Casey Smith of Indiana Capital Chronicle reported on data that the Indiana Commission on Higher Education quietly posted on its website, without issuing a press release, perhaps hoping that no one would notice. The percentage of high-school graduates who entered college declined to only 51.7%. As recently as 2015, the rate of students going from high school to college was 65%.

The figures, posted to the agency’s website earlier this month, reflect concerns state leaders have long expressed about Indiana’s declining college-going culture, especially as the state shifts focus toward career credentials and work-based learning.

“The startling drop in our college-going rate yet again can be credited to the lack of two things: money and morale,” said Rep. Ed DeLaney, D-Indianapolis, in a statement released Wednesday.

“While our governor has been taking a victory lap for getting our state universities to freeze tuition, he has failed to guarantee that his move will not decrease financial aid and scholarship opportunities,” DeLaney continued. “Any lack of opportunity for tuition support will lead to more Hoosiers not being able to afford college and being forced to choose a different path.”

The 2023 numbers come just six months after the State Board of Education commission approved sweeping changes to Indiana’s high school diploma, set to take effect statewide in 2029, that emphasize work-based learning and career readiness over traditional college preparation…

DeLaney maintained that Republican leaders “have been devaluing the opportunities that our colleges and universities can offer students.”

“At the same time, the supermajority has made attacking colleges and universities the centerpiece of their culture war agenda — from policing what can be taught in the classroom, to forcing institutions to eliminate hundreds of degree options, to creating an entirely new high school diploma that emphasizes the path directly into the workforce,” the lawmaker said.

“Trying to bury this report in a website and not send a press release is a telling sign that the Commission on Higher Education knows this does not look good, and does not act to fix it,” DeLaney added. “It simply isn’t important enough to them. They are busy eliminating college courses and creating new tests. This is what the legislature has asked them to do….”

Indiana’s college-going rate has dropped more than any other state tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics over the past 15 years.

Previously, Indiana reached a college-going rate of 65%.

“We set a goal to get it back when it slumped,” DeLaney recalled. “Now, it doesn’t seem like we care to address the issue. That is a shame for our students, a shame for our economy, and a shame for our state.”

Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers passed additional legislation requiring public colleges to eliminate low-enrollment degree programs. So far, Indiana’s public colleges and universities have collectively cut or consolidated more than 400 academic degree programs.

“The supermajority has been in power for 20 years and this is their achievement,” DeLaney said. “At some point we have to ask ourselves: is a declining college-going rate not the result they want?”

Shame on the politicians of Indiana!

After the Brown decision of 1954, after years of delay, the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson cracked down on districts that refused to desegregate their schools. The Department of Justice negotiated consent decrees with recalcitrant districts, mostly (but not only) in the South.

More that 100 such consent decrees are still in effect.

The Trump Department of Justice recently canceled the consent decree with Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana.

The head of the Department’s Civil Rights Division hailed this reversal of longstanding policy.

Expect more such rulings from the Civil Rights Division, dismantling protections for racial minorities, LGBT, and women. The only protected group in the Trump era is white men.

The Guardian had the story.

In late April, the Department of Justice announced that it was ending a decades-long consent decree in Plaquemines parish, Louisiana, in a school district that has been under a desegregation order since the Johnson administration in the 1960s.

The Plaquemines parish desegregation order, one of more than 130 such orders nationwide, was in place to ensure that the school district, which initially refused to integrate, followed the law. Many consent decrees of the era are still in existence because school districts are not in compliance with the law.

Some experts, including former justice department employees, say the change in direction for the department could be worrying.

These orders “provide students with really important protections against discrimination”, said Shaheena Simons, who was the chief of the educational opportunities section of the civil rights division at the justice department for nearly a decade. “They require school districts to continue to actively work to eliminate all the remaining vestiges of the state-mandated segregation system. That means that students have protections in terms of what schools they’re assigned to, in terms of the facilities and equipment in the schools that they attend. They have protection from discrimination in terms of barriers to accessing advanced programs, gifted programs. And it means that a court is there to protect them and to enforce their rights when they’re violated and to ensure that school districts are continuing to actively desegregate.”

The justice department ended the Plaquemines parish desegregation order in an unusual process, one that some fear will be replicated elsewhere. The case was dismissed through a “joint stipulated dismissal”. Previously, courts have followed a specific process for ending similar cases, one in which school districts prove that they are complying with the court orders. That did not happen this time. Instead, the Louisiana state attorney general’s office worked with the justice department in reaching the dismissal.

