Local Government – Page 7

Following The Money

It was never about improving education.

I’ve posted several times about the World’s Worst Legislature’s continuing assault on public education–an assault defended on grounds that research has soundly debunked. An article from yesterday’s Indiana Capital Chronicle pulled back the (already pretty sheer) curtain on those legislative justifications.

Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston maintained Thursday that virtual charter schools deserve equal funding as their brick-and-mortar counterparts and denied that a virtual education company he consults for would unfairly benefit from an increase in taxpayer dollars proposed in the state budget

The for-profit Stride, Inc. operates seven Indiana-based virtual public, charter and private schools, according to its website and as reported by the School Matters blog.

Indiana virtual schools like Stride currently receive 85% of the per-pupil state funding that goes to “traditional” public schools. Funding would increase to 100% under the House Republican budget proposal that’s now under consideration in the Senate.

That means virtual schools stand to get a significant funding boost. For instance, Union School Corporation’s enrollment is almost all virtual, and it will see a 30% increase in total base funding in the first year of the budget. By comparison the statewide average increase in base funding for all school would be 6%.

Based on its current student enrollment, Stride stands to win big, as well — to the tune of some $9 million.

Can we spell “conflict of interest”?

According to the report, Huston is one of at least 15 state lawmakers who provide “professional advice and guidance” to private businesses.

Huston started TMH Strategies Inc. last year, a little more than a month after his high-profile departure from a six-figure role at the College Board, according to his latest statement of economic interest.

He listed his consultancy’s current clients as Fishers-based tech company Spokenote, as well as Stride, Inc. — a for-profit education management organization that provides online curriculum to homeschooled kids and other schools.

Lest we be tempted to give these lawmakers the benefit of the doubt–lest we be inclined to believe them when they claim to ignore the financial interests of their paying clients when legislating, we need only look at the involvement of a familiar name .

The President of Schools at Stride, Inc. is Tony Bennett — former Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction before he was defeated in 2012 by Democrat Glenda Ritz.

Huston left Cisco Systems, Inc. in 2009 to serve as Bennett’s chief of staff at the state education department. But he returned to the company in 2010.

The Associated Press detailed Huston’s involvement in the 2012 sale of a $1.7 million Cisco videoconferencing system to the IDOE that officials later determined was a waste of taxpayer money.

Bennett also contributed $15,000 to Huston’s campaign account since 2020.

Many of you will remember Bennett. During his single term as Indiana’s Secretary of Education, he was touted as a “national leader in the Republican effort to overhaul public education.” After his defeat by Glenda Ritz, he was hired as Florida’s Education Commissioner by then-Governor Rick Scott, a post he was forced to resign when the AP reported that while serving in Indiana, he’d changed the state’s evaluation of a charter school founded by a prominent GOP donor.

As a former teacher–I started my professional life as a high school English teacher and later spent 21 years as a college professor–I have multiple reservations about virtual instruction, not to mention the state’s ability to confirm attendance figures reported by such schools. But even if those concerns can be addressed, virtual schools don’t incur overhead for brick and mortar school buildings–they don’t pay for utilities, janitors and maintenance. They don’t provide school lunches or transportation. Why should they receive the same per-pupil dollars as schools that do incur those expenses?

I guess the answer is: because they were savvy enough to hire the right “consultant.”

The assault on Indiana’s public schools has been unremitting and enormously damaging, but in Indiana, education isn’t the only policy area where deep pockets are more persuasive than logic, evidence or the public good.

Again, the Capital Chronicle has the story.

Environmental activists decried the legislative process for two bills Thursday, saying they clearly benefited some of the state’s most powerful while harming the average Hoosier…

On Wednesday, a House environmental committee opted to add controversial wetlands language to a Senate bill on sewage systems. Because the topic was unrelated and no notice was given, opponents had limited opportunity to give public testimony — a critical part of the legislative process.

Meanwhile, the state’s biggest utility – and frequent campaign donor – Duke Energy already called upon a court to review a crucial ruling less than 24 hours after the House passed and Gov. Eric Holcomb signed a bill to recover “unexpected” additional costs from customers.

