Indiana’s appropriations for K-12 education is closing in on $8 billion, representing something like 50% of the state budget. Higher ed is another $1.8 billion. That’s a lot of money. For years, educational policy has been in flux due to the work of advocates who use the rhetoric of “choice.” It’s all about the children. But policy makers support kids’ education in much the same way parents often support kids’ sports: loudly, counterproductively, and, quite often, sincerely. And, just as it’s hard to ignore the suspicion that the parent is projecting some childhood dreams of glory on the young athletes, so too is it hard to ignore that big pot of money the policies of choice advocates will redirect to friends, well-wishers, and, quite often, themselves.
From the comfort of my couch, I see three basic fronts for this installment of the education struggle. As an immediate concern, we have the spectacle of ISTEP tests which will test endurance as much as intellect. Short term, we have legislation that will remove the Superintendent of Public Instruction from, what I am told, is a 100 year tenure as chair of the Indiana State Board of Education. Longer term is an effort to make the Superintendent of Public Instruction an appointed position instead of an elected position.
ISTEP Endurance Testing
The ISTEP endurance testing seems to be a product of the requirements of the federal “No Child Left Behind” combined with the recent dithering over Common Core. As you may recall, Indiana abandoned Common Core for reasons that remain unclear to me — other than there was a Tea Party notion that it was a federal imposition and therefore Obama and therefore bad. What the substantive problems with Common Core were, I still don’t know. Indeed, there were complaints from Common Core detractors that the new Indiana standards were too much like Common Core. (From the first link):
When Indiana stopped using Common Core standards last year and wrote its own, we were still required under No Child Left Behind to test our students on whatever standards we used. So the ISTEP+ had to change to reflect the change in standards. Educators have known since last summer that the test would be different, but the shock this week came when schools saw the amount of time the ISTEP+ would take.
And the difference is significant. Last year, a third grader spent a total of five hours and nine minutes doing ISTEP+ testing. This year, that amount jumps to 12 hours and 30 minutes. These increases are for every grade that takes the ISTEP+, not counting stress tests if a school has their students sit to complete those.
The fruits of this slap dash effort to appease Common Core detractors will now be realized by Indiana’s students who have to give the test for these Indiana Standards its shakedown cruise — piloting a lot of the questions. Gov. Pence has attempted to mitigate the political fallout from this through a last minute executive order. Certainly, the headlines he received were favorable — saying in most cases that he was taking action to shorten the test. (See, e.g., “Pence signs executive order to shorten ISTEP”) In reality, his executive order calls for the Office of Management and Budget to hire a consultant which it has done at an expense of $22,000. The first phase, at an expense of $11,000 will be for recommendations on Spring 2015 — though, turning the ISTEP battleship on a dime seems unlikely. (I’m full of mixed nautical metaphors today). The recommendations will come just as the testing is supposed to start. The second half of the consultant’s contract will be for Spring 2016.
Chair of the Indiana State Board of Education
The only slightly less immediate issue is HB 1609 which seeks to remove the Superintendent of Public Instruction as chair of the Indiana State Board of Education (SBOE). The Superintendent is a Constitutional Office provided for in Art. 8, Section 8 of the Indiana Constitution. However, the duties of the Superintendent and the manner of selection for the Superintendent are left up to the General Assembly. The Superintendent’s role as chair of the SBOE is specified by IC 20-19-2-2. The Superintendent is the only member of the SBOE not appointed by the governor. As chair of the SBOE, the elected superintendent has something of a check on education policy over a body otherwise dominated by governor’s appointees. When former Superintendent Tony Bennett turned a largely ignored office into something that riled up the voters, they threw him out in favor of the current Superintendent, Glenda Ritz.
