Tag Archives: Indiana legislature

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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When Representation Doesn’t Represent

I used to joke about watching our wallets–and our liberties–when Indiana’s legislature was in session.

I wish that admonition could be dismissed as just a joke…

I’ve previously detailed some of the weird and worrisome bills introduced this session: Jim Lucas’ effort to give tax credits to the maniacs who purchase deadly weapons; the multitude of bills to steal funds from the state’s public schools; and  thinly-veiled efforts to ban Drag Queen Story Hours, among others.

I’ve also argued that these and many other bills are a dramatic departure from what was previously Republican orthodoxy. In my former party–a party that no longer exists–attempts to tell businesses what they can and cannot invest in or the criteria they should employ when making business decisions would have been unthinkable.

But here we are, with a GOP so radicalized that toxic Congresscritter Jim Banks has a head start in the race for Senate. 

One recent departure from prior GOP orthodoxy is a bill that would prevent the state’s public retirement system from working with banks or investing in funds that prioritize environmental, social or governance policies. That would include those that restrict investments in specified industries, such as coal or firearm manufacturers.

House Bill 1008 has been identified as “priority legislation” for the House Republicans caucus.

As Michael Leppert wrote in a recent column on the issue,

As reported by the New Jersey Monitor last summer, “Nineteen Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which manages $10 trillion,” accusing “BlackRock of making decisions based on its alleged political agenda rather than the welfare of state pensions.” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita was among the signatories. 

If ESG investing is a political position, isn’t blocking or banning that investing also taking a political position? Of course, it is. 

It is the position of Republicans nationally to ignore climate change, and to oppose social progress and governance standards that consider it. SB 292 is the Indiana version of the national GOP political “platform,” if their grievance strategy can actually be called that. 

Last December, I quoted from a column from the Capital Chronicle that illustrated  how very unrepresentative our gerrymandered state legislature is.

Poll after poll and survey after survey shows what Indiana residents are worried about, and what they aren’t.

Bellwether Research’s latest poll in early December surveyed 1,100 Hoosiers representing both the demographic and geographic layout of Indiana. It asked about their top priorities.

Wishes one and two were lowering health care costs and affordable housing, at 31% and 21% respectively….Next up was increasing K-12 education funding at 17%. Nothing after is in double digits…

That poll also found that 56% of Hoosiers believe marijuana should be legal for personal use and 29% for medicinal purposes. Only 15% say it should not be legal. Another found that over 80% of Hoosier parents approved of their children’s school and curriculum.

And don’t get me started on the ban on abortion passed by state legislators despite  repeated polling confirming that Indiana citizens are pro-reproductive-choice by significant margins. Or the willingness of our despicable AG to pay an “extra” 100,000 to harass the doctor who aborted a raped ten-year-old. Or the absence of evidence that Hoosiers really want those legislators to pick on transgender children.

As I noted in that December post–okay, as I’ve noted repeatedly–the enormous disconnect between what Hoosier voters actually want and what we get from our culture warrior lawmakers is a direct result of the extreme gerrymandering that produces safe seats and allows lawmakers to ignore the demonstrated policy preferences of a majority of Indiana citizens.

Gerrymandering, after all, is the very best voter suppression tactic. Why bother to vote when the result has been foreordained–or, to use Trump language, when the election results have already been rigged? Gerrymandering amplifies the power of the fringes–the ideologues and culture warriors who vote in primaries–and effectively disenfranchises the rest of us.

Reporting on the antics at the Statehouse is one of the very few checks on lawmakers bent on pursing their own cultural fixations, and central Indiana has been ill-served by the Star’s devolution into sports and what has been called the “beer beat”–reports on new watering holes. That makes the arrival of the Indiana Capital Chronicle very welcome. The Chronicle describes itself as an “independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to giving Hoosiers a comprehensive look inside state government, policy and elections.”

Information, unfortunately, isn’t enough. It will require national legislation to thwart Indiana gerrymandering, since the only way to stop it at the state level requires action from the same politicians who benefit from it.

Hoosiers will see state-level reform at about the same time as we see pigs fly.

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Minority Rule, Courtesy of Gerrymandering

In addition to its website, Talking Points Memo sends out a morning newsletter to subscribers. A few days ago, that newsletter (paywall) included two paragraphs that sum up the single biggest challenge facing American democracy.

The success of the abortion rights coalition in ballot initiatives from Kentucky to Michigan showed that abortion can be just as powerful an incentive to vote for those who support abortion access as for those who oppose it.

For many House Republicans, that shift would, in another world, alter their behavior. With majorities in even deeply red states supporting abortion access, you’d expect these lawmakers to moderate their position. But thanks to the dearth of competitive House districts due to cumulative years of gerrymandering, many of them have more to fear from a primary challenge from the right than a general election against a Democrat.

I have frequently posted about the effects of gerrymandering. Probably the most damaging consequence is voter suppression; as I have often noted, people who live in a district considered “safe” for the party they don’t support lack an incentive to vote. When the disfavored party doesn’t turn out, that also depresses the votes for that party’s  candidates for statewide office.

