Category Archives: Education / Youth

House Bill 1136

The assault on democracy and rationality isn’t just at the federal level.

At the start of every session, the culture warriors in Indiana’s terrible legislature introduce all kinds of wacky and extreme bills. Some of them are so wacky and so extreme that they go no farther. They don’t even get committee hearings.

Of course, lots of perfectly reasonable measures–even obviously excellent ones, if sponsored by Democrats–also go to the  bill graveyard.

Media folks who cover the statehouse have learned not to take bills seriously until there are indications that they have some chance of actually passing. That should be our reaction to House Bill 1136, which has received a good deal of publicity and generated significant anguished pushback. H.B. 1136 provides that, if more than 50% of students who live within a school corporation’s boundaries are enrolled in a school that isn’t operated by that school corporation, “the school corporation must be dissolved and all public schools of the school corporation must be transitioned to operating as charter schools.” The bill establishes a new governing board and procedures for dissolving and reorganizing the school corporation.

I tend to lump this bit of legislative nastiness (it’s clearly aimed at urban schools that serve minority and low-income kids) in with the other looney-tune measures that will go to the big bill cemetery in the sky, but it does trigger several of my pet peeves, the most “peevish” of which is lawmakers’ persistent war on public education.

Before I focus on recent evidence bolstering my argument that vouchers are simply a way to evade the First Amendment and allow legislators to send tax dollars to religious schools, I need to focus on a preliminary pet peeve: the public discourse that makes no distinction between charter schools and the private schools that accept vouchers. 

Charter schools are public schools. They operate under restrictions that don’t apply to private schools (like the Constitution). Overall–depending upon their sponsorship and management–their performance has been positive. That’s overall, but–just as with traditional public schools–there are exceptions. (Most of the problems, according to what I’ve read, have come from charters managed by private, for-profit companies.)

Voucher-accepting private schools are another matter entirely, as I have repeatedly documented.

Pro Publica recently added to the huge volume of data on that subject.

In an article titled “On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools,” the report focused on the religious underpinnings–and successes–of the voucher movement. The article highlighted three conclusions.

The Ohio Model: Rarely seen letters show how the voucher movement started in the 1990s as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools and expanded to a much broader push.

Helping the Affluent: An initiative promoted as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids — is increasingly funneling money to families who already easily afford private school tuition.

The Voucher Deficit: Expanding programs threaten funding for public schools and put pressure on state budgets, as many religious-based schools enjoy new largesse.

I really urge you to click through and read the entire hair-raising report, which documents the real purposes of educational vouchers: they are tools meant to enrich religious institutions and the well-to-do, and undermine separation of church and state.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

Strategists behind this effort started with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools. Then they fought to expand the benefits to far richer families — “a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate.” 

So much for that pesky Constitution…

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Old Truths

Important notice: Due to the cold, the rally on January 20th has been moved to Broadway United Methodist Church, 609 E 29th St, Indianapolis. Indoors.

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.Several weeks ago, the Indianapolis Capitol Chronicle ran an article in which the author mused about civics instruction. She had come across the 1930 edition of a civics textbook, and noted that its focus on community responsibilities seemed very different from today’s preoccupation with individualism.

The book starts with this preface (and yes, I took photos while at the table): “It is generally agreed today that the main reason for the existence of schools is to help our pupils to become good citizens. Our schools teach the three R’s because everybody needs those tools in order to act intelligently in his relations with his fellow man. It is no less important for the pupil to learn that his life must be lived in close association with his fellow men, and to profit by the experience of human beings in regard to these relations.”

In those few introductory words lies the conundrum that faces all societies: how do we protect the political, religious and philosophical autonomy of the individual while building safe, orderly and supportive communities?

Several years ago, I made a speech in which I considered that question. As I said then, there is an African proverb to the effect that it takes a village to raise a child. Implicit in that saying is the question at the heart of political philosophy: What should that village look like? What is the common good, and what is the nature of social obligation? What sort of social and political arrangements are most likely to promote and enable what Aristotle called “human flourishing”? And perhaps, more importantly, do we live in an era when such questions have largely been abandoned?

That simple introductory paragraph from a long-ago textbook reminds us that our public schools have two vitally important tasks: first, giving children the intellectual tools and skills they will need, not just to negotiate the economic world they will inhabit, but also to lead richer, more fulfilled and considered lives; and second, equipping them for the responsibilities of citizenship.

