Amelia Pak-Harvey, writing for Chalkbeat Indiana, has a report indicating that roughly 1/3 of charter schools in Indianapolis have closed since 2001. Indiana accountability standards for charter schools are fairly weak and not coherent or comprehensive.

Pedigo’s school is one of 31 in-person or blended-model charter schools that have closed in Indianapolis since 2001 — roughly a third of 91 such schools, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of school identification information from the state. Some, like Carpe Diem, appeared to be given the power by authorizers to expand too soon. Some faced declining enrollment, yet were allowed by authorizers to stay open. And some were rejected by one authorizer, only to be approved by another.

While closing schools represents a form of accountability, the volume of closures turns a spotlight on Indiana’s charter authorizers. These boards, often connected to government agencies or universities, essentially provide the oversight an elected school board would for traditional public schools. As the city’s charter enrollment grows, observers question whether authorizers are doing enough gatekeeping and quality control of schools — and whether the state’s own oversight of authorizers has been lax.

Charter oversight in general has created intense controversy in Indiana in recent years, although perhaps the most prominent example doesn’t involve brick-and-mortar schools. Following a 2017 Chalkbeat investigation, state auditors alleged that operators of two virtual charter schools inflated enrollment numbers to improperly obtain and disperse tens of millions of dollars. The state sued to recover the money, and the case is still in court.

Not really a focus of this article, but to me it underscores the duality of Indiana’s approach to school size and scale. When it comes to rural schools in particular, the General Assembly seems to promote consolidation. At the same time, it aggressively pursues a charter and voucher policy which fractures the school landscape, primarily in urban areas. The message to rural school systems is “get big and save money.” The message to charters is “we don’t care how small, decentralized, or inefficient you are so long as you offer ‘choice’ to urban and suburban populations.”

In the waning hours of the most recent session of the General Assembly, a last minute amendment was added to HB 1447 to address the non-existent “problem” of obscenity in school libraries. As I wrote at the time:

There just isn’t a scourge of obscene material floating around our school libraries. The idea that we need to adopt a law creating a procedure to deal with obscenity in school libraries is one of those “the question is an accusation” kind of dynamics. “They wouldn’t need a process if there wasn’t a significant problem would they?”

The language slipped into the bill requires a school to have a process to handle complaints by a parent or community member requesting that a school library remove material that is obscene or is harmful to minors under the respective statutory definitions for each. “Harmful to minors” largely tracks the obscenity language but is slightly broader, so I’ll quote it here:

A matter or performance is harmful to minors for purposes of this article if:

(1) it describes or represents, in any form, nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sado-masochistic abuse;

(2) considered as a whole, it appeals to the prurient interest in sex of minors;

(3) it is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable matter for or performance before minors; and

(4) considered as a whole, it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

It’s good that the new language limits the complaint process to community members or parents of students. It’s also good that the standard is basically an obscenity standard rather than merely something that a person finds offensive.

But the obnoxious element is that it requires the process include a public hearing at the governing body at its next public hearing. So, it encourages grandstanding and, by setting a limited time table for the hearing, discourages deliberation.

Our local school’s upcoming board meeting includes a policy for requesting that material which is obscene or “harmful to minors” (as defined in the Indiana criminal code) be removed from the school libraries. It also includes a related request form. The Indiana legislature’s mandate that schools adopt such policies is largely a waste of time. Like I said, there simply isn’t a plague of obscene material in our school libraries. Passage of this law was not an effort to solve a problem but, rather, part of an effort to create the impression that a problem exists.

But, the General Assembly requires it, and so the school has to comply. On first glance, the proposed policy seems reasonable. If any obscene material or material “harmful to minors” is present, this would be a way to get it removed. On the other hand, I think the policy imposes reasonable barriers that will deter grandstanding about material that does not rise to the legal level for removal. In particular, it forces the person requesting removal to very specifically identify the portions of the book that are obscene and explain why they think so. (Also, it limits requests to people who either live within the boundaries of the school district or have kids in the school.)