Gee–I wonder why Indiana ranks 43d among the states in education–and why we’re the most polluted…

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The ReThink Project

I used to defend Indiana’s slow progress by pointing out that allowing other states to innovate and then seeing what worked and what didn’t was prudent. What happened in State X after it did thus-and-so, and what can we learn about the best way to handle thus-and-so?

Unfortunately, that justification too often mistakes stubborn resistance to change for prudence.

That bureaucratic refusal to consider past error was especially annoying in the initial effort to get the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) to rethink its automatic approach to repairing the Interstate highways that divide the city’s downtown.

As I have previously written, it was inarguable that at the 50-year mark (which we hit a few years back),those interstates required extensive repairs. A group of downtown residents, businesses, architects and landscape architects formed a group they called “ReThink I69/70” and urged INDOT to “rethink” the design of those highways and to mitigate, where possible, the problems they’d created when they were first rammed through the city’s Black and historic neighborhoods.

The racism reflected in the siting of the nation’s Interstate system has been widely documented, and the Biden Administration is confronting the damage.

The interstate system — largely built between the 1950s and 1970s — helped move Americans in large numbers and at high speeds, but its creation required a lot of destruction. History.com reports that “more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide” due to federal highway construction. “Hulking highways cut through neighborhoods, darkened and disrupted the pedestrian landscape, worsened air quality, and torpedoed property values.”

That damage was largely inflicted in Black and Latino neighborhoods. That wasn’t an accident. At Yale Law Journal, Sarah Schindler writes that the “placement of highways so as to intentionally displace poor black neighborhoods” was commonplace in places like New York, Miami, Omaha, Oakland, and many other American cities. “Although this work was undertaken in order to make places more accessible to cars,” she adds, “it was also done with an eye towards eliminating alleged slums and blight in city centers.”

Knocking down poor neighborhoods to make room for commuter highways was inherently racist, the Los Angeles Times adds: “Highway builders often defended taking property in Black neighborhoods by arguing the land was cheapest there — a fact that relied on government-backed mortgage redlining policies that discouraged investment in Black areas.” Sometimes the harmful intent was more overt, Reuters reports. In Montgomery, Alabama, the state routed Interstate 85 “through a neighborhood where many Black civil rights leaders lived, rather than choosing an alternate route on vacant land.”

The need to address structural problems in our aging roadways gave Indianapolis a rare opportunity to address the problems created by those initial decisions. The ReThink group argued that thoughtful revamping could improve traffic flow and restore community connectivity and walkability. It could also spur economic development that would significantly add to the city’s tax base–nothing to sneeze at, given our fiscal constraints. It is rare that a city gets such an opportunity.

The initial response of INDOT was to ignore and dismiss the alternatives promoted by the ReThink coalition. It took considerable time and effort to get the agency just to back off its initial plans to add lanes to the current configurations, consuming more real estate and increasing the divisions between neighborhoods. By the time the coalition had generated enough attention and support for redesign, the northeast section of Indiana’s Inner Loop was already being reconstructed–in place, but thankfully, without the additional lanes and concrete walls.

The remaining work, however, may benefit from the persistence of the ReThink coalition and the Biden Administration’s emphasis on the need to address the mistakes (and animus) of the past

Today Mayor Joe Hogsett, Congressman André Carson, Rethink Coalition, and the Indy Chamber announced a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). The award will fund a planning study around the southeast leg of the I-65/I-70 Downtown Inner Loop near the Fletcher Place and Fountain Square neighborhoods, examining how to create more livable, reconnected communities around the interstate while maintaining interstate commerce and regional travel.

“This federally funded study will help guide our community as it looks at ways we can reunite neighborhoods divided by the original interstate program,” said Mayor Joe Hogsett. “Thanks to USDOT, INDOT, and our community partners, this announcement begins a process that could have lasting benefit for generations of Indianapolis residents.”

There’s a broader lesson here. Citizens who are sufficiently aroused can move lawmakers and bureaucrats.

Chinese citizens forced changes to their government’s COVID rules. Iranians are protesting their government’s “morality police.” Israeli citizens are opposing Netanyahu.

