The most frustrating thing about Indiana’s terrible legislature is the dismissal of empirical evidence by the super-majority of GOP ideologues impervious to any facts contrary to their closely-held beliefs.
When reality conflicts with the religious fundamentlism that permeates their worldviews, Indiana citizens suffer. We are already seeing the truly horrific consequences of Indiana’s abortion ban–women suffering and dying unnecessarily, and large parts of the state becoming ob/gyn deserts. We are also seeing it in the legislative (and gubernatorial) insistence on funding religious schools at the expense of the state’s public schools, despite the amply-documented negative effects on education. (People familiar with education policy have long been aware that vouchers were intended as an Establishment Clause “work around,” not as an educational tool.)
The Republican super-majority–and Governor-elect Braun–are intent upon extending Indiana’s dreadful school voucher program despite its costs, despite the failure of vouchers to do any of the things that were initially promised, and despite the fact that voters have rejected voucher programs in every state where a vote has been allowed.
Not only has the General Assembly continued to send tax dollars to private schools that are overwhelmingly religious, that money has continued to flow with minimal oversight. A recent investigation by Pro Publica has documented what happens when tax dollars support schools while imposing virtually no rules or offering any transparency.
The article began by chronicling the closing of the “Title of Liberty” private school. The principal informed parents that
They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.
These families had, until this moment, embodied Arizona’s “school choice” ideal. Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. So they’d shopped for other educational options on the free market, eventually leading them to Title of Liberty.
Arizona offers Empowerment Scholarship Accounts — a type of school voucher spreading to more than a dozen other states. ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice. There is little oversight, and as the article notes, no transparency.
The state never informed parents who were new to Title of Liberty and were planning to spend their voucher money there that it had previously been a charter school called ARCHES Academy — which had had its charter revoked last school year due to severe financial issues. Nor that, as a charter, it had a record of dismal academic performance, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in 2023.
When it was a charter (which is a type of public school), these things could be known. There was some oversight. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools had monitored the school’s finances and academics, unanimously coming to the conclusion that it should be shut down.
Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)
You really should click through and read the whole, depressing article.
To the best of my knowledge, Indiana’s program doesn’t pay individual tutors, but there is a similar lack of accountability. (Charter schools–which, unlike voucher schools, are public schools–are supervised and must have institutional authorizers. It’s an important difference.)
Honest folks who numbered among the original proponents of Indiana’s voucher program have conceded the failure of the program to achieve its desired results. Michael Hicks, for example, who had been an advocate of expansive “school choice,” recently wrote that “school choice effects are smaller than almost anyone hoped or expected. Today, it’s clear that the average student in private school underperforms their public school counterparts (charter schools tend to out-perform both).”
I don’t expect Indiana’s legislature to modify its support in response to the mountains of negative evidence, just as I don’t expect them to reconsider the state’s abortion ban just because women die. Over 90% of Indiana’s vouchers go to religious schools, and supporting those schools is their actual definition of “success.”
And we wonder why educated students flee the Hoosier state…..
Those concerned about the decimation of public schools in Indiana need to be aware of HB 1136 School Corporation Reorganization. It provides that, if more than 50% of students who have legal settlement in a school corporation were enrolled in a school that is not operated by the school corporation on the 2024 fall average daily membership count date, the school corporation must be dissolved and all public schools of the school corporation must be transitioned to operating as charter schools.
From Indiana Coalition for Public Education-Monroe County: The bill’s provisions are estimated to dissolve five school corporations and by FY 2029, 68 schools will transition to operate as charter schools.
The first five to be dissolved would be
Indianapolis Public Schools, Gary Community School Corporation, Union School Corporation, Tri-Township Consolidated School Corporation, and Cannelton City Schools.
The Bill has been referred to the Education Committee and is scheduled for a first reading Wednesday (1/8)
To start with I will admit that the following is only loosely related to the topic at hand but may reveal a useful perspective on the future of human tools.
Ten thousand generations ago, there were no homo sapiens on earth. Since then, every generation has improved life by inventing new tools to manage life better, with each generation taking what they were given and making things a little better than they found.
Of course, due to dispersion across the earth’s surface, we evolved into many flavors at different locations but always searched for better.
A closer look at that process also reveals the growth in diversity, with some places more conducive to a safe and comfortable life. It’s been like a relay race, with more and less capable teams finding faster and slower paths.
Our generation is like a photo record of a point in spacetime, with winners and losers, some ahead or behind by a little and others by a lot, but all captured in spacetime of an eight billion human race.
It’s strange, though, because the perspective is different for each contestant, with leaders more safe and comfortable than followers.
However, what distinguishes winners and losers? Wealth? Power? Happiness? Productivity? Contribution to others? Narrowing the gaps? Growing the body of knowledge for everyone by managing the growth in knowledge for themselves? Best fit specialization for these times?
