Category Archives: Education / Youth

Indiana’s Legislature Doesn’t Get It

I often post about education, about which I have some firm convictions. I began my professional life as a high school English teacher, and ended it with 21 years as a college professor. Now that I am an elderly retiree, my focus has narrowed to a simple question: What is education and why does Indiana do so badly at it? (Among other deficits, we rank 43rd among the states in the percentage of our population with a bachelor’s degree.)

Most of us have come across the concept of Occam’s Razor–the principle that the simplest answer is usually the right one–and I’ve concluded that the answer to why Indiana’s legislature is so bad at education policy is, indeed, simple: the World’s Worst Legislature doesn’t know what education is. Hoosier lawmakers don’t understand the difference between education and job training, and they appear entirely unaware of the critical importance of public education in forming a “body politic.” 

I have posted numerous times about the insanity of Indiana’s voucher program, which siphons resources from public schools, increases civic polarization, evades the constitutional separation of church and state, and has utterly failed to improve student academic performance. Recently, we’ve also learned that, despite early promises about benefitting poor children, most families taking advantage of vouchers are upper-middle-class or wealthy.

The legislative drive to privatize education and send money to religious schools at the expense of both poorer Hoosiers and the state’s public school system is reprehensible enough, but last session’s changes to academic requirements underscored lawmakers’ confusion of job training with the purposes of a genuine education. (We had already seen that confusion when the legislature passed a “workforce development” bill giving high school students credit for substituting an apprenticeship with local businesses for academic coursework.)

During its last session, lawmakers modified the requirements for what is known as the “core 40” that high school students must take to graduate.

As Chalkbeat recently pointed out, at a time when too few Hoosiers have college degrees,

A plan to refocus Indiana’s graduation requirements on work experiences would eliminate a diploma linked to college-going without providing a clear alternative for students seeking postsecondary education.

There’s a lot to dislike about lawmakers’ most recent cluelessness, but allow me to focus on just two areas: science and civics. 

The requirement for science instruction has been reduced to two classes from six, and there are now no required courses.

In a world facing the enormous challenges of climate change, determined efforts to deny the efficacy of vaccines (and medical science generally), and multiple other conflicts that are the result of a widespread lack of scientific literacy, this is insane. It’s bad enough that many voucher students will be taught creationism rather than science, but to dramatically reduce required instruction in the scientific method is to turn out even those desired “worker bees” with a lack of the basic knowledge they’ll need to function (including their ability to remain employed!) in an increasingly technological world.

Worse still, citizens who don’t understand the difference between a scientific theory and a wild-eyed guess will be vulnerable to the anti-scientific claptrap spewed by climate-change deniers and culture warriors. Absent a basic understanding of how science operates, they will certainly not be informed voters.

Then there’s the reduction in social studies requirements.

Students will no longer be required to take economics, world history or geography–only government and U.S. History. To belabor the obvious, without an understanding of basic economics, students will be unfamiliar with a major element of both governance and history. In an increasingly inter-connected world, they will be able to graduate without understanding the all-important context of American history, or the multiple influences of global interconnections.

Education has been defined as the development of reasoning and judgment–intellectual preparation for a mature life. That preparation will include–but be much more extensive than– job training, and it should include knowledge needed for effective citizenship. One of the major purposes of the public school was–in Benjamin Barber’s phrase–to be constitutive of a public. Public schools were created in large part to create Americans from children coming into the classroom from diverse backgrounds. We abandon that essential task when we privatize schools and limit required instruction to job skills. 

Gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McCormick–a life-long educator who previously served as Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction–left the Republican Party in part due to her profound and informed disagreement with the legislature’s super-majority over these issues. 

It’s one more reason to vote for McCormick. 

PS Another major reason to vote McCormick is her support for reproductive freedom. If you can, attend her Reproductive Town Hall in Indianapolis on June 11th, from 6:30 to 7:30 at IBEW Hall, 1828 N. Meridian Street #205.

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Speaking Of Indoctrination

A few days ago, I highlighted the growth of “below-the-radar” volunteer organizations working to inform citizens and get out the progressive (okay, the anti-lunacy) vote. I was encouraged to discover how many efforts of which I’d previously been unaware– were underway in Indiana and elsewhere.

But of course, what’s sauce for the goose…A post at Juanita Jean reported on a similar phenomenon--but from the Right.