Margaret Mead said it best : Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

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What I Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Me. Really?

Among the things that make me crazy: one is the GOP’s obvious belief that education and academic research are dangers to be avoided at all costs.

Does evidence show that having guns in your home is dangerous? How many people commit suicide using a firearm? Are guns more lethal than other weapons? Whoa! If government allowed research into those questions, it might divest you of your God-given right to carry your AR-14 in the canned goods aisle of your local Kroger.

As Politico reported back in 2018,

House Republican appropriators Wednesday rejected a proposal to designate millions of dollars for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for gun violence research, voting 32-20 to keep the language out of a fiscal 2019 spending bill.

The party-line vote marked Democrats’ latest failed bid to spur studies into preventing firearm-related injuries and deaths — and comes despite a bipartisan agreement earlier this year that the CDC is permitted to conduct such research.

Republican opposition to any and all gun research has been a problem for years, but guns are only one area of research that the party wants to shut down. Yesterday, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported on a vote from the World’s Worst Legislature stripping funding from the Kinsey Institute.(paywall)

That vote was apparently based upon “disputed allegations” by one of Indiana’s many rightwing GOP wacko’s. This one insisted that Kinsey’s research had been child exploitation and that the institute’s research into human sexuality contributed to “liberalized sexual morals, including more acceptance of homosexuality and pornography.”

According to the AP,

Alfred Kinsey, who died in 1956, produced groundbreaking sex-behavior studies in 1948 and 1953 and was portrayed by Liam Neeson in the 2004 film “Kinsey.”

Republican Rep. Lorissa Sweet claimed that some of Kinsey’s research was child exploitation as she argued for an amendment to the state budget bill against funding for the institute.

“By limiting the funding to Kinsey Institute through Indiana University’s tax dollars, we can be assured that we are not funding ongoing research committed by crimes.” Sweet said.

Democratic Rep. Matt Pierce, whose Bloomington district includes the university campus, responded that Sweet’s claims were “based on old unproven allegations of conspiracies that did not exist,” calling them “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back.”

Pierce said the university maintained a department that ensured all research involving humans met federal laws and that the Kinsey Institute aimed to better understand human sexuality, including how to treat and prevent sexual predators and pedophiles.

All House Democrats voted against the measure; they were joined by seven (presumably more rational) Republicans. The bill specifically prohibits any use of state money for expenses– including the institute’s on-campus facilities, research work, utilities, office supplies and maintenance of research photographs or films.

Pierce said the institute’s funding was being exploited as a “culture war” issue and that it would simply create bookkeeping problems for the university to use sources such as outside grant funding or student tuition to support it.

It is painful for those of us who belonged to the GOP when it was an actual political party to recognize its transformation into a cult whose members routinely chant “don’t confuse me with facts.” There’s a reason today’s GOP is increasingly compared to the Know-Nothing Party. This vote in Indiana’s House confirms the aptness of that comparison.

Research and scholarship aren’t just integral to succeeding in school or in many professions. In a rational world, research informs action. Researchers gather evidence in order to test the theories and factual assumptions upon which both governments and individuals act.

Americans on the far right of the political spectrum–especially White Christian males– are frantically opposed to a number of social changes: the unwillingness of today’s women to be properly subservient, the belief that people of color and LGBTQ+ citizens are entitled to equal treatment by both the law and the institutions of civil society. They see accurate education and the conduct of research as breeding grounds for those changes.

In every era, there are people who respond to social change by yelling “stop the world, I want to get off.” They are a minority, and would be far less threatening in the absence of several outdated structural elements of American politics–especially gerrymandering and the Electoral College–that have entrenched governance by that distinct minority.

An essay in Psychology Today quoted “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” for the saying“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”

But is it? Let’s look at what results from ignorance: avoidance of facts and information, a skewed view of the world where you don’t want to learn more about something, a desire to label and judge something you might not fully understand, and a general lack of knowledge about the world around you.

In other words, today’s GOP.

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And Then There’s Indiana’s Housing Crisis…

Our Indiana’s legislative overlords concentration on bullying trans kids and impoverishing public education evidently leaves them little time or interest in solving the state’s real problems, like the lack of affordable housing and/or the plight of low-income renters.

