Ken Kusmer, writing for the Associated Press, has an article indicating that the newly elected General Assembly – now, significantly with the Democrats losing power in the House – will target “education.”
The school plan that House Republicans presented during the campaign calls for giving parents more options in choosing schools for their children, holding teachers accountable for the performance of their students, and putting more education dollars in classrooms rather than administration and overhead.
As a practical matter, I suspect this means primarily trying to cripple the teacher’s union. Whether they really have anything else in mind remains to be seen. What I do know is that I live in a district with really top notch public schools. If they manage to screw that up for me, I’m going to be really irritated.
Interesting. Doug, I suspect that what you suspect is correct.
The mantra is always putting more money into classroom than administration. The real message is likely less money for anything.
What a place my home state has become. A brutally regressive 7% sales tax and a property tax cap which may operate regressively. I will have to research that. YOYOMFer.
Ain’t God been good to Indiana.
Are you kidding me? You read about their plan, and the first thing that comes to mind is that they’re going to screw up your schools? How would that happen, exactly?
Back in the real world, teachers are actually the only profession in Indiana that are covered by a Right-to-work law. So even if the GA passed a RTW law (which I would welcome and think is a possibility), very little would change for teachers.
I’m really enjoying, in a Schadenfreude way, the pain that Tony Bennett is inflicting on the educational establishment. I see what this is doing to my school system (Munster, which is more or less the best in Indiana, depending on the measurement), and I think that it is generally positive. I particularly like having the kids’ grades online in real time. I also like the online access to their ISTEP scores, not to mention ISTEP in and of itself.
How would that happen, exactly?
Depends on the end result they want.
1. They could allow for school choice(of course we already have public school choice that allows you to move districts for free with in certain limitations) and include parochial schools, but allow them to operate outside of PL217(collective bargaining) while keeping public schools subject to 217.
2. They could mandate that 65% of dollars “go to the classroom”, but given their history of forcing schools to artificially inflate the denominator this is a farce.
3. They could force consolidation of school corps by tweaking the formula to penalize schools under a certain adm.
If they want to improve schools, then set goals and release schools from the piles of nebulous oversight and restrictions.
FYI – Many schools were offering real time grades well before Bennett got to the DOE.
Let public schools throw out the trouble makers and difficult to educate. Then, per capita, “follow-the-student” funding makes sense. Otherwise, public schools in bad neighborhoods are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. (I’m not saying that’s good policy, by the way, it’s just the only way that per capita funding makes any kind of sense.)
Has anyone considered separating school funding from remedial parenting?
I’m being serious, here. It seems to me that whenever we talk about school funding, the discussion turns to how it costs so much more to educate in the “bad neighborhoods”.
What I would propose is giving the same money, per student, to all schools, then have a separate program to either train parents how to be good parents (if that is the issue), OR be the parent because it is a single mom/dad who just can’t spend as much time as is needed to support their children in school.
It seems like that would stop the whole school class warfare, and put a real price tag on what it costs to help those in the “bad neighborhoods”. We could also pay for this out of the general fund, rather than property taxes, so that the whole debate about moving property tax money around could be ended.
The more I type about this, the more I like it, because then this new program would address other issues (gangs, unprotected sex, etc) that may not be permitted in school but still has a cost to society.
Before anyone gets mad about a new program, understand we already do this, we just call it “school”. Like many things, we need to call a duck a duck instead of twisting everything around.
Our choice of words is always very interesting. Your quote from above was: “I suspect this means primarily trying to cripple the teacher’s union.” VS.
As you probably know, Abdul also wrote about the new Republican statehouse’s priorities, and stated that a priority should be “And the Indiana State Teachers Association stranglehold on education can finally be broken”
I am guessing many more people will get behind terminating a “stranglehold” than supporting the “crippling” of an organization.
I know very little about Indiana education, as I have just returned to Indiana from New Mexico. I have no children, so I have no live “dog” in the fight. I lived in Minnesota which had a stellar public education system. And I lived in New Mexico, a state rife with social ills (the Mississippi of the Southwest) that had generally poor public schools.
The wisest man I ever knew said “there is no use spending money for better schools until we get a better bunch of kids.”