Those of us who get our information from the (mostly) reliable traditional news sources have been made aware of the many semi-secret organizations working to replace secular democracy with Christian Nationalism–from groups of wealthy and ostensibly respectable businessmen to the considerably less “socially acceptable” militia members. The linked post offers yet another illustration of the well-known Republican predilection for projection– blaming others for one’s own behaviors. This is yet another example of the hypocrisy of those insisting that “libruls” and public schools are engaged in “indoctrination.”

As Half-Empty writes at Juanita Jean,

What do Sean Spicer, General Michael Flynn (ret.), Jack Posobiec, Dan Crenshaw, Mike Waltz, Dana Loesch, Dinesh D’Souza, and John Solomon all have in common?

If you guessed they were all January 6th supporters or TFG idolizers, you would be correct, but they also have one basic thing in common: they are all Kid Lit authors.

At least they are now.

All of the above and more belong to the new constellation of stars being offered by Houston-based Brave Books. Brave Books proudly offers “Pro-God, Pro-America children’s books.” They tout their books to be “faith-based children’s books teaching American values for a brighter future.”

Brave Books features such titles as “The Island of Free Ice Cream,” which instructs children “that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is,” and “Fame, Blame and the Raft of Shame,” which teaches children “the dangers of cancel culture.”

I kid you not.

As Half Empty notes, most parents of toddlers consider colorfully illustrated children’s books a must-have.  And such children are still in their formative years; they are not yet capable of distinguishing between right and wrong, and far too immature to consider complications or shades of gray. Toddlers and very young children are ripe for socialization/indoctrination.

Early indoctrination of children is not a new concept. Early in the Soviet Era, children of the USSR were encouraged to join Little Octobrists (октября́та) in order to become lively, active, healthy, disciplined youngsters who subordinate themselves to the collective.

At about the same time, a similar program was offered in Germany called Deutsches Jungvolk and Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) for older male children.

The difference between then and now, obviously, is that in the present case, the children’s books are offered by a private business, and the earlier indoctrination programs were government run.

Apparently, however, even that distinction blurs.

While not government entities themselves, there are three examples of government-related organizations that do participate in indoctrination. In May 2023, the NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee) purchased $5,193.00 of these books in order to provide gift mementos to its donors. In November 2022, the Michael Waltz Campaign (FL – 06) bought $580.00 worth of books for supporters. In May 2022, the principal campaign committee of Matt Gaetz (FL – 01) purchased $2,555.80 worth for “supporter gifts.”

As Half-Empty notes, these GOP tactics amount to a “win-win” scenario:

authors get paid for their works, donors get rewarded for donating, and young children are told about the evils of boycotts and getting free stuff (eg., ice cream, EBT, Healthcare, and Social Security).

In this scenario, when you are in a majority, you maintain the majority by early indoctrination of future voters. If you find yourself in a shrinking minority, it is even more important to indoctrinate them.

I will admit to being dubious about the long-term success of these efforts at early childhood indoctrination. On the other hand, the parents who use these books (assuming that recipients of these GOP “gifts” are parents who actually do read to their children–or read at all) are likely to pursue other childrearing practices that reinforce the book’s “lessons.” Although the likely impact of this particular effort is low, its existence reflects the pervasiveness of GOP efforts to compensate for the party’s minority status–its determination to turn back the clock to a time when White Christian males dominated a patriarchal American society.

What worries me is that these sorts of underground efforts have to be considered in context: an extensive media (Faux, etc.) reinforcing Rightwing disinformation, a voting population that is largely civically-illiterate, and the persistent racism of a considerable portion of the American public.

It’s that context that keeps me up at night…

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Race, Religion, Money And Vouchers

The nefarious effects of educational vouchers continue to be documented. 

The Washington Post recently reported on a study confirming what a number of prior studies have suggested: that an unexpected rise in racial segregation is largely attributable to the expansion of school voucher programs.

Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a study being released Monday shows a pronounced increase in school segregation since 1988, particularly in large school districts with significant numbers of Black students.

Overall, school segregation between Black and White students has increased by 25 percent since 1991 in the 533 large districts serving at least 2,500 Black students — a significant increase but nowhere near the decline that occurred in the aftermath of Brown, according to the study. (Of note: the paper makes clear that most of the school segregation in the United States is driven by demographic differences between districts, not within them.)