Over the past few decades, there has been a very unfortunate narrowing of emphasis to just one portion of that first responsibility. Critics of public education have focused almost entirely on the subjects needed to produce a workforce–on giving students the skills they’ll need to compete economically. The sorts of instruction that will help them flourish, that will give them the insights and understandings that will help them create rich and enjoyable lives–music and art and literature–have been relegated to the sidelines or eliminated entirely, dismissed as “frills.”

Worse, the various educational “reforms” that have been pursued have ignored the second important purpose of public education–preparing students for thoughtful and engaged citizenship in a complicated and increasingly diverse society.

Not only have our public schools neglected the proper teaching of American history and government, the vouchers that facilitate evasion of the First Amendment have sent thousands of children to religious schools, most of which ignore civics instruction and deepen tribal commitments rather than helping students understand the complexity–and necessity– of seeking the common good and wrestling with the imperatives of our national motto: e pluribus unum.

Too many of our legislators, here in Indiana and elsewhere, confuse education with job training. They are most definitely not the same thing. We are impoverishing generations of students by depriving them of sustained contact with the liberal arts and with the enduring questions that separate thinking humans from automatons. By neglecting instruction in government and citizenship, we have contributed to the widespread ignorance that continues to elevate so many unfit and unstable individuals to positions of power. It isn’t just Trump–there are plenty of other examples at all levels of government, certainly in Indiana.

Finding the “golden mean” between too much emphasis on individualism and too much emphasis on community and conformity has never been simple. That search for a proper balance between individual rights and the imperatives of the common good is fatally compromised when a significant portion of the population remains uneducated because those responsible for education policy don’t know (or care about) the difference between educating students and training them.

When the body politic lacks a common understanding of their society’s foundational principles, culture warriors and plutocrats are enabled, and tribalism threatens to bring down the entire edifice of legitimate government. That is arguably where we find ourselves right now, and the sustained assault on American education–an assault that has hollowed out the very concept of education– is at the very heart of our impending Trumpian disasters.

We are reaping the whirlwind.

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An Object Lesson

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…..

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Unintended Consequences

One of the trickiest problems facing policymakers is the risk of unintended consequences. Even policies passed with the best of intentions can produce very negative outcomes, often to seemingly unrelated issues. Good policy decisions rest both on proper diagnosis–that is, a thoughtful and informed analysis of the problem to be solved and its causes–and on recognition of the effects a proposed policy change might have on other areas of American life.

Those two requirements of sound policymaking–proper diagnosis and an understanding of what we might call the “inter-relationship” of policy areas–require policymakers to be competent and informed. Enormous damage can be done by ideologues impatient with pesky realities, or self-important ignoramuses acting with limited understanding..

Considerable harm can be done unintentionally by people who lack the knowledge necessary to see the probable consequences of their ignorance. What makes the coming Trump administration so terrifying is that it is composed almost entirely of such people.

Trump himself is clearly unable to understand the logical outcomes of his threats–think his love affair with tariffs, which would vastly increase inflation, or the effects of his plan to deport millions of immigrants, many of whom American farmers rely upon to pick their crops.

I thought about the problem of unintended consequences when I came across an article focused on the unfortunate effects of even well-meaning legislation passed by thoughtful legislators. 

Richard Rothstein wrote The Color of Law, a book I heartily recommend. It was an eye-opening history of the many laws that created America’s residential segregation, and any reader who comes to it while laboring under the misapprehension that such neighborhoods arose by chance or choice will discover otherwise. (I will admit to being shocked when I read it, and I did know some of what he covered.)

In the linked article, however, he takes analysis a bit farther, and shows how that shameful history led to a seemingly unrelated bill that worsened the negative outcomes of residential segregation.

I was recently asked how I came to write The Color of Law. The answer is this: In the 1990s and early 2000s, I had been a journalist and policy analyst studying public education. At the time, it was conventional wisdom that the “achievement gap”—black students having lower average performance than white students—was caused by lazy or incompetent teachers of low-income children. In 2002, this view, shared across the political spectrum, was enshrined in federal legislation: the “No Child Left Behind” law. Its theory was that if we shamed teachers by publishing their low-income African American students’ test scores, the teachers would work harder and the achievement gap would disappear. Residues of this law continue to this day. If you wonder why elementary and secondary schools are so obsessed with administering standardized tests and reporting their scores, it’s because of that policy.