“I’m not aware of anyone, any case, that has [ended] that way before,” said Deuel Ross, the deputy director of litigation of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF); the LDF was not specifically involved with the Plaquemines parish case. “The government as a plaintiff who represents the American people, the people of that parish, has an obligation to make sure that the district has done everything that it’s supposed to have done to comply with the federal court order in the case before it gets released, and the court itself has its own independent obligation to confirm that there’s no vestiges of discrimination left in the school district that are traceable to either present or past discrimination.”

Despite the district not proving that it is compliant with the order, the justice department has celebrated the end of the consent decree.

“No longer will the Plaquemines Parish School Board have to devote precious local resources over an integration issue that ended two generations ago,” Harmeet K Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the decision. “This is a prime example of neglect by past administrations, and we’re now getting America refocused on our bright future.”

But focusing on the age of the case implies that it was obsolete, according to Simons, who is now the senior adviser of programs and strategist at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The administration is trying to paint these cases as ancient history and no longer relevant.”

In 1966, the Johnson administration sued school districts across the country, particularly in the South, that refused to comply with desegregation demands. At the time, Plaquemines parish was led by Leander Perez, a staunch segregationist and white supremacist.

Perez had played a large role in trying to keep nearby New Orleans from desegregating, and once that effort failed, he invited 1,000 white students from the Ninth Ward to enroll in Plaquemines parish schools. By 1960, nearly 600 had accepted the offer. Perez was excommunicated by Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel for ignoring his warning to stop trying to prevent schools run by the archdiocese of New Orleans from integrating.

Perez attempted to close the public schools in Plaquemines parish, and instead open all-white private academies, or, segregation academies, which became a feature of the post-integration south. An estimated 300 segregation academies, which, as private schools, are not governed by the same rules and regulations as public schools, are still in operation and majority white.

Students and teachers working in school districts today might be decades removed from the people who led the push for desegregation in their districts, but they still benefit from the protections that were long ago put in place. Without court oversight, school districts that were already begrudgingly complying might have no incentive to continue to do so.

According to the Century Foundation, as of 2020, 185 districts and charters consider race and/or socioeconomic status in their student assignment or admissions policies, while 722 districts and charters are subject to a legal desegregation order or voluntary agreement. The justice department currently has about 135 desegregation cases on its docket, the majority of which are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.skip past newsletter promotion

“Separate but equal doesn’t work,” said Johnathan Smith, former deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division at the justice department. “The reality is that students of color do better when they are in integrated classrooms … We know that the amount of resources that are devoted to schools are greater when there are a higher number of white students. So to have students attend majority-minority school districts means that they’re going to be shut out, whether that’s from AP classes, whether that’s from extracurricular activities. All the activities that make it possible for students to fully achieve occur when you have more integrated classrooms.”

“Public education isn’t just about education for the sake of education,” he added. “It’s about preparing people to be citizens of our democracy and to be fully engaged in our democratic institutions. When you have students that are being shut out from quality public education, the impact is not just on those communities. It’s on our democracy writ large.”

Smith, the current chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, said that the decision “signals utter contempt for communities of color by the administration, and a lack of awareness of the history of segregation that has plagued our nation’s schools”.

Expect more reversals from the Civil rights Division of the Justice Department. Harmeet K Dhillon has spent years litigating against civil rights of minorities.

Andru Volinsky is a lawyer, a former elected official, and a public school activist in New Hampshire. In this post, he criticizes the Republican drive to increase home schooling, charter schools, and vouchers while rolling back child labor laws.

Writing in IndepthNH, Volinsky says:

A Book, an Idea and a Goat.

From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link:  https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page

By ANDRU VOLINSKY

Last week I wrote about Trump and the Freestaters’ War on Children. You can find that post here.

At the same time that the MAGA Right pushes to expand taxpayer-funded school vouchers in NH and elsewhere, it also presses to relax child labor laws. Remember, these nasties coordinate their efforts to undermine the public good through forums like ALEC. This same tandem of legislation is happening in state legislatures across the country. Twenty-eight states introduced legislation in the last few terms to turn back the clock on child labor protections. Thirty states have some form of taxpayer-funded school voucher program. Project 2025, the Trumpian roadmap, includes a provision to reverse protections against children working in inherently hazardous jobs and justifies this rollback as a way of respecting “parental choice” in the matter.