That being said, I have a close friend that is the president of a small town local ISTA. I will be interested in her take on these proposals and the “stranglehold.”
jason, i think you’re underestimating the scope of what you’re suggesting. most of the problems faced by at-risk youth can’t be fixed by sending their parents to a class.
what do you do if the parents are in prison?
what if the parents have serious drug problems or mental health problems, or both?
what if the parents are homeless?
what if the parents only speak spanish or some other language, so the kids don’t know any english when they enter school?
what if the family lives in extreme poverty?
what if the parents simply don’t care?
and let’s not even get into the issue of learning disabilities…
stAllio!,
I didn’t do a good enough job explaining, but when I said “OR be the parent because it is a single mom/dad who just can’t spend as much time as is needed to support their children in school.”, I really meant be the parent. Make sure they eat breakfast, learn English, etc.
Again, I think you agree teachers are already doing some of these things, hence the need for extra money for those schools. I’m saying to still do what they are doing, and maybe even more, but let’s bill it correctly, and use the right tool for the job. A high-school Algebra teacher may not be the best person to help a 17-year old who is being pressured to join a gang.
I’m just trying to quantify the problem without removing services. Let’s see where we’re spending the money so that when we debate IPS versus one of the other school systems we can have a decent debate about it.
mitch has been about busting the teacher unions all along. He stabbed Dr. Reed in the back because she wanted what was best for the students, not the politicians and profiteers. tony does not have the experience in running a good school corporation but thinks he has been told all of the answers by his advisors who suck at the teat of school reform privatization vouchers works. The research is robust that vouchers, choice and charters do not improve student achievement, states that spend “more in the classroom” (usually by not counting as school employees (ie privatizing) such people as lunchroom, janitorial, or transportation services as part of the expenses of the school) do not out perform those who spend less. This election of republicants does not bode well for our education system, the poor and social outcasts nor our elderly.
Many of the factors that stAllio describes are endemic to many of our schools, rural, suburban and urban. I would wonder if there are other developed countries that face such problem have similar results, better results, poorer results.
I would suspect that advanced democracies that have a broader social safety net do not face the same challenges as this country does. But maybe not.
I do not know much about these issues at this point, but I wish to learn about them.
Living in a county with 6 of the 15 schools statewide that have been on “double secret probabtion” for more than 5 years, I have seen firsthand what Bennett is doing to fix them. All of the teachers were fired and had to reapply for their jobs, and less than 50% were rehired. They brought in an entirely new curriculum and gave them one more year to straighten things out. We shall see what the results are, but all indications are that he has really shaken things up in these perennially failing schools.
The teachers bitch about Bennett, but I’ve met him and talked to him and listened to what he is saying and watched what he is doing. I support the guy 100%. Even in “good” schools, everyone can be doing a lot better than they are.
buzzcut–I hope you are not disappointed when he claims victory and improvement after one year even though a real reform effort would take several years to implement and bring about positive achievement. I am glad you talked with him, apparently you have no idea when someone is lying to you and has no idea what they are talking about.
mitch promised tony he would support him for governor in 2012. Now pence is involved and may mess up the applecart. :)
1) The metaphysical certainty that one can design a test which “demonstrates” the success or failure of an education is unwarranted.
2) As is the equation of “educational success” with the particular fields of math and reading comprehension.
3) And those are models of adequacy compared to the idea that potential income generation equals success, happiness, or is anything other than a political argument, not a theory of education.
4) And yet the one is argued as a reason for the other, and vice-versa.
5) By the way, if you’re intent upon using academic testing, then the single available resource is the NAEP, the only nation-wide test of adequate size. And there Indiana scores a bit above the national average. As it has all along. And it has continued to improve, as has the rest of the nation. And in particular, major strides have been made the past ten years in the average scores for African-American and Hispanic students. Some failure we have here. Some roiling disaster requiring a hack job by political hacks which always–somehow–seem to target teachers, the only group actually doing anything about education.
Tony Bennett sings a lively tune, but I really doubt that his “fixes” are going to do much more than advance the political agendas of those bent upon wresting control of education for themselves from the present hierarchies. As with most things in politics, it’s about having the ability to drive the bus yourself, not with any intrinsic improvements or reforms.
I’m a big fan of civil, educated conversations – one of the primary reasons I visit this blog – and this is a good one.
First, Bennett had nothing to do with getting grades online – no matter how much he may claim to. This has been a software feature for years. Many schools are just now getting the infrastructure to do it.
I despise ISTEP as it has become the only measurement used. And teachers are forced to teach everyone to a single level rather than differentiate. NCLB and the resulting tests are, IMO, the reason for our education systems stagnating.
