A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

A business school approach to education won’t work

February 24, 2024 by Doug Masson 4 Comments

What’s gonna work?
Team work!

A Facebook memory from a year ago prompted this post.

Last year, one of our school board members made statements reflecting her view that “specials” teachers are less valuable than “core” class teachers. This ties in with how incentive payments are distributed at the school.

Years ago, the State came up with something they call “Teacher Appreciation Grants.” The notion is that throwing a little extra money to a few “exceptional” teachers will create an incentive for all of them to compete and excel. Superficial free market stuff bolted onto the public education system. (Cheaper than paying the teachers what they’re worth, I guess.)

At West Side, there traditionally hasn’t been a lot of buy-in to the State’s divide-and-conquer vision of education.

With respect to these state-mandated “appreciation” grants, I think they’ve passed the money along to certified staff equally and then come up with local money to show non-certified staff they are appreciated as well. (Take this with a grain of salt – I haven’t been within shouting distance of this process in several years.)

I think policymakers are making a category error when they view “specials” teachers as less valuable than “core” teachers or when they try to enlist market forces to get teachers to compete against each other.

Specifically, they are envisioning teachers as islands rather than part of a team. A lever doesn’t work unless you have both a beam and a fulcrum. A pulley doesn’t work without both a wheel and a cable. (You can thank teamwork between the science teacher who taught me about simple machines and the English teacher who taught me about metaphors for this paragraph!)

The English teacher, the math teacher, the computer teacher, the art teacher, the gym teacher, the science teacher, the music teacher, the language teacher, are all going to need to collaborate if we want kids who are well-educated, well-adjusted, and well-rounded. Each piece supports and makes the other pieces better. It’s supposed to be a school *system,* not just a mess of individual classes.

The West Lafayette mission statement reflects that the school’s mission “is to engage students in a world-class educational experience that prepares them to be well-rounded, ethical, innovative, creative, productive, and adaptive citizens who shape our global society.” You’re going to need all-hands-on-deck to accomplish that mission.

Updated: I wanted to update this post to add a link to a YouTube video a friend shared which offers some insight into what actually motivates people. A cash bonus isn’t a great motivator for this situation. Those kind of rewards work better for rote tasks. For complex undertakings, like teaching; factors such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose lead to better performance.

The Ideological Drift of “Transparency”

February 22, 2024 by Doug Masson 2 Comments

Sunlight is a great disinfectant. But it can also scorch the earth and render it lifeless.

A friend flagged this 2018 Yale Law Journal article by David Pozen entitled “Transparency’s Ideological Drift.” It caught my attention because the obstruction-minded group that will likely be seeking a majority on West Lafayette’s school board in the 2024 election has long used “transparency” as a rallying cry.

Pozen notes that historically transparency and open government have been linked with progressive politics. However, in the twenty-first century, “transparency is doing different work.”

Perhaps the most fundamental driver of this ideological drift, however, is the most easily overlooked: the diminishing marginal returns to government transparency. As public institutions became subject to more and more policies of openness and accountability, demands for transparency became more and more threatening to the functioning and legitimacy of those institutions and, consequently, to progressive political agendas.

…

Groups on all sides of the political spectrum swear fealty to it. In its actual application, however, transparency has become increasingly associated with institutional incapacity and with agendas that seek to maximize market freedom and shrink the state—a trend epitomized by the Federalist Society’s launch in 2016 of a Regulatory Transparency Project[.] … The link between open government and active government has become ever more attenuated.

With respect to advisory committees, Pozen notes that open door laws have reduced the use of such committees and, when used, hindered their usefulness. “Where advisory committees are used, ‘[the Federal Advisory Committee Act] has hindered collaborative forms of stakeholder involvement’ as well as the ability to produce timely and useful advice.” At the state level, there is evidence that such requirements chill candor and hamper compromise. “The mid-1970s notion that laws like [Government in the Sunshine Act] would ‘restore the faith of the public in their governmental agencies and . . . enable such agencies to function in a more equitable fashion’ now seems hopelessly naïve, if not exactly backwards.”

