was fortunate in that, whatever messages I was getting from some segments of my peer group, I was getting stronger messages from my parents and teachers.

Blacks may well have additional obstacles to overcome in terms of an anti-educational cultural bias; but American culture generally seems to have a strong anti-intellectual bias. Witness the rise of “Joe” the “Plumber.” Hell, witness the rise of George W. Bush. One of his political *strengths* was that he wasn’t “too smart.” We raise a man of intellectual mediocrity to the heights of power, and then ask our kids to take us seriously when we tell them a good education should be their primary concern? They may not be that well educated, but they’re not (by and large) stupid.

The conversation in the NPR segment turned to the election of Barack Obama and how it might help fight the notion that an educated black person is too white. Obama’s strength in this regard will be that he is not only smart, but he’s cool as well.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is that you can’t be Poindexter smart – you have to be cool-smart. If only I had known. I’m conceited enough to regard myself as smart but not so deluded as to think I’m cool. I’ve gone the opposite route and now revel in my geekery. I’m not sure cool can be learned in any case.

Vonnegut on Public Schools in Indiana

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I just, once again, stumbled across this Kurt Vonnegut quote about public schooling, and thought I’d share:

It’s my dream of America with great public schools. I thought we should be the envy of the world with our public schools. And I went to such a public school. So I knew that such a school was possible. Shortridge High School in Indianapolis produced not only me, but the head writer on the I LOVE LUCY show (Madelyn Pugh). And, my God, we had a daily paper, we had a debating team, had a fencing team. We had a chorus, a jazz band, a serious orchestra. And all this with a Great Depression going on. And I wanted everybody to have such a school.

My father, as it happens, is a Shortridge alumnus. So, I suppose, I’m an indirect beneficiary. More directly, however, I graduated from the public schools in Richmond, Indiana and have rarely, if ever, found myself to be less educated than the others I have encountered, including all of the private school kids from Cleveland and Cincinnati I met when I went to Miami.

That’s why I tend to bristle when people beat the drum about how public schools suck. I don’t know the answer to making sure that more of our kids graduate well educated, but I do know that a good education is available at our public schools. And, it’s not like I went to some top-flight exception to the rule. Richmond High School, at least 18 years after my graduation, was designated as one of ten Indiana “drop out factories” in an AP report.