What's The Matter With Indiana

In the modern era of education reform, each state has tried to create its own special brand of educational dysfunction. If the point of Common Core related reforms was to bring standardization to the country's many and varied state systems, it has failed miserably by failing in fifty different ways.

What Indiana provides is an example of what happens when the political process completely overwhelms educational concerns. If there is anyone in the Indiana state capitol more worried about education students than in political maneuvering and political posturing, it's not immediately evident who that person might be.

The current marquee conflagration of the moment is the announcement of a new Big Standardized Test that will take twelve hours to complete. This announcement has triggered a veritable stampede from responsibility, as every elected official in Indianapolis tries to put some air space between themselves and this testing disaster. And it brings up some of the underlying issues of the moment in Indiana.

Currently, all roads lead to Glenda Ritz.

Back before the fall of 2012, Indiana had become a reformster playground. They'd made early strides solving the puzzle of how to turn an entire urban school district over to privatizers, and they loved them some Common Core, too. Tony Bennett, buddy of Jeb Bush and big-time Chief for Change, was running the state's education department just the way reformsters thought it should be done. And then came the 2012 election.

Bennett was the public face of Indiana education reform. He dumped a ton of money into the race. And he lost. Not just lost, but looooooooosssssssssst!!! As is frequently noted, Glenda Ritz was elected Superintendent for Public Instruction with more votes than Governor Mike Pence. I like this account of the fallout by Joy Resmovits mostly because it includes a quote from Mike Petrilli that I think captures well the reaction of reformsters when Bennett lost.

"Shit shit shit shit shit," he said. "You can quote me on that."

After Ritz became a Democrat education in a GOP administration, Republican politicians decided that given her overwhelming electoral victory, they'd better just suck it up and find a way to honor the will of the people by working productively with her  to fashion bi-partisan educational policies that put the needs of Indiana's students ahead of political gamesmanship. Ha! Just kidding. The GOP started using every trick they could think of to strip Ritz of her power.


As Scott Elliot tells it in this piece at Chalkbeat, things actually started out okay, with Ritz and the Pence administration carving out some useful compromises. Elliot marks the start of open warfare at Bennettgate-- the release of emails showing that Tony Bennett had gamed the less-than-awesome Indiana school grading system to favor certain charter operators.

Certainly Ritz and pence have different ideas about how to operate an education system. Mike Pence particularly loves charters-- so much so that he has taken the unusual move of proposing that charter schools be paid $1,500 more per student than public schools (so forget all about that charters-are-cheaper business).

Indiana has also created a complicated relationship with the Common Core, legislating a withdrawal from the Core, but one that required the state to do it without losing their federal bribes payments. The result was a fat-free Twinkie of education standards-- not enough like the original for some people and too much like it for others.

The Indiana GOP has been trying to separate Ritz from any power. They cite any number of complaints about her work style and competence (the GOP president of the Senate famously commented "In all fairness, Superintendent Ritz was a librarian, okay?") and most of the complaints smell like nothing but political posturing.

It's understandable that the state Board of Education would be a cantankerous group. Consider this op-ed piece from Gordon Hendry, newest member of the board, Democrat, attorney, business exec, and director of economic development under former Indianapolis mayor and current charter profiteer Bart Peterson. Hendry opens with, "To me, education policy is economic policy" (pro tip, Mr. Hendry-- education policy is education policy). After castigating Ritz for not running pleasant, orderly meetings (because her job is, apparently, to make alleged grownups behave like actual grownups), Hendry works up to this:

As a Democrat, I don't know why the superintendent insists on creating conflict where rational debate should instead exist.

That just sets off the bovine fecal detector into loud whoops. First, we've got an accusation buried as an assumption (she's the one creating conflict). Combine that with playing the feigned ignorance card-- I just have no idea why she could be so touchy! Really, dude? I'm all the way over here in Pennsylvania, and I can tell why she might be involved in some crankypants activity. I'm pretty sure winning an election and being forced to work with people who dismiss you and try to cut you out of power-- I'm pretty sure that would put someone in a bad mood. So I can understand finding her ideas obnoxious and disagreeing with how she runs a meeting, but when you claim her point of view is incomprehensible, that tells me way more about you than about her.


Most of the statements I read coming out of Indiana are like that-- they carry a screaming barely-subtext of "I am just stringing words together in a way that I've calculated might bring political advantage, but I am paying no real attention to what they actual mean to real humans."