Mitch and Tony’s constant grumbling about how much money goes to classrooms…akla already hit upon it, this number can be manufactured based on what is inlcuded in the calculations.
This leads into the argument of money to “bad neighborhoods” or giving schools the same money per student regardless of location. Sounds like a great argument for the school general fund to funded thru property taxes. The schools could then have some control over the money they needed. With Mitch’s plan the state is in total control of school funding – and you can see how that went in the first year – $300M reduction.
I liked Dr. Whites’ questions to Bennett concerning school progress. The state plan is to take over failing schools – which is interesting as so many argue for smaller government – which to republicans really just means centralized government. Dr. White asked why can’t local schools that fail be given the same power that charter schools get to do what they feel is necessary. Give the school a chance first to work without all the state crap and see what happens. I suppose that’s not as good press as total state takeover though.
“Dr. White asked why can’t local schools that fail be given the same power that charter schools get to do what they feel is necessary. Give the school a chance first to work without all the state crap and see what happens. I suppose that’s not as good press as total state takeover though.”
While we’re at it, let’s allow students that are failing in school decide how often they should attend class and how much homework they should hand in. See the problem?
See the problem?
Is it that you can’t construct a reasonable or even vaguely applicable analogy?
I think you may have made my point, Paul. Let the kids decide when to show up – let the school have greater expulsion power.
Currently it’s very difficult to eliminate problem students. Give public schools the ability to eliminate kids that have zero interest in being there – school wide improvement occurrs immediately.
Currenlt public schools are forced to accept and keep (except in extreme cases) everyone and test everyone. Privates and charters can cherry pick the kids so they test the better kids so they have a head start on test results right there.
No, I don’t think that it is certain that we can have the students take a test and have it tell us how a school is doing.
However, my observation has been that schools seem to resist ANY form of measurement on their success.
We must have some way of demonstrating how well a school, student and/or teacher are doing. Otherwise, we have no way to make any case as to what is better or worse for education. I could say that having the kids play basketball all day is the best way to educate them, and without some form of measurement, you couldn’t tell me I was wrong.
Jason: so we must have standards, because otherwise we have no standards? And if we have no standards, of course, then any combination of English words make a much sense as any other.
Would you say this about any other aspect of life? (Sure, we have standards for lots of things, but where for the simple reason that otherwise we couldn’t evaluate them? Know someone who can’t enjoy music because there’s no standard that tells us whether Beethoven scores higher than Bach? People who refuse to go to parties unless the acceptable topics of conversation are written out ahead of time? Conversely, in those areas where some arbitrary standard designer [typically an American one; this mania is not shared by the rest of the world] has attached artificial values to some inherently non-qualifiable item–the Ten Greatest Wines of 2005, or the Fifteen Best Cities To Live In–do you drink only those, or pack up and move?)
No, because you don’t apply artificial standards elsewhere “just so you can judge”; you don’t accept artificial standards just because someone’s touting them for personal gain. Your desire to judge something shouldn’t trump your own recognition that the standards are flawed. They sure don’t trump someone else’s. (Case in point, those schools which resist ANY form of measurement. Care to name the ones you’ve observed? Do you want us to believe they do so just so they can get back to lazin’ away and not caring about students, or might it be that they have professional and philosophical objections to the overuse and misuse of high-stakes testing?)
Doghouse, I’m agreeing with you that testing may not be the way we can measure schools.
I’m just saying that I have noticed that other methods, such as graduation rates or GPA, have been shot down as well, not just standardized tests. No, I’m not a school administrator, and I don’t have a list of schools that have rejected this. Just my own limited experience.
Can you point out how the teachers say they should be measured? My point is that in the vacuum of ANY measurement, one will be imposed on them. It is on the teachers and schools to come up with a method they can live with, because I have also seen first hand teachers who are just happy to ride out their tenure without regard to the students.
I think those teachers are in the minority, but I can only comment I what I have seen as a student and as a parent. Since I know firsthand that somewhere between 1 and 99 percent of the teachers are good and some percentage in the same range is bad, I know we need to find out what those numbers are.
If the teachers only say “My *ART* can not me measured by mere mortals in the general public”, then some equally idiotic politician will create standardized tests in the first two weeks of school, where nothing useful can be measured yet many serious decisions will still be made on the results.
If there is some form of measurement that the teachers do want, they should be speaking in a unified voice so that morons like me can hear it. As of yet, I still have not heard it.