With new blood in the Superintendent’s office potentially upsetting the apple cart, the SBOE suddenly couldn’t get along with its chair. Note: this isn’t necessarily a party thing. The Republican Superintendent always seemed to be able to work with the Democratic Governors, and – though Governor appointees, IC 20-19-2-2 specifies that not more than 6 of the 10 appointees can be from the same political party (although the controls on who is in or out of a political party are a little sketchy). There are Democrats who also stand to profit off of the privatization of education. So, I would say this has more to do with conflicting visions of our educational future than with pure party politics. Advocates of traditional public education tend to favor Democrats and advocates of a more privatized vision tend to favor Republicans, but it’s not a 1:1 correlation.
Rep. McMillin’s HB 1609 recently passed by a vote of 58-40. It leaves the State Superintendent as the 11th member of the board but directs the SBOE to elect a chair from its membership in the July meeting. This effectively transfers control of the SBOE to the Governor entirely. The House rejected, by a vote of 69-26, a proposed amendment that would have had the Department of Education submit nominees from a process involving school districts in the area served by the vacant board seat and one that would have provided for direct election of SBOE members. (Another bill, SB 1, alters the composition of the SBOE to include fewer governor appointees and to include four appointees from the House and Senate that would likely consist of two Republicans and two Democrats) as well as stating that the Superintendent is not the automatic chair.)
The cursory explanation for the power grab is that having the Superintendent as the chair of the SBOE is just too dysfunctional. But I think that’s kind of the point of the current structure. Democratic systems of checks and balances are messy. Sometimes they don’t make the trains run on time. If you’re just going to put all of the power into the hands of the Governor and his people anyway, why let the citizens of Indiana have a direct vote on a position having to do with educational policy at all? Which brings us to:
Appointment of Superintendent of Education
Longer term, there is a proposal that would eliminate the Superintendent as an elected office and make it an appointed position. SB 24 would make that effective in the year 2021. (SB 500 has so much jammed into it, that there could be something about the Superintendent in there for all I know.)
Seems to me that, to the extent Republicans pass legislation that concentrates education authority in the hands of the Governor, they are being a little short sighted. Democrats don’t have much luck in statewide elections in Indiana. They have somewhat more luck in Governors races than in down-ticket races. I’m not one to put too much stock in the “messages” being sent by voters — the ballot box is not a very precise tool for communication. But, the fact that Tony Bennett was rejected as Superintendent of Education was probably as close as we get. His position was very specific to education. His tenure was very much about privatizing Indiana’s educational system and otherwise diverting money away from traditional schools. Despite being in a very favorable position (down-ticket, statewide race) in a very favorable year, Tony Bennett lost, receiving 48% of the vote to Ritz’s 52% – the first Republican to lose that race in 40 years. I have nothing against Superintendent Ritz, but I don’t believe the result of this race was so much about embracing her as it was about rejecting Bennett and his policies. Nevertheless, proponents of the policies championed by Bennett will not be dissuaded. They are just that passionate about the children, you see.
The hell of all of this is that it’s not doing the kids any good. I know my kids are going to be trading education time for time taking a standardized test. They’ll do fine, but they’d be better off if their teachers were talking to them about history or current events or triangles or just about anything. Heck, they’d be better off running around outside kicking a ball around. And, generally speaking, there isn’t a lot of evidence showing that kids are doing any better in the non-traditional schools parents theoretically get to choose after all is said and done. The 20 years or so of data we have show that voucher schools don’t perform notably better and often perform worse than traditional schools.
There are about a million kids in Indiana’s schools, but more like eight billion reasons for this education fight.
My kids are grown and both got an excellent public education in Indiana. They were very well prepared for college and have excelled.
My opinion is and always has been is I am against anything that weakens public schools. Every kid gets the same friggin chance. (or as close as we can get to it). Keep the profits out of it.
Ditto.