States regulate the hours and conditions of child labor. Federal legislation focuses on hazardous jobs. In 2022, the NH legislature passed and Governor Chris Sununu signed into law a bill that expanded permissible working hours for 16 and 17 year olds and lowered the age at which children can work in establishments that serve liquor to 14.

The bill was sponsored by Senators Hennessey (R) and Guida (R) and was roughly passed on party lines with the exception of Manchester’s then two senators, Donna Soucy (D) and Kevin Cavanaugh (D), who voted to support the less restrictive child labor laws that affect restaurants and bars not owned by the parents of the working child.

Is this where we are heading?

Abuse and Neglect in NH’s Home Schooled Population

Is abuse or neglect in home schooled children a problem? Is it more prevalent in families who home school their children than in families where children are in regular contact with educators and other staff at public or private schools? I classify families who home school but who have their children regularly participate in some public school programming as traditional school families.

My post last week mentioned that I filed a public information request seeking documents that concern NH Department of Education studies of abuse or neglect in the vulnerable population of children who are home schooled. Most states have mechanisms for querying public officials about the existence of documents. NH’s law is called, “Right to Know.“ The federal law is called the “Freedom of Information Act” (or FOIA).

Since NH will now pay any family in the state a bounty of $2500 to take their kids out of public school, it would be good to know that we, as a state, are meeting our responsibility to protect these children from abuse and neglect. That’s why I asked for access to relevant documents of the NH Department of Education.

Drumroll please….

The state’s responses show that during the eight years that Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and State Education Board Chair Drew Cline were in charge and pushed for expanding taxpayer-funded vouchers to remove children from public schools, they did nothing to determine if home schooled children are abused, neglected or, for that matter, if they learn.

1. The NH Department of Education did not collect any information about children who are withdrawn from public school including even those children who school personnel specifically identified as being potentially abused or neglected.

The above is true even though a parent or guardian need only fill out a form to remove a child from school and can fill out the form retroactively. The home schooling initiation process is ready made to protect a parent or guardian when s/he gets wind of an abuse or neglect investigation. Simply keep the kid home and fill out a form after the fact.

2. While public schools are subject to all kinds of regulations and assessments, NH has not collected any data about the “efficacy” of home schooling in New Hampshire. I defined “efficacy” as “how well or poorly a child is prepared to pursue higher education or move into the work force or join the military after completing the equivalent of a high school degree.“

In NH, home schooling is defined by statute as “Instruction shall be deemed home education if it consists of instruction in science, mathematics, language, government, history, health, reading, writing, spelling, the history of the constitutions of New Hampshire and the United States, and an exposure to and appreciation of art and music. Home education shall be provided, coordinated, or directed by a parent for his or her own child.” The NH Education Department, the local school district or a non-public school may work with parents to meet these requirements, but only if the parents ask.

There is also no required, meaningful assessment process, evaluation of the home school curriculum or even review of a home schooler’s portfolio, unless the parent specifically asks for it and then the parent chooses the evaluator, who need not be a credentialed educator. The home school portfolio is expressly made property of the parents, I assume, so it cannot be reviewed without a search warrant. Certification of the completion of a program of home schooling is accomplished by the parent filing a form saying the kid is done. NH law absolves school districts from any liability if a home schooled fails to receive a free appropriate public education (FAPE) which is the requirement for a proper program of studies for children with disabilities who qualify for special ed.

The NH Department of Education produced some basic survey data about home schooling and private education. The data come from a report commissioned by the NH Department of Education and released January 2, 2024 entitled, “Key Findings From New Hampshire Department of Education Study of Non-Public-Schooling Parents.” The 15-page study asked private school and home schooled families their views of public schools.

Two notes about the report. First, the sample size was minuscule and self-selected.

Just over 165,000 children attended public school in NH during the target year for the survey. These families’ opinions were not part of the survey. About 10-12 percent of school-aged children in NH attend private schools or are home schooled. That’s 16,000 to about 20,000 children. Since NH doesn’t keep track of these kids, there was no list to contact these families. The surveyors instead used various opt-in methods and only managed to get 334 responses, about one third from home schoolers. Yet, Edelblut published the report.