It isn’t easy to know, and this divides us into more or less separated individuals, yet sometimes progress is made by everyone.
Intelligence is for these times what athleticism is for those kinds of competitions.
The artificial kind is superior to the natural kind for some tasks depending the breadth and depth of any problem because training a large language model can employ memorizing everything on the internet. In real lives though biochemistry also plays a role which is both good and bad.
That’s why here and now we increasingly employ a collaboration between humans and computers.
I’ll have to read Hicks’s article later because his employer runs the charter licensing program for the state and also was handed our public school corporation without any legal battles at all. Ball State picked up prime real estate next to their campus for pennies on the dollar with development plans long ago made. A local judge, the Ball Family, and a handful of state reps decided to take advantage of a fraudulent expenditure by the CFO, collapse the school corporation, and give it to Ball State to manage.
Before the collapse, the Ball Family put together a video of local ass-kissers telling the public that the school corporation was suffering from an exodus of students to the county schools but never used the word racism or race.
The bond money illegally used to cover short-term losses resulted in zero arrests – in other words, no one was accountable, not even the school superintendent, who also knew what was happening with the money. Worse yet, the head of the teacher’s union knew what was happening but was never held accountable.
While none of the culprits were held accountable, the district’s taxpayers lost significant value and management of a school corporation due to NO FAULT of their own. Amazingly, all the elected school board members (several of them Democrats) landed kush jobs with a Republican-run administration. How did that happen? LOL
We also have public employee unions that are protected and get fat raises paid by non-unionized working-class stiffs who can’t afford their property taxes, rent, housing insurance, or utilities now. Pete said something the other day about “capitalism” being a house of dominoes ready to fall. EXACTLY!
The good news is that Musk’s, Trump’s, and Thiel’s greed will likely set the nation on fire. Whether the people will be informed enough to unite is an entirely different subject. Musk isn’t supporting fascism (although his new adjustment to the X algorithm is to promote positive news) for no reason. They know what to expect from the people and their surveillance system is in place for both the “right and left.”
” (People familiar with education policy have long been aware that vouchers were intended as an Establishment Clause “work around,” not as an educational tool.)”
“‘Nough said!
As indicated by the column, another failing of “school choice” is the lack of stability. I read constantly of schools closing, sometimes in the middle of the school year, and parents scrambling to find another school for their children. When taxpayers only supported public schools, students attended their local district schools from kindergarten through high school, without having to worry that their school would suddenly disappear.
But ……… how can the catholic religion maintain its power if we taxpayers aren’t forced to financially support it?
And what about the fundamentalist religion’s power over their congregants? Don’t the rest of us need to financially help them survive?
Ummmm, I hope you recognize these questions are facetious.
Below is a link to Purdue Fort Wayne’s Professor Downs’ voucher school statistics that show the financial impact of vouchers to every public school system in Indiana. You can search the spreadsheets to see how much tax revenue meant for your local public schools has been taken for private school vouchers.
https://drphildowns.com/index.php/2024/09/23/cumulative-voucher-program-costs-since-2017-18/
Most Indiana citizens in rural areas don’t realize that some of the taxes they pay towards education are actually being funneled to private schools all over the state via vouchers, even though there may not even be any private schools in their county.
Please call your state senator’s and representative’s offices to tell them how much you are against tax revenue being taken from your local public schools to support private school vouchers. You can inform them that they are violating Article 1, Section 6 of our state Constitution by stealing public tax revenue and giving it to religious institution. Don’t let them get away with the BS claim that it is being given to parents because it isn’t – it is sent to the schools that the parents choose.
Nancy, you may want to check to see what “workarounds” to our state constitution took place during Mitch Daniels’ terms. His school board was stacked with Indiana Policy Review advocates (Koch-funded), who found ways to funnel state taxpayer money into religious schools in K-12 and secondary institutions like Indiana Wesleyan, Marian College, and Taylor. Not only did they funnel cash to religious schools, but they also let the religious schools maintain their ability to discriminate against potential employees by requiring a religious oath and a letter from your clergy to show you are a “good Christian.”
Mitch brought many “gifts” to Indiana during his governorship.
Todd – yes, I knew Mitch started the voucher system and how Kochs provided the ‘workaround’ our constitution. It is absolutely crazy that they got away with defying it. It is also crazy that the gop fell in line with trump and his lies. I wonder how far the country has to fall before the willfully ignorant people wake up to what they’ve enabled.
Mitch’s choice for his next job (and Purdue trustee appts) after being the gov is why I was ashamed of admitting I graduated from Purdue while he was there. And then he topped it all off with buying a for profit online school and naming it Purdue Global. Many of us feel that he cheapened the degrees that we worked so hard for.