A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

The Lafayette Journal & Courier featured a column by an administrator at one of the local Christian schools entitled “Why School Choice is Working.” Despite the title, the column doesn’t really establish that “school choice” (i.e. vouchers/privatization, etc.) is “working.” For starters, it doesn’t really define what “working” is. (My assumption is that this should mean that we end up with a better educated population. But, for all I know, someone else might think it enough that we’re handing kids diplomas without spending as much money.)

But, on to the arguments.

Item the first: The columnist argues that vouchers are actually saving our educational system money because a “voucher will always cost less than public school tuition because it cannot exceed 90 percent of the cost of attending a public school.” I’ll just re-state my response from the last time this argument surfaced in the paper:

First of all, not all children cost the same to educate. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s a major issue with taking a “dollars-follow-the-child” approach. Some kids are easier to educate than others. My guess is that the tougher cases are more likely to stay in public schools. Secondly, this ignores the subsidy potential for parents who, in the absence of the “choice” legislation would have paid 100% of their decision to put their kid in a non-public school. This is a windfall for those families. No one is forcing you to give your kids a public, secular education, but now we’re subsidizing the decision to send kids to private and/or religious schools.

Item the second: The local schools’ test scores are improving and the administrator’s particular school have remained the same. This “does no harm” argument is not compelling. First of all, this particular argument is anecdotal. I have no idea whether it is representative of the state as a whole. But, even if it was, maintaining the status quo in terms of educational quality is hardly a compelling case for publicly funding private education.

Boiled down, those are the two arguments the column puts forward. So, the headline (which may not be the author’s doing) is not really on point. He also asserts that publicly funding a religious education is constitutional because it’s the parent’s choice. I don’t think one follows from the other, but won’t quarrel with him at this point because, where these vouchers are concerned, the religious angle really isn’t at the heart of my beef. I don’t really like it any better when the vouchers are going to private, secular schools.

Lacking any evidence that these voucher experiments are actually improving education, proponents of school privatization are left with bare assertions that “empowering” parents to “choose” is, by itself, a sufficient reason to publicly fund private education. Being empowered and choosing are good things, right? I’m sure their marketing consultants tell them that. But, as I’ve said before, these are not sufficient reasons for insisting on unproven schemes for improving our schools. Other countries have figured a lot of this out. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We can look at what has worked elsewhere and copy it.

Near as I can tell, the voucher proponents fall into one of three general camps:

1. People who were going to send their kids to something other than a traditional public school anyway and want to have that decision subsidized.

2. People who see that big pot of education money as a business opportunity.

3. People who regard “free market” arguments as a sort of dogma and believe that making the school system more like a marketplace must improve education, regardless of the actual data.

And, I suppose honorable mention should go to lawmakers and politicians who see this as a way to disempower public school teachers as a political force. But that is, perhaps, a discussion for another day.

Today’s Lafayette Journal & Courier offered some space for a column attempting to defend Indiana’s voucher system in response to West Lafayette School Superintendent Rocky Killion’s earlier column entitled “Myth busting Indiana’s voucher system.”

Since today’s pro-voucher column was offered in rebuttal to Killion’s column, we’ll start with him. He said:

1. Indiana’s system won’t save us money. Rather than being, as advertised, a savings to taxpayers, voucher spending has increased from $16 million to $40 million.

2. Indiana’s “choice” system is not improving Indiana’s public schools. There is simply no evidence for it. Top performing school systems in the rest of the world don’t operate like this. He quotes Marc Tucker, president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy: “I defy you to point to a top-performing country that got that way by introducing choice systems.”

3. Private/charter schools get better results than other schools. Again, no evidence. Available research indicates private/charter schools are generally performing the same or worse.

With respect to the cost, the pro-voucher column insists that “vouchers only cover a portion of the cost to educate a child. Their parents, private donors and other scholarships pay their remaining tuition.” First of all, not all children cost the same to educate. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s a major issue with taking a “dollars-follow-the-child” approach. Some kids are easier to educate than others. My guess is that the tougher cases are more likely to stay in public schools. Secondly, this ignores the subsidy potential for parents who, in the absence of the “choice” legislation would have paid 100% of their decision to put their kid in a non-public school. This is a windfall for those families. No one is forcing you to give your kids a public, secular education, but now we’re subsidizing the decision to send kids to private and/or religious schools.

See generally, this report (pdf) from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability:

Indiana joined the ranks of states with voucher programs with the enactment in 2011 with the Indiana Choice Legislation and expansion in 2013. As indicated previously, this legislation significantly expands the ways in which public dollars in Indiana may be directed to private schools. Indiana’s school choice initiative contains three distinct components, each of which increases the ability of parents to use what would otherwise be public money to cover the cost of a private education.