When trying to grapple with why transparency has drifted from a progressive ideal to one put to use eroding the ability of our institutions to function, Pozen notes that transparency is abstract and, therefore, likely to be put to different uses by different groups. As one of our local teachers pointed out in a school board meeting where the opposition group campaigned under the banner of transparency, it is a “glittering generality.” (“An emotionally appealing phrase so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that it carries conviction without supporting information or reason. Such highly valued concepts attract general approval and acclaim. Their appeal is to emotions such as love of country and home, and desire for peace, freedom, glory, and honor. They ask for approval without examination of the reason. They are typically used in propaganda posters/advertisements and used by propagandists and politicians.”)

Popular distrust fuels demand for “evidence” of agency activities, as transparency itself “becomes a symbol of organizational [honesty] and health.” And yet, distrust also creates an environment in which skeptical interpretations of such evidence can flourish, which in turn fuels demand for additional disclosures. No happy equilibrium is ever reached. Without an affirmative political program to guide information policy, as in the Progressive Era, transparency mandates never seem to generate a widely shared sense of security or empowerment regarding the institutions that are “opened up.” They end up generating, instead, calls for ever more transparency.

Perhaps I will dig into this article further in the future. Certainly it was not directed toward our little school board. But it’s disturbingly accurate in how it predicted dynamics we’ve seen in our community. A group with no discernible substantive agenda has worked to sow distrust in our school administration and school board under the banner of transparency. Whatever the ultimate goal might be — assuming anything other than distrust in our institutions is desired – it is almost certainly nothing progressive.

West Lafayette High School Getting New Principal / School Board Drama Ensues

February 21, 2024 by Doug Masson 4 Comments

After long years of quality service, West Lafayette’s principal, Ron Shriner is retiring. Upon learning of his plans, the school administration launched into a search for a new principal. Shortly before the top candidate was announced, I happened to talk to the superintendent and one of the school board members. When asked how the principal search was going, they couldn’t tell me anything specific, but they were excited. This guy was going to run a good school and probably cure cancer in the bargain. (I exaggerate, but their enthusiasm was contagious.)

A few days later, the West Lafayette School Board agenda included the approval of Chad Rodgers as the new principal at the Junior/Senior High School. Rodgers will be coming to West Lafayette from his current position as principal at Greencastle High School. Among other accomplishments and accolades, in 2021, he was named District 8 Principal of the Year by the Indiana Association of School Principals.

West Lafayette teachers turn out in force urging support for the new principal.

In an unprecedented show of support for the selection, the meeting room was packed with teachers and people who had been involved with the selection process. The teachers were also concerned about the school board messing up a good thing. The teachers submitted a petition, signed by 68 of the 74 high school teachers.

Process grievances have dominated school board meetings

You’ll notice a particular focus on support for the process. This has to do with the context of school board dynamics in recent history. There is an opposition bloc, currently in the minority, that devotes an inordinate amount of time to process. Their laser focus on meeting minutes has become a punchline, stretching what used to be hour long meetings into three hour marathons. These disagreements very rarely focus on substance.

As a friend of mine put it, “their nominal complaints are usually about incompleteness of representation of the discussion or recording of votes. It seems like they think minutes should be a transcript of the meeting.But that’s not really their complaint.” In all likelihood, the goal is to generate a narrative of grievance, the better to elect a fourth person in the fall and take over the majority. Then what? The best minutes in the land? Probably not. If I had to guess, it’s anti-union stuff with merit pay directed to certain teachers and other business school type initiatives. That’s me reading between the lines on certain votes and statements. They haven’t come out and said as much. Such policies would be deeply unpopular in this left-leaning community.

The question before the board was approval of the person, not the process.