The study found that the problem was not housing segregation, although that certainly helps explain school segregation, because housing has become less segregated since 1991. It also found that rising school segregation isn’t driven by economic inequality, which has also declined over this period.

The researchers point to two specific policies: federal courts releasing school districts, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg, from obligations to desegregate schools beginning in significant numbers in the late 1990s; and school-choice policies that let parents pick what school their children attend.

Surprise!–NOT.

Vouchers don’t just promote racial segregation–they also facilitate religiously-based polarization. I have previously written about Indiana’s voucher program, which sends millions of tax dollars to predominantly religious schools. A recent report from North Carolina underlines the role of school choice programs in siphoning public funds from public schools and sending them to religious schools, especially those aligned with conservative Christian churches and activists. Those schools have received hundreds of millions of dollars in state government funding in recent years.

Democrats in North Carolina have criticized the private-school voucher program for taking money — and students — away from public schools and sending them to private schools, where there’s often little public accountability for academic success, and where schools are free to engage in discrimination or hire people without credentials as teachers. Republicans defend offering families the choice of where to educate their children.

The report notes that several of these schools are “unabashedly Christian,” including one that has  

an application form that instructs potential families to provide the name and phone number of their pastor, detail which church ministries they’re involved in, and agree that their child can be expelled if the family doesn’t attend church services at least once a week.

If the data confirming that voucher programs promote racial and religious divisions weren’t troubling enough, a recent Brookings study confirms that–despite pious pronouncements about vouchers enabling poor children to escape “failing” public schools–vouchers have become another handout to the wealthy. The research looked at Arizona, one of several states where Republican lawmakers have created or expanded private-school choice programs to give nearly all students, regardless of their individual need, public funding to attend private schools.

In 2022, Arizona lawmakers opened the program to all students, including those already attending private schools. EdChoice touts the current iteration of the program as the “first to offer full universal funded eligibility with broad-use flexibility for parents.”…

The list of allowable expenses for Arizona’s ESA program is long. It includes everything from tuition and fees to backpacks, printers, and bookshelves. Overall, about 63% of state funds are being spent on tuition, textbooks, and fees at a qualifying school, with “curricula and supplementary materials” (12%) being the next largest expense.

And who, exactly, is benefitting from this taxpayer largesse?

We looked to publicly available data on Empowerment Scholarship Account recipients to get a clearer picture of who is receiving ESA funds. If, in fact, affluent families are securing the lion’s share of ESA funding, that would raise obvious questions about whether these programs are exacerbating rather than mitigating inequities in school access…

The researchers used a number of methods to determine where the funds were going, and the results were unambiguous:

In other words, regardless of the SES measure used (poverty rate, median income, or educational attainment), we see similar patterns in who is obtaining ESA funding. More advantaged communities are securing a highly disproportionate share of these scholarships.

Vouchers were supposed to improve educational outcomes for poor children. The programs have not only failed to improve learning outcomes, they have increased racial segregation, facilitated religious discrimination, and been a windfall for the wealthy (many of whom already had children in private schools), all while robbing the nation’s public schools of desperately needed resources.

They’ve been a civic and educational disaster.

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The Protests, The War

This will be a somewhat longer post than usual, and it has been an extraordinarily difficult one to write.

As a retired faculty member of Indiana University, and a former Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I have been appalled by IU’s over-the-top response to the student protests on the Bloomington campus. The late-night change of a 55-year-old policy,  the decision to invite a police presence, the horrifying confirmation that a sniper was positioned on a nearby roof–all of this in response to what observers described as a peaceful protest–is incomprehensible.

Other institutions of higher education have similarly over-reacted–but still others have not. At Dartmouth, Jewish and Middle-Eastern professors have co-taught a class exploring the conflict and its history; at the University of Chicago, where my granddaughter is a sophomore, the University has issued a statement reaffirming students’ right to protest while making it clear that demonstrations “cannot jeopardize safety or disrupt the University’s operations and the ability of people in the University to carry out their work.”

You don’t have to agree with the message being conveyed in order to support the right to protest. In the immortal words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, freedom of speech is meaningless unless it is also “freedom for the idea we hate.”

