Republicans in Indiana are currently struggling to find enough votes to engage in a mid-cycle gerrymander that they believe would send one or two more Republicans to Congress.
If enough members of Indiana’s GOP legislative supermajority cave to Trump and pass his desired gerrymander –and if that legislation survives a legal challenge (not a given, since it would run afoul of the state constitution)–and if the sheer effrontery of the act doesn’t drive turnout that reduces, rather than adds Republican seats–Indiana will presumably send to Congress the same sort of Republicans who keep trying to turn Indiana into Mississippi.
I have posted several times about the sheer knuckle-headedness of Indiana’s legislature, especially (but certainly not exclusively) when it comes to education policy. Not only have religious fundamentalists and Christian nationalists managed to squander huge amounts of our tax dollars on vouchers–starving public education while sending those dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious schools– virtually all of their interventions in education reflect their utter lack of understanding of what education is–they apparently confuse it with job training.
Not surprisingly, Indiana’s Department of Education reflects that legislative blind spot.
Michael Hicks–a Ball State University economist–recently published an essay criticizing a dangerously misguided policy change from DOE.
In crafting Indiana’s new high school diploma requirements, the state Department of Education identified only one of the two deep challenges to education in Indiana.
The new diploma might, and I stress might, help the smaller of the two problems. At the same time, it risks making the larger problem worse.
Indiana’s largest, and growing, problem is that we send too few young Hoosiers to college. The decade-long decline has been so bad, and so sustained, that we are now graduating and keeping young people beneath the replacement rate of our already dismal educational attainment.
This ensures we will slide toward the bottom of the nation in our share of college graduates by mid-century. That matters for our economy because over the past half-century more than 100% of economic growth accrued to places in the top half of educational attainment. So, if you wish to grow the place where you live — whether it’s a county, city or state — it needs to have better than average educational attainment.
The second problem Hicks identifies is a lack of entry-level job skills among the “excess supply of young Hoosiers” who don’t go to college. The state’s large employers complain about that lack, but as Hicks notes, employers who need college graduates or employees with advanced degrees don’t complain to the legislature–they simply recruit elsewhere.
DOE’s new policy charges schools with finding additional internships for more “hands-on” learning. Sounds good–but as Hicks quite correctly points out, the changes come at a steep cost. That’s because, in order to accommodate work outside the classroom, academic requirements have been reduced across the board.
Under the new rules, it is now possible to get a high school diploma with mathematics courses that are mostly taught in middle school and have been since the 1920s. Math, science, literacy, history and writing requirements have all been reduced. These are the lowest diploma standards in modern state history.
Once again, Indiana is ignoring the needs of poor and rural children. As Hicks says, affluent, college educated parents will ignore the minimum standards. Children from those families may even be better off, because “smart kids in rural and poor school corporations will be funneled into less exacting academic programs” weakening competition for college slots.
The new diploma offers some nice soundbites, but it’s an engine of unequal opportunity and a near guarantee that we’ll send fewer kids to college, and that we’ll send them there less prepared. That will be a panacea for businesses looking to hire folks for $15 an hour jobs, but will do nothing to promote prosperity in Indiana.
Of course, none of these concerns appeared in the briefing slides or implementation guidance of the new diploma. State officials simply didn’t do their homework, which is a damning observation for folks involved in education.
Hicks also notes the lack of homework evident in what the new policy calls the “military option.”
Students can obtain a “military diploma” in one of three ways–appointment to a service academy (which would require far more academic preparation than the new standards call for), enrollment in a college ROTC program (which requires that the student be in college–again, requiring more academic preparation than the standards contemplate), or enlistment in the armed forces before high school graduation.
Can we spell embarrassing?
Just what Congress needs–more GOP representatives from Indiana’s version of Mississippi…
What’s the problem? You don’t need no stinking college diploma to work at some Amazon Warehouse. But you’re sure gonna need one to design the robots that are going to take your job at the Amazon Warehouse.
I’ve agreed more and more with Hicks over the past several years or so as MAGA has pushed the R Party away from its Libertarian Koch donors. Most of the BSU economists are shills for the Kochs. In fact, the whole business department is right-winged shills. Hicks is slightly outside that realm in his own economic center.