Rothstein eventually concluded that lower average achievement of these pupils wasn’t due to deficits of instruction, but to the

social and economic challenges that children brought with them to school—for example, greater rates of lead poisoning that resulted in damaged cognitive function; living in more polluted neighborhoods that led to a higher incidence of asthma that kept children up at night wheezing and coming to school drowsier the next day; lack of adequate health care, including dental care, that brought more children to school with distracting toothaches, and on and on…

Looking back on this now, it’s remarkable that the book treated these all as individual student disadvantages, and made very little mention of segregation. But I soon thereafter realized that it was one thing if individual students came to school with one or more of such challenges; it was quite another if many students in a school did so, overwhelming the ability of even the best teachers to overcome them. We call such schools “segregated” schools and so I began to think of school segregation as the greatest problem facing American public education. And as I thought about it further, an obvious fact struck me: the reason we have segregated schools is because they are located in segregated neighborhoods. For me, a logical next step was to view neighborhood segregation as a school problem, one that writers about education policy should consider more carefully.

That insight led Rothstein to write The Color of Law. It should caution us to recognize the complex and inter-related nature of so many of the issues modern America faces.

We will soon see what happens when the government is run by people who don’t understand H.L. Mencken’s observation that “For every complex problem, there’s an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

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The Voice Of The People

We Americans talk a lot about democracy. Those conversations multiplied during this year’s election cycle, when it became obvious that democracy was under attack by a MAGA base that preferred Trump’s promised autocracy. That said, those conversations rarely focus on the Founders’ approach to democratic governance, and the constitutional mechanisms they employed as a result of their concerns.

It is a truism that the Founders weren’t fans of what they called “the passions of the majority.” In addition to limiting the right to vote to those they trusted with that power–White guys with property–they crafted a system that limited the operation of democratic decision-making; the Bill of Rights was a list of things that government was forbidden to do even when a majority of voters wanted government to do them. The limitations were founded on that libertarian premise I frequently cite, a belief that government action is legitimate when necessary to prevent citizen A from harming the person or property of citizen B, but not when government is trying to restrict an individual”s personal liberties, the choices that–in Jefferson’s famous words–neither pick a neighbor’s pocket nor break his leg.

The Founders’ decision to restrict the areas that were remitted to democratic decision-making is why many people who don’t really understand that basic framework often claim that America wasn’t intended to be a democracy, but a republic. To be accurate, our system is a democratic republic, in which we elect representatives who are supposed to respond to the democratic will of the people when legislating in the large number of policy areas where majority rule is appropriate.

Those of us who have been sounding the alarm over America’s retreat from democracy have pointed to the growing lack of proper representation–and the numerous systemic flaws that have separated government’s performance from the expressed will of its citizens. Thanks to pervasive gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the filibuster, and the composition of the U.S. Senate, among other undemocratic systemic mechanisms, elected officials have increasingly felt free to ignore even clear expressions of popular sentiment.

That retreat from representative democracy isn’t simply a federal phenomenon; it occurs with regularity at the state level. Two recent examples may illustrate the point.

Example one: In the wake of the Dobbs decision, several state legislatures imposed draconian bans on a woman’s right to obtain an abortion. Polling clearly showed that–in most of those states–large majorities of voters opposed those bans, and subsequently, in states where the electorate had the opportunity to oppose the bans through referenda (a democratic mechanism not available in my state), they overturned them.

Example two: Right-wing ideologues have waged consistent war against public schools. In a number of states, legislatures  send tax dollars to private schools–predominantly religious schools–through voucher programs. I have posted numerous times about the negative effects of those programs: their failure to improve educational outcomes, their disproportionate use by upper-middle-class families, and the degree to which they deprive public schools of critically-needed resources.

When citizens of a state are able to vote on those programs, they lose.

In ballot initiatives, voters delivered a stunning rebuke to school vouchers, which siphon scarce and critical funding from public schools—which serve 90 percent of students—and redirect it to private institutions with no accountability.

Although the outcome of the 2024 election may test the resolve of the most committed and determined public education advocate, educators and their allies can find strength and inspiration in what happened in Nebraska, Colorado, and Kentucky. In those states, support for public schools was put on the ballot and won a resounding victory.

As the NEA President noted,

“Voters rejected diverting public school funding to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools, just like they have done every time vouchers have been on the ballot. The public knows vouchers harm students and does not want them in any form.”

Thanks to the distortions in our electoral systems, voters in the United States have been steadily losing the right to democratically direct their governments. The 2024 election was different only because the further threat to democratic decision-making was so transparent. The truth is that, thanks to the operation of the cited anti-democratic mechanisms (aided and abetted by low levels of civic literacy and engagement and funded by the plutocrats), the voice of the people has become more and more irrelevant.

The cranks and ideologues have used those poorly-understood mechanisms to attain and retain public office, and they  no longer feel constrained by the demonstrable wishes of even large majorities.

If and when the resistance manages to overcome MAGA, that will only be a beginning. We haven’t had majority rule–aka democracy– for quite some time.

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