“Seems to me that, to the extent Republicans pass legislation that concentrates education authority in the hands of the Governor, they are being a little short sighted. Democrats don’t have much luck in statewide elections in Indiana. They have somewhat more luck in Governors races than in down-ticket races.” I totally agree with this. However, I would point out that an underreported story is that Bennett during his last couple years in office had ticked off numerous education reformers, including members of his own party in the legislature who were calling him on the carpet about his A-F system and limits and restrictions on charter schools that were not liked by charter school proponents. Bennett didn’t lose the election because he pushed education reform too strongly. He lost because he not only ticked off Democrats, which he didn’t have with him to begin with, but he ticked off conservative Republicans as well who were more than happy to cast a protest vote against him which turned out not to be a protest vote at all but a vote for the winner.
Since 99 per cent of the voters don’t know what a Superintendent of Public Instruction does, I doubt that Ritz has much of a mandate. If Ritz is really more popular than Pence, then Ritz should be running for Governor.
My sympathy is with the Governor (any governor) because the Superintendent is a subordinate position. The notion of electing subordinate Department heads seems quite silly to me. The Legislature is the check and balance. When President Obama advocates a Community College system, do we first go out and hold an election for Secretary of Education and then calculate whether the Secretary is more popular than the President?
Ritz, as a Democratic, got more votes (1.33M) than Pence (1.27M) as a Republican in a state where most people vote Republican. I think that says something about what the voters know or don’t know — they made a deliberate and we presume intelligent choice to step over the party line to vote for someone they wanted.
As for Ritz running for Governor. Haven’t you ever heard of the Peter Principle? Perhaps — and in my opinion quite likely — that Ritz makes a fine Superintendent of Public Instruction but would be over her head as a Governor. Let her do what she is good at. I would suggest the same for Pence.
Is the Superintendent really a subordinate position? That viewpoint assumes that government should be like a company with a single supreme boss and a board of directors (the legislature) as a balance. It just isn’t that way. If you want to consider an analogy using the whole USA government then we have the President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court all acting as leaders and as balances to each other. Yet at the same time we have other elected officials in the individual states providing a balance to the Feds. Is Indiana subordinate to the Federal government? Not entirely — we do fight for what we believe in. Having a SoPI to balance the Indiana government makes for a messy yet democratic (in the non-party sense of the word) process.
I might agree that many voters did not know all the entails of what the Superintendent’s job entailed, but they knew they did not like the direction being taken in education by Daniels and essentially his lap dog, Bennett. They spent years denigrating teachers and schools, which are the closest thing to family of any professionals we deal with. In small towns, they might be the only folks who went to college, and are the professionals most likely to help your kid get ahead. That resonated on a deep level. In fact, I think it still does, and I am amazed that the rural legislators are so eager to expand vouchers and charters, since it essentially means stripping their own schools of money for the benefit of urban, elite parents. Look, who are the only parents in a rural area able to drive their kids to a charter or private voucher school? For the most pal those who already have means. You’ll never have a charter or private school in Fountain County as good as the public schools. In fact, the “data” show over and over that it’s the rare charter that even succeeds.
So you will be advocating for the appointment of the State Auditor, Secretary of State and Attorney General too?
Like the old saying goes, “it’s more efficient to put all your eggs in one basket.”
Some of us have done so elsewhere in these parts.
I think the Republicans are counting on the Democrats inability to find a candidate and/or conduct an effective campaign for Governor … to counteract any enemies they make right now.
I’d be in favor of John Gregg running again. Based on my exposure to him while he was Speaker, I remain convinced that he’d be good at the job. Certainly not as liberal as many Democrats would hope for, but competent and well-versed in how the state government works.
I agree with your points – but his campaign is why I don’t think the Democrats can run an effective campaign. Mike Pence was not that great of a candidate but I don’t think Gregg pushed him on anything.
I agree with you Joe. Gregg’s ad where he introduced his mom and dad were total wastes of time. Had he come out fighting, using the ammunition that Daniels handed him, we would have had a different governor.
Gregg had plenty based on Pence’s Decade of Nothing in Congress and his platform that had no details whatsoever. Pence has continued to be big on platitudes and short on details. I don’t understand how a guy who has been a poor Governor can entertain the the thought for a moment that he’d be a good President.