I have refrained from posting my own concerns about the conduct of a war that has divided America’s Jewish community as much as it has the broader polity. But Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo recently shared his reactions, and I share them. (Marshall is Jewish). He begins his essay by noting that much of the anti-Semitism being voiced has come–at least at Columbia–from non-students on the periphery of the protests. He also points to the naiveté of students calling for the elimination of the State of Israel, attributing the slogans to “the kind of revolutionary cosplay that is often part and parcel of college activism.”

Is this anti-Semitic? Not as such. It’s a political view that the Israeli state never should have come into existence in the first place and that the events of 1948 should simply be reversed by force, if a solution can’t be voluntarily agreed to. But since a bit over half of Jews in the world live in Israel, that is a demand or an aim that can’t help but seem wildly threatening to the vast majority of Jews in the world, certainly the ones in Israel but by no means only them.

Marshall discusses the decades-long administrative changes in institutions of higher education that have made so many universities ill-equipped to deal properly with this particular moment, and then he turns to the war itself.

If it is true that the groups spearheading the protest expressly hold eliminationist goals and beliefs about Israel, it is just as clearly true that the real energy of these protests isn’t about 1948 or even 1967 — they are about what people have been seeing on their TVs for the last six months. And that is a vast military onslaught that has leveled numerous neighborhoods throughout Gaza, led to the substantial physical destruction of much whole strip and lead to the deaths of more than 30,000 people. That’s horrifying. And people know that the U.S. has played a role in it. It’s not at all surprising that lots and lots of students are wildly up in arms about that and want to protest to make it stop.

To me, you can’t really understand the situation without recognizing that Hamas started this engagement by launching a massacre of almost unimaginable scale and brutality and then retreated to what has always been its key strategic defense in Gaza, which is intentionally placing their military infrastructure in and under civilian areas so that the price of attacking them militarily is mass civilian casualties that are then mobilized internationally to curtail Israeli military attacks on Hamas.

This is unquestionably true and no one can honestly deny that this is Hamas’s central strategic concept: employing civilian shields to limit Israel’s ability to engage Hamas in military terms.

But that being true doesn’t make tens of thousands of people less dead. And most of the dead aren’t Hamas. So if you’re a student you say — along with quite a few non-students in the U.S. — all that stuff may be true, but what I’m seeing is the ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocents and I absolutely need that to stop, especially if it is being carried out directly or indirectly with arms my tax dollars bought….

The last six months has thrown me very hard back on to defending the existence of Israel, its historical connections to Jews in Europe and the Middle East before the 20th century, its origins as the political expression of a people who are in fact indigenous to Israel-Palestine. And that’s because all of these things are now questioned and attacked as core questions.

But the reality is that these conversations, often harrowing and angry, are simply diversions from anything that creates a path forward from the terrible present. There are two national communities deeply embedded in the land. Neither is going anywhere even though there are substantial proportions of both communities who want that to happen to the other one. There’s no way to build something sustainable and dignified without both peoples having a state in which they have self-determination and citizenship. That’s the only plausible endpoint where violence doesn’t remain an ever-present reality. How you get there is another story. And yes, if you think one unified state makes sense, God bless you. If you can get majorities of both groups to agree to that, fine. I don’t live there. If that’s what they want, great. That’s almost certainly never going to be the case. And it’s a failed state in the making.

But none of these arguments about 1948 or 1967 or indigeneity or “settler colonialism” really impact or have anything to do with getting to some two state/partition end point. And no I’m not saying for a moment that that will be easy to get to. It seems terribly far off. But fantasies and alternative histories won’t get us there.

I am older than Marshall–old enough to remember my mother sobbing while reading “The Black Book” after the end of WWII–a compendium of reporting on Nazi atrocities. I remember the little blue box she kept, in which she collected dimes and quarters to plant trees in Israel, and I remember the fervent hopes of family members for the establishment of a place where Jews would be safe. Back then, none of us could have conceived of an Israeli government dominated by a Bibi Netanyahu, whose twenty years of shameful policies toward Palestinians have actually strengthened the Hamas terrorists, not to mention being utterly inconsistent with Jewish law, culture and tradition.

On this blog, I often repeat the mantra “it’s complicated.” And the situation in the Middle East is nothing if not complicated. Nothing–not history, not Netanyahu’s behavior before or since–justifies the barbarity of October 7th. That said, neither does that barbarity justify the horrors that have been unleashed on the Palestinian civilians in Gaza–just as shameful incidents of anti-Semitism on the nation’s campuses do not justify wholesale assaults on peaceful protesters.