First, the Indiana initiative offers parents a traditional school voucher (Choice Scholarship) program. Second, Indiana also created an income tax credit (Scholarship Tax Credit) for individuals and corporations making contributions to private, nonprofit SGOs, which in turn use these donations to fund scholarships for Indiana school children to attend private schools. An individual or corporate contributor to a SGO receives a credit against what she, he or it would otherwise have to pay in state income taxes, in an amount equal to 50 percent of her, his or its SGO contribution. Third, the Legislation allows parents to deduct against their Indiana taxable income, up to $1,000 per child for unreimbursed education expenses.

With respect to improving public schools, the pro-voucher column offers this article of faith: “If Killion perceives non-public schools to be ‘competition,’ I would argue that competition will elevate all schools to be more innovative, to challenge the status quo and to achieve more.” You can argue it all you want, but there is no evidence to support the argument. Competition makes some things better but not everything. There’s a reason we don’t rely on competition to supply tap water, drainage, and sewage. Water is a basic necessity, and we all lose when our neighbors cut corners. Based on the manner in which top performing countries developed their public education systems, there is no reason to believe that this voucher system will do the trick.

With respect to private/charter schools getting better results, the pro-voucher column offers nothing – only second hand anecdotes and platitudes about how parents should be able to choose a quality education for their child, assuming (without support) the contention that private and charter schools perform better than public schools. They don’t.

Again from the CTBA report:

None of the independent studies performed of the most lauded and long standing voucher programs extant in the U.S.—Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio; and Washington, D.C.— found any statistical evidence that children who utilized vouchers performed better than children who did not and remained in public schools. After controlling for school type and student demographics, a comprehensive study commissioned by [the Bush administration] found that students who attend traditional, K-12 public schools outperform students who attend both charter schools and private religious schools, irrespective of denomination.

I expect that that bit about “controlling for demographics” is a key point. Some of those demographics are, no doubt, correlated with those more expensive to educate students I alluded to above. But, ignoring those demographics is, long-term, a losing strategy for the community.

The CBTA study recommends that we take instruction from places like Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canada — countries with school systems that were not always leaders but which found ways to dramatically improve their systems. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel here — educational systems have been improved other places. School choice advocates’ determination to ignore those lessons suggests that improving education is a pretext with the primary motive having more to do with cultural and ideological concerns (leaving aside, for now, the venal types who just see the public school system as a big pot of money, ripe for the taking.)

The Indiana Law Blog has a post on the ongoing battle by big box stores to have their real estate assessed based on the “dark store method.” They want their properties valued the same as similar, vacant stores. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that they argue that their business methods make the property valuable and assessments should be based on the value of the real estate, not the value of the business methods used to operate the store.

This would make sense if the box stores could open up in the middle of a sparsely populated rural area or a blighted hell hole and make money. The fact that they can’t show that the location matters very much to the value of the operation. If the courts are going to take this seriously, they should make the box stores demonstrate how valuable their business methods are by showing the value those methods have in a sparsely populated area or blighted area divorced from the value created by the surrounding community. That’s the amount of their discount from the value determined through traditional assessment methods.

One of my go-to quotes is Thomas Hobbes on life in the State of Nature being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The context usually has to do with countering extreme libertarian notions (or at least taking those notions to their logical conclusions) about government being useless or evil. However, I’m currently reading “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari, and maybe Hobbes and I have it wrong. The average forager seems to have had it better than the average farmer. The agricultural revolution was a Faustian bargain with the average human working harder, for longer hours, at work that was less interesting, on a smaller patch of ground. Their diet became less varied and humans became more susceptible to plague and famine. However, it undeniably allowed humans to produce more food  in a smaller space and live together in greater densities. Before too long, there was no turning back – and, in any event, no one really remembered what the hunter gatherer lifestyle was like.

Then why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. And partly because population growth burned humanity’s boats. If the adoption of ploughing increased a village’s population from a hundred to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times? There was no going back. The trap snapped shut.

To support agriculture, we had to invent the idea of property (a right that, the Founders’ declaration to the contrary, is a human construct, not something that exists of necessity in nature. Also, it’s demonstrably alienable.) In fact, we had to conceive a lot of things that don’t exist in the real world.   Harari says that this ability to conceive of abstractions  preceded the Agricultural Revolution — a Cognitive Revolution that enabled homo sapiens to emerge from Africa, cover the planet, and eliminate the non-sapiens humans of the time (Neanderthals and the like). Without being able to conjure up abstractions, humans could not have organized in large numbers. Some of those abstractions are laws, nations, corporations, religions, and cultural narratives.