As I’ve indicated before, tenants in Indiana have almost no rights and no recourse against bad actor landlords. Indiana law–or really, the lack thereof– is an open invitation to out-of-state buyers of real property, with the result that Indianapolis is now first in the nation for out-of-state ownership of rental property. (In most cities, around 3% of rental properties are owned by out-of-state investors. In Indianapolis, the percentage is 15% and climbing.)

We have an eviction crisis, made more severe by Indiana’s lack of affordable housing. The Greater Indianapolis Multi-Faith Alliance (GIMA) reports that Indiana has a gap of 135,033 rental units affordable for Hoosiers in the bottom 30% of the income distribution. Indiana has the single highest housing cost burden among all Midwest states for those residents.

As a result,many Hoosiers are spending 50-80% of their incomes on rent. One minor emergency – an issue with a car, an emergency room visit, a layoff– can cause a spiral into evictions.

Indianapolis ranks #2 in the country for evictions. Only New York is higher, and costs are a huge factor; Marion County rents have increased an average of 20% since 2020, while wages have only increased by 4%.

As GIMA has reported, out-of-state institutional investors are drawn to Indiana for its landlord-friendly laws, a situation that doesn’t just hurt renters, but drives up costs for would-be homebuyers as well.

Some other statistics: Sixty percent of rental property owners in Indiana live in Illinois, California, Georgia, Texas, and Florida. Indiana is on track for more than 30% of all residential property purchases to be by investors. Indianapolis is #1 among U.S. cities for out-of-state corporate investment in real estate.

GIMA is trying to get legislators’ attention.

It is supporting HB 1005, Rep. Doug Miller’s bill to establish a residential housing infrastructure assistance program and revolving fund.

Rep. Miller’s bill will be particularly beneficial in rural Indiana, which highlights that this is not an urban, city-focused issue. It affects all of Indiana. Providing state-supported programs to build more housing is critical to stopping the evictions crisis. We would encourage our legislators to take this first, modest step to show the people of Indiana that they come first, that human dignity is a Hoosier value, and that housing is critical to human well-being.

The organization is also supporting SB114., a bipartisan measure sponsored by Sen. Eric Koch, Sen. Shelli Yoder and Sen. Stacey Donato. That bill was prompted by an incident that received widespread publicity: in February of last year, Citizens Energy shut off the water supply for 868 tenants of Capital Place and Berkley Commons apartments for 21 hours, because the landlord, JPC Charities, owed $1.3m in missed utility payments.

Citizens Energy Group certainly deserves to be paid for its services, but tenants should be able to apply pressure by paying their rents into escrow accounts until the landlord remedies its misbehavior.

As GIMA’s policy paper put it,

This incident highlights the reality that tenants in Indiana have almost no rights, no power, and no recourse from bad actor landlords. It also highlights the impact that out-of-state investment in rental properties is having in our state… This small step will help send a message that Indiana is no longer ripe for “do-what-you want” property owners.

GIMA’s concerns about Hoosier tenants’ lack of legal recourse is shared by State Senator Fady Qaddoura. Last session, Qaddoura introduced legislation allowing renters to put their rent in escrow if a landlord did not make timely repairs to serious problems. He noted at the time that Indiana is one of just a handful of states without some mechanism allowing tenants to withhold payment of rent until repairs are completed.

Qaddoura has reintroduced that measure, together with some additions that would require out-of-state landlords to contract with real estate property managers inside Indiana.

“The philosophy here is that if you live and operate in Indiana, you’re not going to risk the reputation of your business to engage in deceptive practices on behalf of an out-of-state, negligent, corporate landlord,” he said.

Qaddoura also wants to increase state income tax deductions for tenants – currently set at $3,000.

You would think these bills would pass easily– they simply reflect a fairer balance between landlords and tenants–but this is Indiana, so of course, you’d be wrong. As a friend who knows her way around the Statehouse tells me, the Indiana Apartment Association has ruled with impunity in the General Assembly for decades, and continues to do so.

The IAA represents landlords–homegrown or not–and couldn’t care less about tenants. Particularly low-income Hoosiers who struggle to pay those escalating rents.