A final reminder: the Christian Zionists in and out of Congress who support anything and everything that Israel does are motivated by their belief in the prophecy that all Jews must be “returned” to Israel in order to usher in the Rapture. Jews who accept Jesus will be “Raptured up,” while the rest of us will burn in hell. Unconditional support for Israel is necessary to bring that about–such support is most definitely not evidence of loving-kindness for the Jewish people.

At the end of the day, I keep thinking about that plaintive question from Rodney King, after he’d been beaten by officers of the LAPD: “Why can’t we all just get along?”

If only I had an answer to that…..

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Vouchers Again..

When we look at the growth of America’s polarization, and the reasons for it, we need to recognize the significant contribution made by voucher programs.

I have frequently written about the mythology of so-called “school choice” programs. The original argument was that they would allow poor children to escape sub-standard public schools, that children attending them would receive better educations, and that competition with “government schools” would trigger improvement in those schools. (The critics constantly complaining about the nation’s public schools for some reason never suggested putting additional fiscal or human resources into improving those schools. Instead, the “fix” was entirely punitive– siphoning off existing resources in order to generate competition.)

It is now pretty clear that the actual motivation for privatizing education was as a mechanism to evade the First Amendment’s prohibition against sending tax dollars to religious institutions (destroying teachers’ unions was the cherry on top….). Proponents successfully argued that the money was going to parents, who were then free to choose religious schools if they wished.

Of course, the vast majority of schools accepting vouchers are religious–and the vast majority of families using vouchers send their children to those religious schools. Meanwhile, those initial promises remain unfilled: voucher students have not performed better on standardized tests (often, quite the contrary); a majority of the families using vouchers are middle and upper-middle income, not poor; and far from triggering improvement in the nation’s irreplaceable public school systems, the programs have impoverished and hobbled them.

Most people who are familiar with the performance of voucher programs know all this. What is less well understood is how educational vouchers have deepened American divisions. A recent report from In The Public Interest focuses on how and why.

The report looks at what voucher schools do with the public dollars being bled from public schools.

They preach—and practice—discrimination. Education Voters of Pennsylvania has pulled together a list of the ways voucher schools have discriminated in that state, and Illinois Families for Public Schools has done the same for Illinois—both make for bracing reading.  But what’s true for Illinois and Pennsylvania is true across the country.

The study documents discrimination against LGBTQ+ students, discrimination on the basis of religion, and discrimination against students requiring special education attention. A large number of religious schools also teach that women should not have the same rights as men. In Wisconsin, Lutheran schools receiving public money hold to the following beliefs:

Since God appointed the husband to be the head of the wife (Eph 5:23), the husband will love and care for his God-given wife (1 Pe 3:7). A wife will gladly accept the leadership of her husband as her God-appointed head (Eph 5:22-24).

In church assemblies the headship principle means that only men will cast votes when such votes exercise authority over men. Only men will do work that involves authority over men (1 Co 11:3-10; 14:33-35; 1 Ti 2:11,12).

 Women are encouraged to participate in offices and activities of the public ministry except where the work involves authority over men.

The Arizona Lutheran Academy website includes the following text:

Many families are surprised to learn about the options and come to realize a private, Christian education can be a reality. It is rewarding to walk families through the tuition assistance process and see how God provides in ways that some never knew existed.

As the Executive Director of In The Public Interest wryly commented, “Well, not God, exactly. All of us are paying for it with money intended for public schools.”

Discrimination paid for with public money is bad enough, but what is worse is that voucher schools– especially but not exclusively religious voucher schools–can teach (or omit teaching) pretty much anything they want. A colleague and I looked at Indiana’s voucher schools a few years back, and found few of them bothering with civics.

More to the point, historians tell us that public schools were intended to be constitutive of a public. In other words, America’s public schools were established to do more than teach subject matter, important as that task is. They were meant to undergird e pluribus unum–to create an over-arching unity from our diversity. Residential segregation has always made that goal difficult, but even in neighborhoods where the children come from similar socio-economic households, they bring other differences to the classroom, where they should learn that the American Idea respects those differences but also welcomes all of them to a common civic table.

Enormous amounts of our tax dollars are being spent to avoid those lessons. Vouchers are contributing to America’s polarization and to the growth of Christian Nationalism–and they are doing so without producing any of the educational benefits originally promised.

They’re a very expensive scam.

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