But those organizing abstractions can be insidious. When they are at their most effective, we have convinced ourselves that these abstractions are not artificial. Harari talks about Hammurabi, his laws, and the classes (slave, commoner, and aristocrat) that the law created and/or reinforced. The conceit in Hammurabi’s Code was that those laws were handed down by the Gods — these laws weren’t man-made, they were divine. A division between slaves, commoners, and aristocrats wasn’t artificial, it was natural. We can look back on other cultures and see the man behind the curtain. Clearly Marduk wasn’t actually whispering in Hammurabi’s ear when he declared these laws. There is nothing preordained that makes a person into a slave — that’s an accident of the culture in which the slave was born and the will of the humans surrounding him or her. Recognizing the conceits of one’s own culture is a lot tougher — By accident of having been born to parents living in 20th or 21st century North America, we don’t have divinely ordered slavery (though we are dealing with aftershocks of ancestors who did). Rather, we have self-evident truths and natural laws; not to mention the invisible hand. The Market (if left uncorrupted by humans) will distribute wealth according to merit and other morally satisfactory criteria. Once acquired, that wealth will become a person’s property — to which he or she has an inalienable right because Natural Law. (Recall: property is not the tangible stuff –  it’s not, for example, a chair or a house or a patch of ground. Rather property, properly understood, is the bundle of rights that we have or don’t have with respect to those things.)

If we look back to the beginning of the agricultural revolution, we can see how wealth was generated and acquired. Civilization was made possible by agriculture and its ability to generate a surplus. But that surplus wasn’t willingly generated and turned over to the civilized elite. Government, law, and civilization requires the use of – or at least the credible threat of – violence. Taxes have always been extracted by force where need be. Slave labor was compelled by force. Property becomes property – rather than merely stuff you are holding onto as long as you’re able – because the government will use violence on your behalf to protect your prerogatives with respect to those things. Law, at the end of the day, is potential violence wielded by the state. The Market rewards leverage, not necessarily merit (by which, in market terms, I generally mean labor, creativity, and socially beneficial risk taking). Merit can be a form of leverage that the market rewards, but it’s hardly the only form.

All of this sounds pretty negative. I understand that. But, even if you don’t agree with the entire case, I think much of it is ultimately true – and it creates a perspective that deviates from the mainstream – from the dominant cultural narrative of our times. It’s tough for me to unsee, even if I’m skeptical of pieces of this particular narrative. What’s tougher is how it affects my ability to relate to people who subscribe to the dominant cultural narratives about how property is an inalienable right commanded by natural law and necessarily acquired according to merit guided by the invisible hand of the market. I was raised in that narrative.  But, sometimes, I forget what it’s like to accept those things as natural law rather than human choice. When I’m talking to someone who hasn’t questioned that narrative (let alone rejected it), we don’t agree on the ground rules. I’m playing basketball, and they’re playing soccer. There’s going to be conflict when I use my hands.

What’s my suggestion to make a better society? Communism? Anarchy? Totalitarianism? None of those, really. Or maybe a blend of successful pieces of all of them. I’m not saying I have a better way of making things work, necessarily. But, when I (or someone like me) suggests that we could choose to handle property or allocation of wealth in a different way if we wanted to, or that the Founders weren’t infallible oracles channeling the divine and eternal truths of Natural Law, they’ll look at me like I have two heads. I think merit and wealth may often be correlated. They think there is a causal relation, and – even more problematic – they think a view to the contrary is not only wrong, but probably immoral and against nature.

Because I have been exposed to a lot of  history, despite the negativity that I may be projecting, I don’t actually see our system as all that bad. We have certainly had worse. I do, however, see the system as malleable. To the extent we choose not to make changes, that is a human choice – not mere adherence to natural law, self-evident truths, or the commands of Marduk.

By and large, on this blog, I have made an effort to strike a more or less reasonable tone when I disagree with something. An exception has been with respect to matters related to the Confederacy. I allow myself some intemperance on that subject. So, it’s somewhat gratifying to see the late storm of disapproval where the Confederate Battle Flag is concerned – a storm triggered by a white supremacist who murdered nine black people at church in Charleston.

It seems that a moderate tone on the subject has allowed people to remain in denial about what the Confederate heritage is about. It’s a heritage of treason, citizens of the United States taking up arms against the U.S. and killing its soldiers. They took up arms because they claimed a right to secede so that they could preserve their states’ rights to enslave other people. It’s heritage, but it’s not a proud heritage.

Tony Horwitz, who wrote a great book on the subject of present day Southern attachment to the “Lost Cause” mythology, Confederates in the Attic, has a piece at TPM on the latest controversy entitled “How the South Lost the War but Won the Narrative.”
He concludes:

I’m not very optimistic that the debate over South Carolina’s flag will bring a deeper reckoning. Furling the statehouse flag may bring temporary relief to South Carolinians, but what we truly need to bury is the gauzy fiction that the antebellum South was in any way benign, or that slavery and white supremacy weren’t the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Only then, perhaps, will we be able to say that the murdered in Charleston didn’t die in vain, and that the Lost Cause, at last, is well and truly lost.