Second, to hide the minuscule survey size, all responses in the report are presented only in a percentage format. A whopping 73 percent of home school parents reported that they believe their child would be emotionally or mentally safer at home than in public school. What a condemnation of the public school system! But, as there were just over 100 home school parents that participated, this means about 75 people (+/- 10 percent) felt this way.

My educator friends can comment on whether Frank Edelblut’s study would have been acceptable as a homework assignment. For my part, I think it’s a hit job by a bunch of hacks.

I also asked about the NH Department efforts to determine how many home schooled children lack adult supervision during the school day and learned there was no effort to examine this concern.

Kids at work aren’t supervised by parents. This is the part that provides a direct tie-in to relaxation of child labor laws.

Finally, since it is our good legislators who voted to drastically expand taxpayer-funded voucher bounties, I asked if the legislature requested the Department of Education to study any of these subjects and was informed no requests were made.

So much for the law enforcement types interested in protecting children.

The Clawback of Public Education Funding

Some newer estimates put the Trump administration’s withholding of public education funds previously authorized by Congress at more than $8 billion, not $6.2 billion as previously thought. These are havoc-wrecking clawbacks, not cuts in future funding.

The NH political operatives who occupy the positions of Attorney General and Governor have still not joined the twenty-four attorneys general who have challenged Trump’s illegal action in court even though to do so would be in the obvious better interests of the state.

Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education has shared a good set of tools for demanding action. The Network for Public Education was founded by Diane Ravitch, a NYU education historian. Carol is a retired public school principal and executive director of the Network. Here is what Carol suggests with active links:

Tell Linda McMahon: Release the Funds

What You Can Do Right Now:

1. Email Linda McMahon. Demand she release the funds.

2. Share this action link with friends, family, and your community with this link https://networkforpubliceducation.org/releasefunds4schools/

3. Email Congress. Even if you’ve written before, send another message.

4. Call the U.S. Department of Education at this number: 1-800-647-8733. Press 5 to report a violation of law regarding the disbursement of federal funds by the U.S. Department of Education. You can leave a message.

Missouri lawmakers have banned educators from leaning on a model of reading instruction called the “three-cueing” method as part of a bipartisan education package signed by Gov. Mike Kehoe on Wednesday.

The so-called “science of reading” continues to win converts. The Missouri Legislature recently banned the use of “three cueing,” which is an essential element of Balanced Literacy. Just as “Whole Language” swept the country in the 1990s, just as “Whole Language” was replaced by “Balanced Literacy,” several state legislatures are now certain that “the science of reading” is the key to their state’s educational revival.

The law mandates that three cueing, which teaches students to read using context clues, can be used to supplement lessons, but phonics should be the majority of instruction.

State Rep. Ed Lewis, a Moberly Republican and sponsor of the legislation, told The Independent that the law builds on prior legislative efforts and work from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“We’ve come to the realization that phonics is crucial,” Lewis said. “The three cueing system, when used as the primary source, evidence shows a decrease in the amount of learning that occurs, and for that reason, we want to use it less.”

Three cueing is widely criticized for encouraging kids to make guesses when reading and doesn’t show how to sound out words, which is important for understanding complicated texts.

Missouri isn’t the only state to ban three cueing. By the end of 2024, at least 11 states had explicitly banned the method.

My own view is that legislatures are unqualified to tell teachers how to teach.

Journalist Steve Monacelli reviews the consistent failure of Texas politicians to pay for an early flood warning system. Texas has a huge budget and a huge surplus, but public safety was not a priority for the legislature or the Governor Greg Abbott or the Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. They were willing to cut taxes and pour $1 BILLION into school vouchers, but unwilling to fund a flood warning system. Such a system was considered unnecessary and “too expensive,” although it would have saved lives.

Monacelli wrote in Barbed Wire, reposted at MSNBC:

Extreme weather events aren’t a new phenomenon in Texas. According to data from the National Centers for Environmental Information, Texas ranks first in the United States for deaths from natural disasters. The frequency of costly and deadly weather events has steadily increased since the 1980s, when an average of 1.4 disasters totaled a billion dollars in damage or more per year, to a peak of 20 events in 2024. But in recent years, even with the increasing threat of natural disasters, Texas lawmakers and officials have been largely asleep at the wheel — unable or unwilling to take better precautions that, in hindsight, seem both necessary and painfully obvious.

