The planned lawsuit by the Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA) challenging the legality of the level of school funding figures prominently in most papers today. Lesley Stedman Weidenbener has a good article for the Louisville Courier Journal.

The article reports that,  as a state, Indiana is about average in its level of school funding, ranking 22nd. However, the problem might be at a district by district level. ISTA’s spokesperson said that the General Assembly hasn’t funded schools at a level sufficient to meet the accountability measures it has set. Failure to meet those measures will result in sanctions for underperforming schools. ISTA’s spokesperson also predicts that inadequate funding will lead to failure to meet the standards which will lead to another round of hand wringing about our broken school system which will lead to renewed voucher proposals which is something ISTA really does not want.

The Governor’s office wouldn’t comment, saying “they hadn’t seen the lawsuit.” Senator Kenley, on the other hand, was more willing to discuss the issue. (A minor point, but yet one more indicator of why Indiana would have been better off had Sen. Kenley beaten out Gov. Daniels for the Republican nomination in ’04.)

Senate Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee Chairman Luke Kenley,
R-Noblesville, said he was aware the teachers association had been
discussing a lawsuit. But he said he was surprised that it would focus, at least in part, on funding for students in need.

The school funding formula he helped write for the current state budget includes a redesigned complexity index, a method of distributing additional dollars to schools with students who are poor, live in single-parent households and have limited ability to speak English. The index also considers the number of young adults living in the district who did not earn a high school diploma.

“The formula is designed to look at the child and measure whether there’s a need there and then drive the dollars to those children,” Kenley said. “Indiana has been much more sensitive than other states to funding children in need.”

ISTA’s spokesperson, Dan Clark, said that the weight the formula gives to any of the factors is arbitrary and, consequently, the amount of money the formula provides to schools with more children in need is arbitrary. Sen. Kenley said that the index factors were based on a study done by IU to advise the General Assembly, but also says he’s interested to see the suit and suggests that it may be a source of good information for the legislature as they develop the next two-year state budget.

I might be wrong, but this does not look like the sort of issue a court is well suited to address. School funding within broadly defined parameters strikes me as a legislative matter. The suit might be useful in producing information that can educate the General Assembly, but this seems like a very inefficient way of conducting a study.

I am happy to announce that I have completed the return drive from North Carolina. In total, the round trip was about 1,500 miles with my wife, my 2 year old son, and my 8 month old daughter in an SUV for approximately 25 driving hours. As I was doing this, I encountered a scene which struck me as a metaphor for bureaucrats of Mitch Daniels’ nature. I’m not saying it is insightful or elegant; in its delerium, one’s mind can conjure up all sorts of metaphors during that sort of road trip.

In several states, but particularly in Indiana — perhaps by coincidence, I saw long stretches of road torn up for construction while only a very small portion of that road was actually being worked on, creating delays for drivers that are longer than apparently necessary. I’m sure there is a reason for this. My non-cynical suspicion is that it is cheaper to do stages of construction in fewer longer stretches than to do the stages in more numerous short stretches. My cynical suspicion is that contractors want to rip up the road before anyone changes their mind.

Going with the non-cynical explanation, that it’s cheaper this way, it occurred to me that it’s only cheaper for the costs that are being measured. If you count the cost to individual motorists of lost time, inconvenience, fuel, increased time in close quarters with a screaming infant, and decreased family harmony as the occupants of the vehicle turn upon one another (o.k., those last few may not be generally applicable), then the cost/benefit equation looks a lot different. And here is where Mitch comes in. His brand of “smaller” government seems, in many cases, to be nothing more than shifting costs to where they can’t be measured. Sweeping them under the rug, as it were. In fact, the road construction I described is probably a little more useful as a metaphor than as an example. I doubt this method of construction is at all peculiar to Indiana or Gov. Daniels. But he seems to have a passion for shifting costs in this fashion. A better example is FSSA closing the state hospitals. It doesn’t eliminate the costs, it just shifts them on to those in need who will in turn create other costs, most likely for local law enforcement which ends up being the provider of last resort. The jails can’t say no.

At the moment, I’m a bit road weary to develop this idea further at the moment (yet another cost!), but when you hear Mitch or purported advocates of “small” government like him bragging about cutting costs, look closely to see whether the costs have actually been cut or merely externalized where they can’t effectively be measured.