Going forward, it’s probably more important than it was to get a good idea of how school board members might approach issues of censorship. To some extent, the school board has always had the power to remove materials it regarded as objectionable. Most of boards would have likely relied on the education professionals and librarians they employ to make a considered decision on such issues. But the legislature now requires more of a direct pipeline from a complaining person to the school board because the new law requires that the “response and appeal procedure established … must require the governing body to review the request at the next public meeting.” Because this gives moral scolds a better platform for demagoguing against material they don’t like, knowing how school board members will react if the issue arises would be beneficial.

Some good election coverage of school referendum ballot questions from Eric Weddle & Kristen Adair at WFYI and from Aleksandra Appleton at Chalkbeat Indiana. West Lafayette’s referendum was up for renewal for the third time (first passed in 2010 and renewed in 2017) and passed handily with 80.46% in favor (2009 “yes” versus 488 “no.”)  This is down from a gaudy 94.27% in 2017 (2,105 “yes” versus 128 “no”), but that’s not really a fair comparison. The 2017 campaign was a special election where that was the only item on the ballot. The pro-referendum PAC (which I helped) put a lot of effort going door-to-door and making sure people in support got to the polls. This year, the question appeared along side municipal races and the pro-referendum PAC took a more low key approach. As I said in 2017, the need to renew the referendum is a waste of time and effort – it’s make-work by the state. In West Lafayette, there was no appetite to eliminate the current tax rate. The burden is reasonable and the results of that funding have been very good. However, the process is incredibly stressful for school personnel, and it is not conducive to long term planning. In my mind, a better approach would be to leave the rate intact until someone gathered enough signatures to put the question on the ballot. If the community is happy, why go through this process?

On the flip side, of the four referendums that failed last night, three of them were in Lake County: Hammond, Lake Central, and Whiting. (The fourth was a school safety referendum for Bluffton Harrison in Wells County. (Technically, it was four out of the five that failed were in Lake County. Hammond had both a construction referendum and an operating referendum fail.) Correlation is not causation, but as it happens, Lake County is one of the pilot counties in this year’s legislation that requires referendum money to be shared with area charter schools. If the referendums had passed, Hammond would have been the only one required to share because Lake Central and Whiting had their question approved in May before the legislation went into effect. But it’s hard telling how aware the public was of any of these distinctions. Both the operating and construction questions in Hammond went down hard – 24%/76% for the construction question and 21%/79% for the operating question. Lake Central was a squeaker with 49.7% in favor and 50.3% opposed.

Carmel Clay, Hamilton Southeastern, Monroe County, Northeast Dubois, Sheridan, and Fort Wayne were also successful.

I think these school funding questions for localities can turn into virtuous cycles and into death spirals. In West Lafayette, people are willing to fund the schools because they’re good and the schools are good because people are willing to fund them. In other places, the opposite dynamic can take hold: people don’t want to fund the schools because they are bad and the schools are bad because people don’t want to fund them.

Moungi Bawendi is one of three recipients of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Locally, this is significant because Dr. Bawendi was a 1978 graduate from West Lafayette High School and was named to the school’s Wall of Pride in 2022.  The other recipients are Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov. The award is for their work in discovery of clusters of atoms known as quantum dots. Per the Wikipedia entry:

Quantum Dots also called semiconductor nanocrystals, are semiconductor particles a few nanometers in size, having optical and electronic properties that differ from those of larger particles as a result of quantum mechanical effects. They are a central topic in nanotechnology and materials science.

After graduating from West Lafayette in 1978, Dr. Bawendi went on to Harvard and ultimately got a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, did postdoctoral research at Bell Laboratories, and joined the faculty at MIT. Now, obviously Harvard, MIT, University of Chicago, Bell Labs, and Dr. Bawendi’s own considerable talents had something to do with his work, discoveries, and this prize. But I’m also going to mention the foundation that West Side helped contribute. Jim Guy (also a West Lafayette Wall of Pride honoree) taught chemistry at our high school for 39 years. The school recently built an academic wing named in his honor. I’ve heard more than one distinguished scientist give credit to Mr. Guy for getting them started or being a significant influence on their path. Funding your public schools is part of what eventually gets you to advances in quantum computing, cell biology research, solar cells, LEDs, and other potential quantum dot applications.