Several people involved in the selection process, teachers and at least one parent, stepped forward to address the board at the public comment period at the beginning of the meeting. The first teacher’s comments were representative of the sentiments in the room. She had been a participant in the search process. She assured the board there had been enough quality applicants and that the administration had been diligent about asking the search team whether they felt confident in the quality of the candidates and the process. With respect to the timeline, she noted that our timeline is consistent with the process being used in Zionsville, another quality school. They incorporated a stakeholder survey supported by Dr. Yin. Board members Wang, Schott, and Austin helped Dr. Greiner make the final recommendation to the Board. Video of the teacher’s statement below:

Note again the defense of the process and also the warning against starting over. In particular, the teachers wanted a 7-0 vote as a signal that they “trust the students, parents, teachers, administrators, and fellow board members who collaborated to select the best person to lead our school next year.” An English teacher and representative of the West Lafayette Education Association offered more strong commentary in favor of the process and Mr. Rodgers.

(Incidentally, also note that full video of West Lafayette’s school board meetings are on YouTube, making the endless wrangling over minutes all the more perplexing.)

The teacher emphasized that the motion before the board today asked the board to approve a *person* not a process (and she details why, in any event, the process was solid.) “A split vote of any kind would be an embarrassment to our profession and to our community. Any votes against this *person* as a protest against the *process* is insulting the professionalism and the personal integrity of the leadership of our school community as well as making the new hiree’s job harder by making it look to our community as if he was not fully supported for this role.” She asked for a unanimous vote.

History repeats.

The stress on the fact that the board was voting on a person, not the process, is a call-back to two years ago when Dr. Yin’s “no” vote on the new superintendent selection was the subject of long speeches and her supporters holding up signs in protest at meetings. Just like this time, the stated objection was to the process while saying that the specific choice of superintendent was unobjectionable. Repeating that pattern and ignoring the exhortation of West Side’s teachers, school board members Yin and Wang cast votes against approving the hire (despite saying that they didn’t object to the hire, only the process.) Per the Exponent story on the meeting: “‘My vote is not a personal attack,’ Yin said to the room, prompting the crowd of teachers to erupt into laughter.” She went on to embrace the new principal after the meeting.

Rather than taking a moment to understand why the teachers might be so frustrated by these process arguments that they took the extraordinary step of signing a mass petition, she took to Facebook, ignored the teachers’ frustration, and doubled down on explaining why she didn’t like the process. She characterizes the process as rushed and designed to produce a small number of applicants. That characterization is obviously counter to what those involved had to say about it. Also, the process tracked a process used by Zionsville in their own search. (The link is to a school administration explanation of the process.)

There was no functional upside to a “no” vote.

But the details are mostly beside the point. What makes brushing aside the teachers’ concerns all the worse is there was no functional upside to the “no” vote. Unless one is willing to go so far as to say that it was a *bad* process rather than merely an imperfect process or that Mr. Rodgers is poorly qualified for the job (which is not an argument anyone made), chasing the dragon of a more perfect process and micromanaging the details at the last minute serves no purpose.

Let’s say everyone went along with the “no” votes. Now you’re back to square one and, if you’re incredibly lucky, after several more months, the absolute best case scenario is that you end up with a slightly better candidate. More likely than not, you either waste your time or end up alienating potential candidates, because who wants the headache of working with that kind of board?

Urging the board to vote “no” to the hire at the February meeting makes sense only as part of the larger campaign of throwing sand into the gears of the school board processes – nitpicking minutes, objecting to agendas, stretching meeting times out for hours and so forth rather than, for example, devoting that energy to matters that would improve the substantive conditions for students and teachers.

The dynamic around the West Lafayette school board has been corrosive.

This sort of thing has been corrosive to the West Lafayette school community which the teachers, and their plea for unanimity, seem to recognize. Most recently a Facebook forum — started by a supporter of the opposition bloc and committed to refusing moderation requests — produced a pseudonymous post which was recklessly cruel, doxxing the incoming principal and his family in an effort to tarnish his reputation; presumably to bolster the “no” votes (ignoring that they said they supported the selection but only opposed the process.) If I had to guess, most (and possibly all) of the school board members were appalled by this post. It was beyond the pale, but predictable in light of the toxic dynamic that has been introduced to school board operations and the dogmatic non-moderation stance of that forum.

