Category Archives: Education / Youth

A Perfect Storm

Sometimes, a “perfect storm” of problems forces us to make much-needed changes that are politically impossible in normal times. Perhaps—just perhaps—this is one of those times when we can use a few of the fiscal lemons we are being handed to make policy lemonade.

Storm number one is revenue. Indiana is in a world of fiscal hurt. Tax receipts are well below the levels that would allow us to keep state spending flat, and the cuts that have already compromised many essential services are now slicing education funding. Public universities are hurting, but by far the most damage will be done to public K-12 schools that are already struggling. As Matt Tully has reminded us in his outstanding series about Manual High School, these schools have virtually no human or fiscal resources to fall back on. They face enormous challenges, and we have an obligation to help them meet those challenges. It’s not only the right thing to do, our civic self-interest requires it.

Storm number two is costs. Which brings me to the Star’s recent report on the pay and perks of area school superintendents.  

Let me be clear: I’m not begrudging the superintendents their compensation, nor criticizing the school boards who are paying them. I understand the competitive pressures that have brought us to a point where a superintendent’s compensation package in even a small district runs upward of 200,000.

What I don’t understand is why Marion County needs eleven of them.

The entire student population of Marion County today is less than the enrollment of IPS in 1967. Logic says it should not take eleven superintendents, eleven assistant superintendents, eleven curriculum directors, eleven lunchroom operations, eleven bus systems and eleven school boards –together with the costs of clerical staffs and physical facilities to house them all—to educate those students.

I understand that the politics of consolidating these districts is toxic. The number of interest groups fighting over the diminishing supply of public patronage is huge. Even the Kernan-Shepard Report avoided addressing Marion County’s overabundance of districts, although the principles they endorsed elsewhere certainly apply. And it is certainly true that a legislature without the will to make even the most obvious adjustments to Indiana’s dysfunctional governing apparatus—a legislature unwilling to abolish 1008 unnecessary township trustees and meaningfully reduce the 10,000 plus public officials we pay with our tax dollars—is unlikely to consolidate the administration of Marion County’s schools.

Ideally, the Mayor would provide leadership on this issue. The public schools, as Matt Tully has convincingly demonstrated, are key to our city’s ability to succeed, key to our economic development efforts and our quality of life. Consolidating the bureaucracies—not the schools themselves, but their duplicative administrations—would allow us to free up millions of dollars that could be used to improve what goes on in the classroom. The benefits to the city would be profound, and the message sent would be inspiring.

Stormy times call for something other than patronage as usual.

The Big Question

As usual, E.J. Dionne poses the critical political question: will the young people who voted overwhelmingly for Obama when he represented hope and change stay around to support him–and the Democratic party–now that the hard work of governing has highlighted philosophical and tactical differences of opinion on how best to proceed?

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, offered a straightforward formula: “When Republican voters and older voters get angry, they vote,” she said. “When younger voters get angry, they stay home.” Thomas Bates, vice president for civic engagement at Rock the Vote, a group that mobilizes young Americans to go to the polls, shares Lake’s worries. “For people who were energized in 2008, it was a time of hope and optimism,” he said. “And when you get to the brass tacks of governing, the atmosphere in the process of legislating has become poisonous. That makes political engagement as unappealing as possible.” More than is often appreciated, the electoral revolution that brought Democrats to power was fueled by a younger generation with a distinctive philosophical outlook. Put starkly: If only Americans 45 and over had cast ballots in 2008, Barack Obama would not be president.

 

Evidence and Ideology

Americans are absolutely smitten with detective shows where justice triumphs after a painstaking collection and analysis of all available evidence. The popularity of these shows reflects—accurately, I think—America’s pragmatic culture, our desire to “get to the bottom of things” and to base decisions on hard evidence.

 

So how do we explain an American policy process that increasingly displays a positive contempt for evidence?

 

There are all sorts of examples: twenty-five years of research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the drug war is a costly and counterproductive fiasco. Legislators have responded by waging our war on drugs more enthusiastically. We have scientific unanimity on the reality of global warming. Our elected officials “pooh-pooh” climate change. On July 19, the New York Times reported yet another case of the Administration’s “don’t confuse me with the facts” approach to federal legislation. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings joined several Congressional Republicans announcing a proposal to spend $100 million dollars on a school voucher “pilot project.”

 

Education vouchers are a policy near and dear to the hearts of the political right, albeit for different reasons: the Christian right wants tax dollars to support religious schools; libertarians see education as a consumer good to be provided by the market; and a sizable number of ordinary folks who have never been happy about junior sitting next to a black classmate see vouchers as a way to re-segregrate.

 

Except for those who are ideologically committed to them, vouchers don’t generate much political support among people satisfied with public school performance. However, it is undeniable that students at many public schools are not performing well. Voucher proponents thus argue that fairness requires sending children from failing public schools to private ones that are “better.”

 

The problem is, there is no evidence that private schools do a better job of educating the children who attend “failing” public schools. (Comparing kids whose parents are willing to spend the money to send them to private schools to kids whose parents often don’t even make the effort to see that they get to public school is not comparing apples to apples.) Most poorly-performing public schools have large populations of children who do not come prepared to learn: they are disproportionately poor, disproportionately from broken homes, often come to school hungry, and so forth. Before they can learn, these barriers must be addressed.  

 

The Department of Education decided to do what good detectives do: look at the evidence. The Department studied 725,000 children in public and private schools, controlling for student background, and discovered that—with the exception of a small difference in 8th grade reading scores—public school students did as well or better than those in private schools. Secretary Spelling later said she didn’t know about the study her own department had conducted, and a Department underling dismissed it as “a technical analysis.”

 

On TV, when the DNA evidence exonerates our suspect, we look for the guy who really committed the crime. In Washington, when evidence undermines our ideology, we ignore it.

Send the Legislators Back to School

What if a law was introduced that gave Kroger a tax credit and required Marsh to pay for it? The law would also require Marsh to hire anyone who applied for a job, whether or not the applicant could speak English or count, and whether or not Marsh needed more employees. Meanwhile, the state would conduct daily inspections of Marsh?s produce (but not Kroger?s) and issue stiff fines when the fruit didn?t measure up.

Continue reading “Send the Legislators Back to School”

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