I have no idea how good at her job Glenda Ritz actually is, but the political statement represented by her landslide election seems clear enough, and it's a little astonishing that Indiana's leaders are so hell bent on thwarting the will of the electorate. But damned if the legislature isn't trying to strip her of chairmanship of the Board of Education.

Meanwhile, the fat-free Twinkie standards have spawned some massive tumor of a test, coming in at an advertised length of twelve hours which breaks down to A) weeks of wasted classroom time and B) at least six hours worth of frustrated and bored students making random marks which of course gets Indiana C) results even more meaningless than the usual standardized test results although D) McGraw-Hill will still make a mountain of money for producing it. Whose fault is that? Tom LoBianco seems close to the answer when he says, basically, everyone. (Although Pence has offered a gubernatorial edict that the test be cut to six hours, so, I don't know- just do every other page, kids? Not sure exactly how one cuts a test in half in about a week, but perhaps Indiana is a land of miracles.*) But it's hard for me not see Ritz and Indiana schools as the victims of a system so clogged and choked with political asshattery that it may well be impossible to get anything done that actually benefits the students of Indiana.

UPDATE: On February 11, the Senate Education Committee gave the okay to a bill that would exempt voucher schools from taking the same assessment as public schools. In fact, the voucher schools can just go ahead and create a test of their own. It is remarkable that the State of Indiana has not just closed all public schools, dumped all the education money in a giant Scrooge McDuck sized vault, and sold tickets to just go in a dive around in it.

There's going to be a rally at the Statehouse on Monday, February 16th. If I were an Indiana taxpayer-- hell if I were a live human who lived considerably closer-- I would be there. This is a state that really hates its public schools.


* Edit-- I somehow lost the sentence about the shortening of the test in posting. I've since put the parenthetical point back.

More Hard Charter Lessons

News comes from Indianapolis this week that two of the older charters in town are being shut down. Fall Creek Academy and University Heights Preparatory Academy are going to that Big Chalkboard in the sky.

Fall Creek actually goes back to the days when then-Mayor Bart Peterson could whip up charters at will thanks to a magic mayoral empowerment law that Indiana passed just for his city (Peterson has since moved on to making money more directly in the charter biz). After a strong start, the school fell on less stellar times, and when the city pulled the charter, they turned to Ball State University. It's Ball State that has now shown them the door "due to chronic underperformance"

I don't know much more about these charters; I don't know if they're the victims of gross injustice or incompetents long overdue for being closed down. That's not what I noticed about the story. What I noticed was the headline:

ANGER BUILDS! Over Closing of Fall Creek & University Heights Charters. Why Won’t Ball State Explain; Respond?

The article also contains this sentence:

Parents wanted to know why and were stunned to hear that officials from Ball State weren’t prepared to personally answer their concerns.

I want to feel bad for these parents. I really do. But it's like trying to feel bad for people who smoke cigarettes for the health benefits and then are shocked and upset when they get cancer. It's like people who buy a long-haired dog and are upset that there's fur on the furniture. It's like people who hit themselves in the head with a hammer and complain about the headache.

Here are two things for charter school customers to remember, so they can avoid being shocked, stunned, angry or otherwise surprised in the future.

Charters are not run by elected school boards. They do not have to answer to the voters. They do not have to answer to the customers. They do not have to explain anything, and in some cases have gone to court to fight for their right to be just as non-transparent as they want to be. They are a business, and they don't have to show you their decision making process any more than McDonald's has to show you the recipe for their special sauce.

Charters can close at any time for any reason. People seem to automatically associate the idea of a school with the idea of permanence. That's incorrect. Public schools are permanent. Charter schools are not. Public schools represent a community commitment to provide schooling as long as it's needed. Charter schools represent a business decision to operate as long as it makes sense. Enrolling your child in a charter is making a bet that the school will be in business as long as you want to send your child to it. If you lose the bet, you have to know that losing was always a possibility when you made the bet in the first place.

Considering a charter? Do your homework and understand the risks that come with choosing a charter. Pro tip: "doing your homework" does not mean "listening to charter sales pitch and nothing else." That's like getting info about the car you want to buy only from the salesman trying to sell it to you.

I believe it's possible to find charters that do a pretty okay job out there, but any charter comes with certainly fundamental differences from public school, and some come with differences that can be shocking or stunning if you haven't been paying attention. Bottom line? Charter schools are not created to be just like public schools-- and they aren't. If you're going to understand anything about putting your child in a charter, that's the bare minimum that you need to grasp.