West Lafayette has great schools. The best schools in the State. If we lose them, our community will have only our own members to blame.

President’s Day: My idiosyncratic list of Presidents

February 19, 2024 by Doug Masson 5 Comments

In honor of President’s Day, this is my list, pulled from the top of my head based on a lot of half remembered history. It contains plenty of recency bias and penalizes Presidents about whom I’ve read bad stuff in the more recent past. They get penalized for my ignorance: for example JFK gets credit for his handling of the missile crisis, but I don’t happen to know much about his other accomplishments, meanwhile LBJ had plenty of flaws, but his work on civil rights and the social safety net are pretty extensive and continue to have an impact on our daily life. And I try to filter out stuff they did while not President: for example, Ike gets no credit for World War II and Grant gets no credit for the Civil War. On the other hand, I don’t do this reliably: Madison probably gets a lot of warm fuzzies from me for having written the Bill of Rights. So, here you go:

Franklin Roosevelt
Abraham Lincoln
George Washington
Theodore Roosevelt
James Madison
James Monroe
James K. Polk
Thomas Jefferson
Dwight Eisenhower
Lyndon Johnson
Joe Biden
Barack Obama
Bill Clinton
George H.W. Bush
John Quincy Adams
John Kennedy
Jimmy Carter
Grover Cleveland
Herbert Hoover
Ulysses S. Grant
Harry Truman
Gerald Ford
Ronald Reagan
William Taft
William McKinley
Martin Van Buren
James Garfield
John Adams
Zachary Taylor
John Tyler
Calvin Coolidge
Benjamin Harrison
Chester Arthur
Rutherford Hayes
Andrew Jackson
George W. Bush
Woodrow Wilson
Richard Nixon
William Henry Harrison
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
Warren Harding
James Buchanan
Andrew Johnson
Donald Trump

Men of ambition and talent can no longer make their name by building the nation

January 29, 2024 by Doug Masson Leave a Comment

Heather Cox Richardson has a good post on Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 “Lyceum Speech.” At that time, Lincoln argued that the nation’s success contained the seeds of its destruction:

He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.

For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.

To preserve the nation, we needed to make reverence for the laws and our institutions the political religion of the nation. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor…. Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”

I’m reminded, as I so often am, of the quote from “a Man for All Seasons” concerning respect for the law:

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

We need to protect and preserve our institutions.

General Assembly’s Fractured Approach to School Size

January 17, 2024 by Doug Masson 2 Comments

Chris Lagoni and Terry Spradlin, writing commentary in the Indiana Capital Chronicle have a column entitled “Fallacies of the School District Consolidation Debate in Indiana.” The whole thing is worth reading, but I wanted to underscore how the General Assembly is talking out of both sides of its mouth when it talks about the benefits of school consolidation. On the one hand, we’re told that traditional public schools really should consider consolidation because of economies of scale and so forth. On the other, hand we have the General Assembly subsidizing private and charter schools with tiny enrollments. The authors point out:

Today, there are approximately 105 charter schools in the state with an average student enrollment of 436 students. Conversely, there are only five school corporations in the state with enrollment below five hundred students. Indiana’s approach is to have the state carry more and more varied and individual expenses for education, not to consolidate them.

They also take a dig at the forgiveness of charter school debt which the General Assembly has not done for traditional public schools. When discussing ways to encourage consolidation, the authors state:

[O]ne of the significant reasons these discussions have fallen apart in the past has been the effect the consolidation will have on local tax rates. Consolidation of districts may impose a higher tax rate on some residents of the new district. In addition, closing a building, expanding another, adding miles of bus routes, and/or planning for a future building could also impact tax rates. About 10 years ago, the Indiana General Assembly forgave $92 million dollars in charter school debt for closed schools. A similar approach could be taken to help communities wanting to consolidate. School districts carry debt, and another community may not want to inherit the duty of paying for debt obligations previously incurred. Elimination of debt obligations would help facilitate additional consolidations.