But recall, I’m the guy here who misses Daniels. A position which is not popular here, I note…
Gregg had practically no money until late in the summer and did what he could, but I agree it wasn’t effective nor enough. The thing we miss, is that he nearly succeeded, and might have, had Rupert Boneham not been in the race to skim off 5%, which I think would have broken just slightly enough D to win. Winning both the Supt and Gov job would have changed this whole equation. Think of it this way, Pence has appointed 6 of the 10 appointed members of the State Board of Education, slipped money from the DOE to create a separate agency CECI to serve the board as it’s shadow DOE, got Common Core repealed in the last General Assembly which set off the whole ISTEP debacle, and is now encouraging the Supermajority (which they didn’t win based on him, but rather gerrymandering) to crush her power in any way they can. All of these moves could have been spared – along with embarrassment in many ways (ever heard of JustIN?) if we’d just gotten that last bit accomplished.
In the general sense, I do. I’d guess that all but the most informed voters have little idea of what those positions actually do and little to distinguish the candidates from each other apart from the party label. I’m not sure that it makes a lot of sense to vote for executive branch department heads. Particularly only a few. If we’re going to vote for department heads, why not all departments?
I absolutely agree that the State House offices should be appointed.
In New Jersey the Governor even appoints the Lt. Governor.
Our last elected State Treasurer had a degree in Geology. A Personnel Office could have done much better than the voters.
We haven’t seen much from you for the past few weeks on education, and here you were saving up! Very nice work, which may serve to open up this discussion.
The outright politicization of education in this state in which its leaders pander to the idea that “privatization will fix it” builds on some mistaken ideas, including the notion that “education is failing us”, when education is an index of the functionality of a community (e.g, Gary and other urban areas have problem schools which grow out of problem communities which are very expensive to “fix”.) We have some excellent schools in Indiana that are the outgrowth of functional communities, but the problematic schools become pretext for the coup we are witnessing. Privatization is a faux solution that people think will solve these complex problems on the cheap, but these “solutions” will only make the issue more difficult to sort through and cause a lot of suffering and ruination.
If people want a valid, reliable and quick way to evaluate student progress, just ask the teachers. Test results are not used to evaluate and help kids, but to punish schools. They serve a sorting function.
I do not see the evidence that privatized schools will serve these communities any better. As you suggest, “failing” schools are usually a symptom, not a cause. If we see poor academic performance in communities that are otherwise thriving, that would be a different story.
As it is, this looks like another example of smash and grab where people try to make money by extracting value instead of by growing it.
Smash and grab it is. Folks look at test scores, which show dubious outcomes for charters, but then there is the fact that many of these schools are operated by groups which license other folks to do the work, so you can imagine how much goes to work with kids. Then these “schools” can suddenly close shop, leaving the most vulnerable kids high and dry. Sure the kids return to the public schools, but become orphaned foster children. If charter schools were a product on the shelf with those characteristics–not as good, fly-by-night manufacture not concerned about a quality product, not accountable to buyer, but same price– you would not buy them. Our legislators have been scammed.
Thanks Ben for helping me make my point. There are something like 10,000 State employees. If the voters are always right, we should have a ballot with 20,000 names on it. Who is your candidate for third floor janitor at the State Office Building?
Once again you take a point and exaggerate it to no good effect. Ben was talking about department *heads*. People who are accountable not only to the Governor but also to the people of Indiana. There are only a handful of these people. Bringing up all of the state employees as a argument not only misstates Ben’s point but is also irrelevant.
Now it could be argued — as you tend to do so — that departments heads should be selected by the Governor. This could provide for a smoothly running government. Any check-and-balances needed could be provided by the Legislature.
On the other hand it could be argued that a more direct accountability to the people of Indiana is needed for some departments. A good way to provide for accountability is by voting on the department heads — if we like what they are doing then they are voted in otherwise they and their policies are voted out.