(Also – with George Karlaftis on the Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs, 2023 gives West Lafayette graduates a Nobel Prize and a Super Bowl. Not bad for a small public high school in the Midwest!)

Update: Dave Bangert has an excellent write-up on the news. Obviously Dr. Bawendi remains the star of the show, but I love the discussion with and about Jim Guy, West Lafayette’s long-time chemistry teacher:

The phone was ringing early Wednesday morning at the home of Jim Guy, former West Lafayette High School chemistry teacher and namesake for the school’s recently built academic wing.

All the calls came with the news: One of his former students, Moungi Bawendi – an MIT researcher and West Side grad, class of ’78 – was one of three scientists awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in the field of quantum dots.

“Incredible,” Guy said. “We had so many kids who did very, very well. There were so many great ones. … I’m very excited about this. For Moungi, but also for West Lafayette schools.”

…

Inducted in to the West Lafayette High School Wall of Pride in 2022, Bawendi said chemistry was his favorite class, pointing to Guy and his labs as “instrumental in starting me on my career path.”

“I still remember the time when we synthesized an ester that smelled like banana,” Bawendi said in a bio offered to the West Lafayette Schools Education Foundation, which oversees the Wall of Pride at the high school. “Mr. Guy was inspiring. … He was one of those teachers who changes your life.”

I just read a post by Steve Hinnefeld reporting on recent polling about attitudes about schools. While attitudes about schools in the abstract are very negative, people like the schools where they send their own kids.

In the recent Gallup poll, 76% of parents said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the school attended by their oldest child. But, among all respondents, only 36% were satisfied with the nation’s schools, tying the all-time low. That’s a huge gap: 40 percentage points.

Gallup has been polling about education since 1999, and the divide between parents and others has been a consistent finding. Most parents have always given high marks to their own children’s schools, but they tend to be more skeptical of the nation’s schools. People with no direct experience with schools are the most likely to give America’s schools low grades.

I don’t know exactly what that says when real-world experience with a thing is largely positive while thinking about the same thing in the abstract ends up being significantly more negative. I suppose that means that a lot of fiction about schools is being thrown at people which persuades them until they actually find themselves dealing with the objective reality. For those Lord of the Rings fans out there, I have the image of Gríma Wormtongue whispering into the ear of Theoden; turning him into a bitter, decrepit old man who sits around inside all day. This, in turn, poisons the atmosphere of Rohan and saps its strength.

So, I don’t know, maybe turn off the cable news, get outside and go find a way to volunteer with your local school system.

Dylan Peers McCoy, writing for WFYI, has a report on the need for mental healthcare among Indiana’s students and the political activists who are standing in the way. Per the article:

Mental health needs are at a peak among U.S. children and teens. A 2021 national survey found that nearly half of Indiana high schoolers felt persistently sad or hopeless — the highest rate in two decades of surveys. The same survey found that three out of every 10 Indiana students said they had considered suicide.

…

Yet despite the growing need, the kind of mental health support Dodds found at school is facing an onslaught of criticism from conservative parent activists. They say schools should focus on academic instruction. And they caution that mental healthcare and social and emotional learning may promote ideas that conflict with parents’ values.

“A small but loud and politically savvy group of — and it’s not just of parents, it’s really of political activists — are hijacking and spreading a lot of misinformation about mental health and social emotional learning in schools and really leveraging people’s fear,” said Sharon Hoover, co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health.

In Indiana this year, Republicans passed a law that restricts school districts’ ability to survey students as to their mental health and emotional well-being. It has to do with a push against “social and emotional learning” which helps students with skills such as managing their emotions and feeling empathy for others.

I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, but this right-wing push against social emotional learning seems to be kind of a buzzword driven thing. Activists sort of project their anxieties onto some jargon, turn it into something it’s not, and then crusade against the straw man they have created. In this situation, I think they’ve associated the approach to mental wellness with their usual uneasiness over things having to do with gender, race, and interpersonal relationships. So maybe they think they’re fighting a shadowy cabal of educators trying to convince their kid that they are really transgender or maybe that they should be ashamed of being white. But really they’re taking away a tool that might help kids feel a little less miserable as they’re learning to navigate the world.