I appreciate his words, but do you know who SHOULD be carrying his message to the legislature? Geoffrey Mearnes, the President of BSU, because they actually run the Muncie proper school district. If he sees the Governor or the Education Department drifting away from good policy, he should be in Indy, telling the Chamber-driven politicians where they are missing the mark. A President of a university that oversees a public school system would carry much more weight than an economist.
However, I would like to see the statistics of all these “high-paying jobs in Indiana.” In other words, where is the demand for college-educated graduates? In our county in East Central Indiana, there are none. However, I believe Starbucks wants college graduates, which is hilarious. I’m not sure, but I think our country is bloated with young people choking on student loans who can’t afford rent, cars, and are strapped for years to come, “settling for low-paying jobs.”
Haven’t we suffered from a “brain drain” for decades?
To me, it’s a form of slavery, just like the US does with Latin American countries like Argentina. Javier Milei’s campaign promise was, “No more borrowing money!” He’s borrowed so much money that he basically sold out to the American Oligarchy, which will enslave the working class in Argentina. If we get Machado installed in Venezuela, she’ll sell out the country’s working class to American Oligarchs as well.
p.s. Don’t forget about AI coming for a high-paying job near you!
Some people in Indiana have always denigrated higher education. In my rural highschool, lo these many years ago, you risked derision or being told you thought you were better than other people if you admitted you wanted to go to college. And when I worked downtown with a large multinational consulting service, they had lots of kids there working on visas, and an equal number of US kids. But most of those kids weren’t from Indiana. They flew them in from places like Missouri and California and put them up in little apartments while they worked on the job. You have to begin to wonder if the plan is to keep people here ignorant and unable to question anything.
Forest Gump : ” Stupid is as stupid does”
https://youtu.be/tldGgGFe194
My wife was an educator in the Lebanon school system twenty five or so years ago. We would compare the ISTEP scores for the state published in the newspaper. Every year Indianapolis and Gary would compete for the worst school system in the state. One year tenth graders in Indianapolis were second to last in the state and last in the state was a school for special needs. That is who is walking our streets.
Melinda commented “ You have to begin to wonder if the plan is to keep people here ignorant and unable to question anything.”. She hit the nail on the head with that sentence. Our legislature is doing exactly what their manufacturing industry donors want them to do, which is to create employees that will have to settle for low wage manufacturing jobs that generously reward their corps’ top executives and stockholders.
Meanwhile, the legislature continues to downgrade Indiana’s living standard for most of our population by giving massive income tax breaks to those large corps, while also reducing income tax revenue from those corps’ low wage jobs.
Our current President, Republican Svengali DJT, has stated explicitly that he likes stupid people. That being the case, how can we expect any MAGA Legislators to fight for an educated electorate?
There is a mathematical function that can be imagined that relates the portion of human knowledge that any adult needs to flourish in life and the total measure of all human knowledge.
In 1982, noted futurist Buckminster Fuller hypothesized that, between 1700 and 1900, the sum of human knowledge grew by a factor of 4. By 1945, he asserted that knowledge was doubling every 25 years, and, by 1982, the sum of human knowledge was doubling every year. IBM predicted in 2013 that, by 2020, human knowledge would be doubling every 12 minutes.
While we cannot measure any of that with precision, we all know that human knowledge is much more than what any of us individually does.
Now, what is the relationship between what any of us knows relative to that exponentially growing quantity and human safety and comfort? Again, we can only guess, but over my lifetime, what seems noticeable is that at the beginning, you might eke by without a high school education, but now it seems that a college degree is the minimum required. I know it’s easy to make suggestions, but this seems about right to me.
Safety and comfort perhaps come from investment of our personal assets in what the place times honor most. Education is just one possible personal asset among many.
People like Trump were just dealt all they needed by the fact of who they were born to and when. I’m middle of the road. At the other end of the spectrum are those who were handicapped by skin color, gender, religion, sexual orientation, family of origin assets, or just bad breaks or early in life, poor decisions.
The most important things are just beyond reckoning. No surprise there.
That, to me, is the ultimate promise of AI – a mind that can help make decisions when the number of heads required to make an informed decision exceeds the number we know how to collaborate among.
Are there dangers in getting there? Yes, many profound ones. Are we smart enough to navigate the risks to get to that reward? Maybe.