Here in Indiana–a state that has been identified as one of the five most gerrymandered states in the country–our legislature is beginning a session in which the Republican super-majority continues to disregard the demonstrated priorities of its Hoosier constituents.

Several Republican lawmakers appear to oppose the Governor’s call to invest in the Hoosier state’s inadequate, struggling public health system. For that matter, there appears to be no appetite for confronting Indiana’s dismal ratings in a wide variety of quality of life indicators. As Hoosier Democrats recently pointed out: 

Hoosiers have a F rated quality-of-life and the state has a D- rated workforce, a C- rated education system, the third worst maternal mortality rate in the nation, and the country’s most polluted waterways. It appears Republicans will once again ignore the warning signs from Indiana’s top business leaders and their taxpayer-funded reports and instead choose to focus on their extreme agenda.

CNBC lists Indiana as one of the ten worst states in which to live.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve posted on just one part of that extreme agenda, the GOP’s war on public education. Other efforts include our lawmakers’ continuing war on LGBTQ Hoosiers– especially on  trans kids and anyone in the medical community who dares to serves them.

Indiana isn’t alone, unfortunately.

In 2015, two political scientists– Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern–published a study concluding that the preferences of US voters barely matter. Or as they put it, “economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”…

Gilens and “a small army of research assistants” compiled nearly 2,000 polls and surveys that asked for opinions about a proposed policy change. Since he wanted to separate out the preferences of economic elites and average citizens, he only used surveys that asked about respondents’ income. He found 1,779 poll results that fit that description, spanning from 1981 to 2002. Then he took the answers of median-income voters to represent what average voters think, and the answers of respondents at the 90th income percentile to represent what economic elites think.

Next, the authors had to measure what interest groups thought about all of those issues. They decided to use Fortune magazine’s yearly “Power 25” lists of the most influential lobbying groups, but since it “seemed to neglect certain major business interests,” they added the ten industries that had reported the most spending on lobbying. Their final list includes 29 business groups, several major unions, and other well-known interest groups like the AARP, the Christian Coalition, the NRA, the American Legion, and AIPAC. Each interest group’s position on those 1,779 policy change proposals were coded, along with how strongly each group felt about each proposal. The results were combined to assess how interest groups in general, felt.

The study found that average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or organized interest groups also want it…

In contrast, the preferences of economic elites and interest groups — especially economic elites — are each quite influential.

In dramatically gerrymandered Indiana, the clear preferences/warnings of the state’s largest businesses and growing tech sector are routinely disregarded in favor of  the “influential elites” who evidently believe that low taxes are a more attractive economic development tool than a reasonable quality of life–a belief with which CNBC begs to differ.

Indiana’s super-majority does listen to the well-organized religious fundamentalists whose policy preferences repel the high-skilled workers our economy needs. 

As long as they can gerrymander, our unrepresentative representatives are safe from democracy– and their constituents.

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Keeping Indiana Backward

No one likes a smart-aleck who says “I told you so.” But–along with many other Hoosiers–I told you so.

The Indianapolis Star recently reported on one part of the economic fallout created by the culture warriors at the Indiana Statehouse.The headline confirms the findings: “Indiana politics make it difficult for tech industry to recruit, keep employees in state.”

The disconnect is growing between Indiana’s mounting socially conservative policies, which includes not only the near-total abortion ban currently stalled in court, but also a ban on trans girls playing school sports, and the tech industry’s increasingly vocal progressive workforce.

The tension is brewing as major employers struggle to recruit and keep employees in the state, a problem that is snowballing into a crisis for Indiana.

It isn’t just the tech sector. In the wake of the legislature’s hasty passage of the abortion ban in the wake of the Dobbs decision, a financial magazine quoted David Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly and Co.,reporting on requests he’d been getting  from employees wanting to transfer out of Indiana. (Other non-tech employers have voiced similar concerns, and  admissions officers at several of the state’s institutions of higher education expect fewer female applicants for admission.)

The tech workers who spoke with the Star following passage of the ban–ranging from those working in startups to employees of global software companies– reported that the abortion ban had prompted a number of coworkers to start looking for jobs in other states.

Some tech workers said the abortion ban would make it scary for them to start families because of concern that they couldn’t get the health care if they developed complications during pregnancies…

But for others, it’s not just the ban, but what it signals for the future for other social issues, such as LGBTQ rights.

As the article notes, tech workers are some of the most in-demand employees across the country. A significant number can weigh multiple job offers against each other, and a decision about where to locate will depend upon the attractiveness of the community in which they will be employed, as well as the company making the offer.

Jordan Thayer, a trans woman working as a consultant in automation for a software development company in Carmel, said she’s worried that she soon won’t be free to live her life as she wants and her family won’t be safe if they need pregnancy care.

She sees states like Tennessee proposing to ban drag performances in public and worries those laws will come to Indiana and make it hard for her to be out in public, she said.

So, long term, her family won’t stay.

“I don’t want to have to jump employers and change states in a hurry,” she said. “So, we’re looking now.”