HB 1376 – School Referendum Election Dates

January 14, 2024 by Doug Masson Leave a Comment

Rep. Behning’s HB 1376 would require that school referendums be held only during general elections – except that, in the case of a school district entirely within a municipality, they can be held during a municipal election. My own West Lafayette schools could not have held the referendum it did during the municipal elections of 2023 because, although the vast bulk of the district is in the city of West Lafayette, there are some outlying members of the school district who are not in the municipal corporate limits.

This is part of some ongoing gamesmanship with school funding referendums. It used to be that you could hold those referendums during primaries or even hold a special election if none was taking place in the near future. (West Lafayette’s previous referendum was in 2017 when there were no general or municipal elections). But, as it turns out, when citizens showing up to vote are mostly concerned about education and well-informed about the ballot question, they tend to vote in favor of funding the schools. If the pool of citizens voting are mostly showing up to vote for a Presidential candidate and happen to see the school question at the bottom of the ballot, the support for referendums goes down.

So, advocates for public education tend to want to hold the question at times when citizens attention is more focused; and those who are more inclined to starve public education for resources, are more likely to push for times when voting on school questions is more of an afterthought.

HB 1043: Tax Exemption for Gold and Silver

January 9, 2024 by Doug Masson Leave a Comment

I’m getting out over my skis a little bit here because I’m not familiar with the world of gold and silver transactions. But, HB 1043 looks like a tax exemption for gold bugs. It talks about gold and silver coins and bullion as specie legal tender and then exempts legal tender from personal property assessment and from the state gross sales tax. The fiscal note says that the exemptions already in place for certain coins and bullion is already pretty expensive for the State. (A Sales Tax Information Bulletin from the Indiana Dept. of Revenue talks about the exemptions already on the books.) This bill would cost the state more money.

HJR 1 – Ballot Initiatives

January 6, 2024 by Doug Masson 2 Comments

Presumably this is going directly into the equivalent of a General Assembly trash can, but Rep. Errington has introduced HJR-1 which would institute a ballot initiative process in Indiana. I see chatter on political boards from time to time where citizens of Indiana see state constitutional amendments initiated by citizens in other states (lately abortion and marijuana seem to have been the big ones) and wonder why nobody does that here. It’s because our state’s constitution doesn’t allow such things where other state constitutions do.

I would be shocked to see it happen here. This constitutional amendment would allow citizens to propose statutes and constitutional amendments independent of the General Assembly. As written, such a proposal would require a petition with signatures from a number of Indiana voters equal to 2% of the voters who voted for Secretary of State in the last Secretary of State election. (That office is during a midterm election cycle, so the number would be lower than some other options — if my math is right, in 2022, there were about 1.85 million votes, meaning you’d need 37,000 signatures until the next election.)

If the new measure requires some kind of funding, it doesn’t go into effect until something happens (General Assembly or initiative) that appropriates the necessary funding. The governor can’t veto a measure and the General Assembly cannot repeal a statute passed by ballot initiative.

SB 129: Reimbursement of Officer Basic Training Expenses by Subsequent Employer

January 4, 2024 by Doug Masson Leave a Comment

Sen. Byrne has introduced SB 129 which provides for reimbursement to a unit of government that pays for an officer’s basic training if the officer goes to work for a new employer. This seems to be a particularly pressing issue for smaller units of government to which basic training is a bigger percentage of the budget and which also likely can’t afford to pay the higher salaries. So, a new officer gets hired by a smaller city or county; gets some training on that unit’s dime; and, now having training and experience, goes to work for a bigger agency to make more money.

The bill lists the eligible expenses and then provides that, if an officer is hired by a new agency within one year of completing basic training, the new employer has to reimburse the old employer 100% of the eligible costs; 2/3 of the eligible costs between one and two years; and 1/3 of the eligible costs between two and three years. If the officer goes on to a third employer, there is language allowing the second employer to recoup some of what it paid to the first employer.

The downside of this is that it will tend to inhibit an officer’s ability to leave a bad situation and go to a better one or generally seek employment as he or she sees fit. (In some cases, however, it might enhance the employability if the officer is working for a unit of government that imposes more draconian reimbursement requirements.)

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.