Casey Smith, writing for the Indiana Capital Chronicle, has an excellent account of a recent meeting of the General Assembly’s interim study committee on fiscal policy. The top line information is that Indiana’s teachers make less than surrounding states and that’s going to cause us problems. (Ball State economist Michael Hicks has done a good job explaining how Indiana’s fiscal and policy choices over education have hurt us and will continue to hurt us.) The information received by the study committee indicated that median wages for teachers, when adjusted for inflation, have declined since 2020 and lag behind neighboring states.
Some of the responses, hoping to dodge state responsibility for fixing the issue, are a riff on the classic “waste, fraud, abuse” theme which is an old chestnut when it comes to any government spending. In this case, some of the lawmakers are certain that the state money is simply not getting to teachers.
“It’s frustrating up here … that we want to take care of teachers as best we can, because we think that helps us educate kids better,” said Sen. Scott Baldwin, R-Noblesville. “But dollars going into the school system from this body don’t seem to always make it into the classroom or teachers’ pockets.”
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Baldwin continued to push for greater transparency in local spending to ensure that “dollars reach classrooms and teachers,” rather than being absorbed by administrative growth.
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Other ideas discussed included … giving districts more flexibility to redirect certain capital project funds — like those used for athletic facilities — toward salaries.
“We just need to somehow loosen up that money for teachers over another astro-turf football field,” said Sen. Travis Holdman, R-Markle.
I challenge the idea that we are spending inordinately on facilities or administrators. But, even without getting into the weeds on that question, I think it’s absolutely worth mentioning – and loudly – that you need more than teachers to educate a kid. It’s like the recent trend on the right these days of trying to focus on “war fighters” in the military and ignoring the importance of logistics. One of my favorite quotes from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (set in World War II):
The United States military … is first and foremost and unfathomable network of typist and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.
Similarly, Ulysses S. Grant has been criticized (perhaps unfairly) as being less of a soldier than General Lee. But Grant was a good quartermaster with a superior grasp of logistics which is part of why his efforts succeeded and Lee failed.
In a similar way, teachers are part of an educational system – an important part, but hardly the only part. We should make sure teachers are properly paid but it would be foolish to do so by starving the system of its facilities and logistical capabilities. (A failure to recognize that education requires a systematic approach is also a deficiency in Rep. Thompson’s recommendation for “market-based” incentive pay for STEM teachers or other areas where there are shortages. STEM teachers rely on, for example, the elementary teachers who have taught the kids to read and the fundamentals of math.)
Once again, as Caleb Mills – the father of Indiana’s educational system – said, “there is but one way to secure good schools, and that is to pay for them.”