Ben asked why we don’t elect all department heads? It is a good question. Perhaps we should. But at some point the departments become so small that voter accountability is not as important. I posit that our biggest department — education which consumes 50% of the state budget — is a good a good starting point.
Suppose that I do not like the operation of the educational system in Indiana. For whom should I vote in the next election? It is not rational to blame either the Governor or the Superintendent, because neither is in control. It is largely pointless to vote for their opposition, because if whoever is elected will still lack the power to fix the problem. Why should I even vote at all?
Elections should be about choices and consequences. If the Governor can appoint department heads who reflect his views, there will be consequences which I can approve of or disapprove of. My proposal to appoint department heads reflects a philosophy which is more democratic than yours.
The problem with electing anyone is that we not only don’t know their positions on topics, we don’t even know who they are. The next time you vote, how many of those folks were you able to research (if it was available) and find out their story, aside from the fact that they belonged to a party and lived in a some city? Elections seem to work well when you know everyone, like a local Lion’s Club or your church. Even professional organizations are out of reach. When you get that important ballot from your professional organization, aside from the blurb they write (if you are lucky), what do you know about them?
And how many people vote out of some prejudice about the person, base their vote on some negative advertising, or some traditional beliefs about a party? Maybe we should select electors who would be cooped up for a month while they are educated about various issues and then cast their vote. I know that some research has found that folks who go that route vote more intelligently than the average roughian acting on ideology or other unfortunate impulse.
>@Stuart: The problem with electing anyone is that we not only don’t know their positions on topics, we don’t even know who they are.
The problem with that viewpoint and the rest of your arguments (and I will say that you have some valid points) is that it doesn’t provide for democracy. You are basically nay-saying the entire idea of voting for a government. Any part of the government. We could go back to the system where only rich white men, a small group, were allowed to vote thus providing the small club knowledge about the candidates … but that suggestion wouldn’t fly with many people.
As for your suggestion about selecting (voting for?) electors the problem with that idea is who selects the electors? If by popular vote then there is the circular argument of knowing the electors. If you mean selection by random choice — say by taking 1000 people out the 6.5 million in the State — then, yes, perhaps that would work. Chances of getting that idea implemented is zero.
Personally what I think might save democracy is a free and unfettered Internet. I know that the Internet has been offered up all too often as a saviour for lots of societal problems however I think in the case of democracy where access to information is a key point in making democracy function then the Internet might save us.
Rick, mea culpa about my complaint, but that was only a complaint and not an outright attempt to be cynical. It’s always a problem when people can’t or won’t take the time to know all the people on the ballot, and the problem is aggravated by a low turnout (a related problem), as in our recent (wasn’t it 18%?) election. When people don’t take a democracy seriously, you get what we got.
And I totally agree that my idea (as it has been implemented by some people), or any better idea, wouldn’t have a chance in this state, for sure. Too many people who fail to show up at the ballots and don’t know anything about the people they do vote for when they show up would be against any change. Sort of like the dog in a manger that can’t or won’t use what they have, but don’t want the problem solved.
Some sort of Internet use might be interesting, but there are lots of people who really do not want a totally involved and knowledgeable electorate. A well-functioning democracy is dangerous for demagogues. Imagine if, before you voted, a summary of the crazy/stupid things the guys advocated, with other important information, would precede your chance to cast your vote! Right now, though, there is enough energy to keep things as they are and be dissatisfied, but not enough dissatisfaction to solve the problem.
ISTEP was designed to test the educational progress of the individual student to allow for remediation and success. Instead it’s been used as a club to cudgel students, parents, teachers and schools, as we try to “measure” success based on a high stakes test. This corrupts the education process and fails to provide any meaningful results, except frustration, fear, intimidation, and ultimately a teacher shortage that NO ONE is preparing for…
https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/noam-chomsky-on-the-dangers-of-standardized-testing/