That’s a huge “maybe” in these especially treacherous times.
I haven’t ever had a higher paying job than $15.00 an hour in Indiana and I graduated from college in 2016 . I see a lot of employers that want employees with years of experience that I just don’t have and don’t know how to get without getting “on the job” training. Which it seems most employers don’t want to do. I get OJT in the job I have now and it makes it so I can work in other departments if needed.
It’s easier to keep them poor if you keep them dumb…
Speaking of poor and dumb, how will Trump get away with telling his constituents to get off welfare and pick crops or report to the slaughterhouses?
I listened to the head groyper, Nick Fuentes, on his right-winged podcast, say that when history is written about the MAGA movement, it will be called “the greatest con job in history.” He also said, “Trump has lost his mind and is just rambling, saying nothing relevant.”
Some of the right-wingers are waking up…how about MTG appearing on CNN? If Trump loses MAGA, he’s toast, and so are all the sycophants across the country.
Offering incentives (vouchers) in essential fields that require higher education but are experiencing shortages like teachers, nurses etc. would draw more young people into those vital fields. Of course, the legislature would have to tax big business more for that win/win solution.
It should be noted, as well, that students whose family can afford to send them to expensive private schools, will have excellent educations, and therefore will have less competition for their college applications, and will be more likely to land high-paying careers, and the gap between the wealthy and the rest of u will continue to widen.
Indiana has developed a sound community college option for young adults who are not college bound but desire a meaningful career. Ivy Tech is equipped to bridge high school graduates to specific career educational opportunities with high rates of hiring upon successful completion of certificate education. For example, the nursing education program in Indy is equipped with the most modern operating room lab so that a nursing graduate is familiar with any operating room of any hospital in America. If an Ivy Tech student aspires to transfer to higher education, Ivy Tech is far better staffed with counselors to support student transfers than those available at high schools. The jump from high school to college is not for everyone, but community college may be a far better alternative than opting for military. However, if a student is supported by experienced selective service counseling how to upgrade MOS (military occupational specialty) into a very useful career skill paid for by the military, that can be a very smart option. What is required is social capital: initiative to enroll.
My understanding: I am not sure if you are thinking of prohibition in IN state constitution on redistricting state rep seats and state senate mid-cycle seats that does not seem to include Congressional making that a seeming misapplication, or the seemingly accurate one that the free and equal clause should in theory make a partisan gerrymandering illegal in Indiana:
“Ind. Const. art. 2, § 1 “All elections shall be free and equal.””
Speaking of Pennsylvania:
“According to the court, partisan gerrymandering claims are cognizable under the state constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause. League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth, 178 A.3d 737, 814 (Pa. 2018) (“League I”) (citing Pa. Const. art. I, § 5).” — https://statedemocracy.law.wisc.edu/2024-partisan-gerrymandering-explainer/2024/pennsylvania-2/
My understanding: I am not sure if you are thinking of prohibition in IN state constitution on redistricting state rep seats and state senate mid-cycle seats that does not seem to include Congressional making that a seeming misapplication, or the seemingly accurate one that the free and equal clause should in theory make a partisan gerrymandering illegal in Indiana:
“Ind. Const. art. 2, § 1 “All elections shall be free and equal.””
Speaking of Pennsylvania:
“According to the court, partisan gerrymandering claims are cognizable under the state constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause. League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth, 178 A.3d 737, 814 (Pa. 2018) (“League I”) (citing Pa. Const. art. I, § 5).” — State Democracy Research Initiative University of Wisconsin Law School . Pennsylvania – 2024 Partisan Gerrymandering Explainer.
Indiana has allowed corporations to foist off the overhead cost of training employees to the taxpayer. Essentially, people are paying for their own training, directly or indirectly, while upper management gets multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses on the backs of the employees. Passive shareholders, often those same upper management people, reap the dividends, insider trading writ large.
I keep wondering if there will come a time in the near future when all goods are available from a single monopolistic entity, controlled by the oligarchy to their sole benefit. It used to seem impossible, but now seems likely. Competition will be completely absent from the marketplace, for workers or goods. That means that wages will be non-competitive, set by the monopoly. Working for the company store will be the norm again.
Thank you very much for this! I have been trying to say exactly the same thing, but you stated it better than I could.