Industry analysts warn that tech companies in states where abortion access and LGBTQ rights are restricted will need to offer remote work to attract some applicants. Those  (well-paid) remote workers will be lost to Indiana–they’ll pay taxes to the states in which they reside, and they’ll patronize the bars, restaurants and businesses in those states.

The article quoted a female CEO:

You want to live in a community that supports your values and your life style,” she said. “If you’re a woman and you have a choice between living in a state that provides you a great job and your reproductive rights versus a state with a great job and no reproductive rights, it’s easily a tie-breaker.”

It isn’t as though Indiana is  otherwise a sought-after place to live. We don’t have natural amenities, like mountains or lakes or great weather, and thanks to the gerrymandering that has protected a retrograde legislature unwilling to spend tax dollars to improve the quality of life, we have multiple other deficits.

As the article acknowledged:

Long before the Supreme Court became a super conservative majority that would reshape federal and state policies, Indiana has struggled with attracting top talent. Economists have pointed to a mix of reason, including lack of good schools, flat and largely landlocked landscape, poor infrastructure and sparse attractions and amenities compared to other states.

And so even when everything is equal: company brand, salary to cost of living ratio, amenities in the city, the social laws of the state is a tie-breaker, several tech workers said.

Indiana’s abortion ban may well be struck down for violating the religious liberties of Hoosiers whose religions permit abortion and prioritize the health of the mother, but–as the article makes clear–the ban is only one aspect of a legislative agenda that will keep Indiana firmly rooted in the 1950s–and on the “avoid” list of skilled Americans with other options.

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What Did You Learn In School Today?

As Hoosiers anticipate the upcoming session of the General Assembly–an anticipation tinged with trepidation for many of us– we would do well to focus on the harms our Lords and Masters at the Statehouse intend to visit on public education this year.

This will be a budget year, and education is a huge part of that budget. I should note that, despite the pious concerns about taxes and spending voiced by Republican legislators each year, Indiana lawmakers have thrown millions of dollars into efforts to privatize education via the country’s largest voucher program, sending those dollars primarily to religious schools while routinely shortchanging the needs of our public schools.

According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, the state is currently short 2300 teachers, a shortage undoubtedly exacerbated by inadequate pay levels and the legislature’s obvious disdain for the profession, demonstrated by its persistent efforts to dictate what can and cannot be taught in the classroom. In the upcoming session, a don’t say gay bill will be introduced, along with one purporting to keep Critical Race Theory out of the classroom. (The fact that actual CRT has never been in the classroom is irrelevant to the culture warriors, most of whom couldn’t tell you what it is if their lives depended on it.)

Classroom teachers and school board members I’ve talked to are exhausted by the constant assaults by Rightwing parents–the uninformed demands that they teach (or omit) certain materials,  efforts to ban books or remove them from school libraries, and hysterical accusations about education perceived to be “woke.” These high-decibel accusations are front-page news, despite the fact that–according to research–the great majority of Americans who actually have children in the public schools are satisfied with the education those children are receiving.

The harassment of teachers and school board members has little to do with what actually goes on in the nation’s classrooms; instead, it is one of the more visible battlefronts in the GOP’s culture war.

The linked study, done by Pew prior to the midterm elections, underscores the fundamentally partisan nature of the assault.

As the midterm election approaches, issues related to K-12 schools have become deeply polarized. Republican and Democratic parents of K-12 students have widely different views on what their children should learn at school about gender identity, slavery and other topics, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

They also offer different assessments of the influence parents, local school boards and other key players have on what public K-12 schools in their area are teaching. Republican parents with children in K-12 schools are about twice as likely as Democratic parents to say parents don’t have enough influence (44% vs. 23%, including those who lean to each party). And Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say school boards have too much influence (30% vs. 17%). These parents also differ over the amount of input they personally have when it comes to what their own children are learning in school.

At the same time, Republican and Democratic parents – including those with children in public schools – are equally likely to say they are extremely or very satisfied with the quality of the education their children are receiving (58% each) and that the teachers and administrators at their children’s schools have values that are similar to their own (54% each).

The large differences between what Republican and Democratic parents believe their children should learn are illuminating.

When it comes to what their children are learning in school, U.S. parents of K-12 students are divided over what they think their children should learn about gender identity: 31% say they would prefer that their children learn that whether someone is a boy or a girl is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth, and the same share say they’d rather their children learn that someone can be a boy or a girl even if that’s different from their sex at birth. A 37% plurality say their children shouldn’t learn about this in school.

There is also no consensus when it comes to what parents want their children to learn about slavery: 49% say they would prefer that their children learn that the legacy of slavery still affects the position of Black people in American society today, while a smaller but sizable share (42%) would prefer that their children learn that slavery is part of American history but doesn’t affect the position of Black people in American society today.

The self-appointed education experts in Indiana’s General Assembly should take note of another Pew finding: more parents say that state and federal governments have too much influence on what goes on in the classroom–and complain that teachers and principals don’t have enough.

Perhaps if legislators respected teachers–and compensated them accordingly–we wouldn’t be frantically searching for 2300 more of them.

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