Karen Francisco retired as editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. She grew up in Muncie and graduated from Ball State University. She is a fearless advocate for public schools. I invited her to write about what happened in Indiana to turn Republicans against public schools.
She wrote this article for the blog.
The corporate-controlled American Legislative Exchange Council in 2011 rolled out a set of model bills designed to weaken one of its primary targets: public schools. “The Indiana Education Reform Package” was patterned after the destructive legislation pushed through by Indiana’s Republican legislative supermajority and then-Gov. Mitch Daniels.
Indiana has been setting the bar for public-school carnage ever since, quietly advancing a near-universal voucher program and advancing education privatization efforts. But the newly introduced House Bill 1136 is designed to serve as a death blow for public education in Indiana. It would immediately dissolve five school districts, including Indianapolis Public Schools, and effectively set every other district in the state on a path to elimination.
The bill requires the dissolution of districts that have lost more than 50% of students within the district’s boundaries to other schools. The districts’ schools would be converted to charter schools by July 1, 2028. The first schools converted would be those with the lowest test scores.
The legislation cleverly builds on those “education reform” measures designed to cripple public school districts. Ever-changing assessment standards kept the schools chasing arbitrary benchmarks. Sky-high income limits allowed wealthy families to abandon neighborhood schools for parochial and private schools. Inadequate funding and legislation favoring charter schools left districts without the resources needed to serve the at-risk students who are not welcome at voucher or charter schools.
Indianapolis Public Schools, in particular, has been hammered by Republican lawmakers and the city’s Democratic mayors. From an enrollment of nearly 40,000 in 2005, IPS now serves only 21,055 students, having lost thousands of students to voucher schools, charters and poor-performing “innovation schools.”
Why is Indiana, known for its conservatism, such fertile ground for radical education policy? Blame it on a perfect storm of anti-democratic forces. Out-of-state billionaires like Netflix founder Reed Hastings and the heirs to the Walmart fortune have poured millions of dollars into the state to destroy teacher unions. Powerful Republican lawmakers have built careers off education privatization. Indiana’s strong evangelical community, including its newly elected lieutenant governor, has recognized the potential of expanding Christian Nationalist influence with taxpayer-supported schools.
The bigger mystery is why Indiana voters have allowed the continuing destruction of their public schools, electing and re-electing representatives actively working against the voters’ best interests.
I would like to believe House Bill 1136 is the proverbial bridge too far. But 40 years of newspaper experience in Indiana tells me most Hoosiers will show little interest in the imminent threat to two urban school districts and three small rural school corporations. Sadly, race and class play heavenly into opinions about Indiana public schools, and too many Hoosiers will dismiss the danger as “not my problem.”
Elected school boards are the last piece of control Indiana voters exercise over education. Republican lawmakers eliminated the constitutional position of state superintendent of public instruction, and Indiana has always had an unelected state board of education.
House Bill 1136 starts the process of disbanding locally elected school boards, replacing them with boards filled by the governor, local officials and the director of the partisan Indiana Charter School Board. It’s only a matter of time before every elected school board in the state is eliminated.
Look for the American Legislative Exchange Council to update its 2011 “Indiana Education Reform Package” with this crowning piece of anti-democratic legislation and for ALEC’s disciples to carry it across the nation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All this goes way back … see the links on this page —
Anyone with a working long-term memory knows where the agenda to “Starve Public Schools Out Of Existence” came from.
Good thing there’s internet search for the rest of us —
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Richard DeVos Advocates “Stealth” Strategy Against Public Education
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fTAhc4QC4
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Diane and all: Propublica has an in-depth article on this that came into my box this morning. CBK
https://www.propublica.org/article/school-vouchers-ohio-church-state-tax-dollars-private-religious?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=feature
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Oklahoman Poll: It’s time to give Ryan Walters a grade for his 2024 performance
Legislators and others are calling for more accountability for the millions of dollars spend on public schools. How does Ryan Walters measure up?
Check out this story on oklahoman.com: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/opinion/columns/your-voice/2025/01/06/ryan-walters-oklahoma-report-card-poll/76049036007/
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Frances Frakes: It sounds to me like so many legislators who are so saturated with the ideology of profit-making and predatory capitalism, as the ONLY way, that they have forgotten (if they ever knew) the difference between a profit-ideology and the idea of government providing public service–which one is “the government” in a working democracy supposed to be focused on? Profit-making or providing public services? Certainly, public services need to be frugal, but as certainly, they are not about beating out the competition.
With public services, one need NOT be involved with competing with private or corporate ideologies . . . doesn’t even come into the picture.
And then you hear private and corporate people whining about having to “compete” with the government or with (public) institutions (like education and the post office) –they are either complicit in eroding the foundations of democracy or they are so totally ignorant of the political ground that they already stand on that they don’t realize they are shooting themselves in the foot. CBK
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I am disgusted at the role so many Catholic churches, and so many leaders in the church are participants in this political debauchery of supporting or even advocating for vouchers
My thought is that there are three basic instigators of this movement of late. I say “of late” because I remember a time when Catholic schools lived in harmony with public education; and I know (FYI) their teachings are not shot through with religious doctrine as many evangelical schools are though, of course, they have courses specific to their doctrines and to general religious education, which most likely differs from case to case, or from diocese to diocese.
But the three basic instigators are (1) budgetary “hits” they have taken over recent years, one of which is the many compensations awarded to victims of child sexual abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests, and the subsequent loss of parishioner support.
(2) A basic misunderstanding of the idea of “secular” which flows into the related misunderstanding of the REASONS for the very idea of separation of church and state in the first place developed by our founders and as is a formal part of the U.S. Constitution. (Those have been enumerated here many times.)
And (3) a tribal-totalitarian idea of the collapse of the political order so that it is understood as UNDER the order of whatever religion and religious doctrine one is identified with. So that everything in a culture is centered on and draws its order and power (whatever it is, e.g., education, the social order, etc.), from that one religious ideological order.
Catholicism is as guilty as the most air-headed evangelicals in performatively rejecting the ideals of their founder, Jesus of Nazareth. But they also differ in many respects from many of the evangelical and “Christian Nationalist” ideologies; but like them, Catholicism has its strain of right-wing non-thinking totalitarians who, in our time in Western history, cannot NOT have a personality disorder, mixed in with those who have no idea how things would change FOR THEM if their wishes for church rule came to be–like the Trump voters failing to understand what’s coming down the pike at their behest.
Also, it should go without saying that the whole idea of home schooling paid for with vouchers is loaded with moral hazards, like removing quality checks from social media. On that, there is so much proof out there that having great wealth does not make for an intelligent and wise person and sometimes, on the contrary. CBK
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Thank you, Catherine.
What an Unregulated School Voucher Program Looks Like — ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org/article/arizona-private-school-vouchers-no-transparency
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Mike Braun became our new governor yesterday. I attempted to write a letter to Gov. Braun [R-IN] but the form wouldn’t go through.
I did successfully send a protest letter to some education department in Lake County. [I live in Lake county.]
Billionaire Braun was our senator after spending lots of his own money to become senator. He bragged that he was the strongest Trump supporter when 2 other GOP men were running for the same Senate position.
We can be sure that Governor Braun will do nothing to improve education in our state. Dumbed down citizens means more votes for the GOP.
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