This most recent disaster — a catastrophic flash flood in Texas Hill Country that has taken the lives of at least 100 people, including at least 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic — began to escalate in the early hours of Friday while most were still sleeping. 

Texas lawmakers and officials have been largely asleep at the wheel.

Over the prior two days, the National Weather Service had issued a series of emergency weather alerts. So had the Texas Division of Emergency Management. On Wednesday, the Division of Emergency Management activated emergency response resources across 10 state agencies because of increased threats of flooding in West and Central Texas ahead of the holiday weekend, and it escalated those resources Thursday. 

Flood watches distributed out of the Austin-San Antonio regional National Weather Service office Wednesday named several counties, including Kerr, and a list of specific towns, including Hunt, where Camp Mystic is located. Flooding was anticipated, but per most local officials, not to the degree that ultimately occurred. Texas Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd said at a news conference that the forecast from the National Weather Service “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.” 

It wasn’t until 4:03 a.m. on Independence Day that the National Weather Service sent out an emergency alert urging residents to find higher ground and a series of subsequent and increasingly alarmed alerts from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. 

But, according to a CBS News analysis, Kerr County didn’t initiate any messages through its Integrated Public Alert Warning System used to send emergency text messages from local government agencies.

As a result, many swept up in the floods were caught by surprise — particularly in Kerr County, which doesn’t have an emergency warning siren system, despite the topic being a subject of local government discussion for some time. 

Nearly a decade ago, the county had considered a system of sirens, but that wasn’t pursued because of the high expense required and a rejected 2018 application for a $1 million grant from the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which offered to cover only 5% of the estimated cost. As recently as 2023, the county commissioners’ court was still discussing grant options, according to meeting minutes. Lacking support from the state or a regional agency, Kerr County, with a budget in the tens of millions, decided it couldn’t afford it. 

Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official, told The New York Times in a recent interview, “Taxpayers won’t pay for it.”

A review of the extant reporting on the disaster and the unfolding recovery effort reveals a series of failures at the local and state levels. 

Local officials not only failed to put in place emergency warning systems in an area known for sudden and potentially deadly floods, but they also appeared blindsided and unprepared to address tough questions. Kelly told reporters at a news conference Friday that officials had no idea the flood was coming, even though the area has a long history of deadly floods.

“We have floods all the time,” Kelly said. “This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States, and we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever.”

Camp Mystic, the site of many of the confirmed deaths, was one of several summer camps in the Kerr County area that weren’t evacuated Friday. Camp Mystic restricts the use of cell phones, which prevented counselors and campers from receiving National Weather Alerts and likely hampered responses to the rising waters in an area lacking evacuation sirens. Asked why they weren’t evacuated at a news conference, Kelly said: “I can’t answer that. I don’t know.”

A review of the extant reporting on the disaster and the unfolding recovery effort reveals a series of failures at the local and state levels. 

At the state level, a similar failure to prepare for the worst occurred during the last Texas legislative session. A bill aimed to establish a statewide council to create a statewide emergency response plan and administer grants for things like improved emergency alert systems died in the Senate, with detractors pointing to the $500 million price tag as one reason to oppose it. 

“This shouldn’t be about anything other than the fact that it’s a half a billion dollars,” state Rep. Tony Tinderholt said during floor debate in April.

The shortsightedness of this viewpoint can’t be understated, given the high price tag of disasters and of lost lives and the Legislature’s comparative willingness to prioritize other spending, like $2 billion for film industry incentives. (Though Tinderholt, for his part, voted against that, too.) 

The disaster has served as a wakeup call for at least one state lawmaker, Republican Rep. Wes Virdell, who represents Kerr County and voted against the aforementioned disaster preparedness bill. 

“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” Virdell told The Texas Tribune.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who didn’t make the emergency preparedness bill one of his key legislative priorities in his capacity as the president of the Texas Senate, said in an interview on Fox News that if local governments couldn’t afford it, “then the state will step up.” And Sen. Ted Cruz told CBS News he wants to use the tragedy to drive a conversation about how to “make sure warnings of a weather event” reach people more quickly and be “proactive to get people out of the way.”

But for all this talk about proactive efforts, the facts are clear. Texas lawmakers didn’t fund emergency response systems that potentially could have saved lives, and then 27 girls and their counselors died at a summer camp. In a state with an annual budget of over $338 billion, that is a choice.

Question: who was awake at 4 am to get the emergency evacuation order? How many had cell phones to get it?