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Indiana’s Pathetic Legislature

An analysis of the priorities of Indiana’s legislative super-majority yields two possible interpretations. Either the members of the demonstrably unrepresentative GOP caucus hate their constituents (unless they’re well-to-do), or they are so devoid of common sense that they enthusiastically support measures that are the legislative equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.

I do tend to think the problem is intellect rather than malice–a rabid devotion to ideology that precludes the evaluation of credible contrary evidence. But former state employees who depend upon their state pensions might be forgiven for thinking those in the current Statehouse super-majority hate them.

As the Capitol Chronicle recently reported,

A bill mandating that Indiana’s public pension system divest from firms or funds that use certain non-financial investment criteria — a flashpoint in the state’s culture wars — could slash the system’s returns by nearly $7 billion over the next decade, according to a revised fiscal analysis.

Author Rep. Ethan Manning, R-Logansport, and supporters say the proposal would ensure that the Indiana Public Retirement System puts finances first. House Bill 1008 is part of a GOP effort to crack down on the environmental, social and governmental framework known as ESG investing.

But its restrictions and administrative requirements could mean a hefty price tag for the fund and its retirees.

As the article noted, even the conservative-leaning Indiana Chamber of Commerce strongly opposes the measure. That opposition undoubtedly reflects the long-time–but evidently now discarded–Republican opposition to unnecessary and/or intrusive meddling in decisions that should be left to the owners and managers of businesses.

But hey! Today’s GOP recognizes the terrible threat posed by allowing Hoosier companies to consider the environmental, social and governance positions of the enterprises in which they invest, or with which they do business. If former state workers must suffer in order to avoid participating in this descent into “wokeness,” well, so be it.

Lest the casual observer conclude that this misbegotten bill is an outlier, allow me to disabuse you.

Let’s look at just a couple of other areas where our intrepid lawmakers are hard at work making sure the state will not and cannot reach its purported goals. You can probably identify others.

One problem to which everyone gives lip servicee is that Indiana lacks a sufficiently skilled workforce to make us competitive for many of the companies our economic development folks would like to attract.

So what did the God-Fearing misogynists at the Statehouse do? They passed a ban on abortion–sending a clear message about Indiana’s political culture to skilled workers (male and female) who might otherwise have considered living here. Multiple news outlets have confirmed the increased difficulties in recruitment that followed passage of the ban.

Another major issue for Indiana is the worsening teacher shortage, a shortage that the General Assembly is assiduously addressing with multiple efforts to drive educators (who might produce that skilled workforce) out of the profession and/or the state.

It isn’t just the bills telling teachers and school librarians what books they can use and what history they can teach. At the same time our lawmakers are trying to micro-manage what happens in public school classrooms, they are intent upon enlarging a voucher program–aka “scholarship” bill–with virtually no oversight mechanisms.

That program is patterned after one in Arizona, where even minimal oversight was evidently considered intrusive. As The Guardian recently reported,

When the former governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, signed a law last year that lets any family receive public funds for private school or homeschooling, he said he “trusts parents to choose what works best” for their children.

Over 46,000 Arizona students now take part in the state’s education savings account, or ESA, program, which provides about $7,000 per child annually for a huge array of school expenses. But with households in greater charge of curricular choices, some purchases are raising eyebrows, among them items like kayaks and trampolines, cowboy roping lessons and tickets to entertainment venues like SeaWorld….

One parent in the group said she uses the Disney+ streaming service to “extend our learning” and asked if the state would approve the cost of a subscription. Others said they had received approvals for trampolines and horseback riding lessons.

It’s pretty obvious that what legislative culture warriors tout as a boon for “family empowerment ” is really part of a persistent effort to disempower and dismantle public education.

In Arizona, the seemingly endless variety of options available to homeschoolers makes it difficult for state officials to regulate them – and that may be the point. The goal, school choice proponents say, is to break free of school bureaucracy and put parents in control.

In Indiana, the message to teachers is clear: we trust even the most uneducated parents, but we sure don’t trust you.

Gee, I wonder why we have a teacher shortage…?

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