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Indiana: Republicans Have Systematically Undermined Public Schools, Where 87% of Students Are Enrolled

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2026 //
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Indiana once took pride in its public schools. Not any more. Since the Republican Party took charge of state government, public schools have been neglected and underfunded.

Veteran educator Vernon Smith was elected to the state legislature after his retirement. He wrote this article, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

He wrote:

Sixteen years ago, Republicans assumed full control of Indiana’s state government, holding the governor’s office and winning majorities in the House and the Senate. Since achieving this trifecta, the Republican supermajority has systematically cut funding and programs that made this state work for the people who live here.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than the state’s complete neglect of public schools for nearly two decades. Since taking power, the Republican supermajority has done everything in its power to undermine public education, and Indiana’s children are worse off for it.

Let me explain where years of Republican education policy have gotten us. Last month, the Network for Public Education released a report revealing Indiana ranks 45th out of 50 states in support of public education. Last year, only 31.2% of students showed proficiency on both the math and ELA sections of the ILEARN test. More than half of fourth graders can’t read proficiently, and nearly seven-in-ten eighth graders aren’t proficient in math.

A record number of school districts across the state — nearly 40 — have turned to ballot referenda to secure the money they need this year because the state won’t properly fund them and has cut their local funding sources. These are the results of Republicans chipping away at Indiana’s public school funding for years.

Consider where their priorities lie. More than 87% of Hoosier children attend traditional public schools. Yet year after year, the supermajority pours its energy and political capital into expanding charter schools and private school vouchers for the children of families who were, in most cases, never going to need the state’s help in the first place. The legislature has made it clear: they have no issue abandoning working-class Hoosiers in favor of giving an extra leg up to the most fortunate among us.

When Indiana first opened the door to charter schools and voucher programs, lawmakers sold it as a lifeline for children of color and children in poverty whose assigned schools were failing them. But once the door was propped open, my Republican colleagues expanded it year after year, extending vouchers to families making well over six figures. If this were truly about rescuing kids who’d been failed by the system, it would have stayed targeted at the kids who needed rescuing. Instead, it grew into a subsidy for everyone but the working-class families the program was designed to serve.

None of this is by accident. The supermajority was warned by Democrats, education professionals and concerned Hoosiers of the consequences that their policies would inflict on our schools. It is the direct, foreseeable and self-inflicted result of almost two decades of choices made by men and women who have mistaken their own supermajority for a mandate to neglect the children they were elected to serve.

Districts across the state are being forced to ask voters to approve referenda to raise their own local property taxes just so schools can keep the lights on and pay their teachers. Let’s not pretend this educational belt-tightening is born of necessity. Indiana has nearly $4 billion in surplus and reserve funds, which is more than enough to return to our previous, robust support of public education. Our schools and the children attending them are being asked to make do with less while the state sits on more money than it knows what to do with.

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I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it out of partisan loyalty. I say it as a man who spent nearly 20 years as a school principal and six years as a teacher before I ever spent a day in the Statehouse. I have seen firsthand what happens when a school has what it needs, and I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

I am telling you, plainly: Indiana’s Republican supermajority has had 16 years to prove it knows the difference too. It does not. If it did, we would not rank 45th in the nation for public school support. We would not be watching our children fall further behind their peers in other states while the people entrusted with fixing it offer nothing but superficial, special-interest-backed policies that don’t address the underlying issues.

This is where years of unchecked Republican domination have gotten us: two decades of failure and of backs turned on the generation that makes up the future of this state, this nation and the world beyond.

For 16 years, they have stood before us and promised that this would finally be the year public education in Indiana gets fixed. And for 16 years, they have failed to deliver on that promise. The only question left is how much longer Hoosiers are willing to take their word for it and allow more children to fail academically

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Indiana, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

An Activist in Indianapolis Mourns the Death of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2026 //
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Nigel Long is a graduate of Shortridge Public High School in Indianapolis and the parents of students in the Indianapolis Public Schools. He lived through the systematic destruction of his city’s public schools. He opposed the so-called reformers, as he watched them erode and finally eliminate democratic control of the public schools.

Here he expresses his outrage at the theft of democratic control of the city’ schools. His article was posted by the Indiana Coalition for Public Education.

Nigel Long wrote;

Guest Blog – How to Steal a Public School System: The Indianapolis Playbook

I want to talk about what happened in Indianapolis recently, not just for us, but for every city in America.

The Indianapolis Public Education Corporation board was announced. An unelected body now controls school closures, buildings, property taxes, and transportation across the entire boundaries of Indianapolis’ largest and oldest school district. 

David Harris, the man who founded the Mind Trust in 2006, chairs the board. Janet McNeal leads Herron Classical Schools, a network the Mind Trust incubated. Edward Rangel runs Adelante Schools, another Mind Trust launch. Dexter Taylor leads Paramount Brookside, same ecosystem. The IPS board members included were elected with the same dark money that’s been buying school board seats since 2012. And Micheal O’Connor, the consultant the city paid over half a million dollars in public money to design the process that produced this board is now its acting executive director. This board didn’t emerge from the community. It was assembled by the people who funded the takeover.

“This board didn’t emerge from the community. It was assembled by the people who funded the takeover.”

This is the final chess piece in a 20-year game. And I know that because I was there for the first one.

I was a 9th grader at Shortridge High School when the Mind Trust brought John Legend to Indianapolis. I remember being on that field trip, sitting in that room, caught up in the excitement of a global superstar telling us that the future of our schools was bright. I didn’t know then that I was watching the beginning of the end of IPS as we know it. I was a kid. I didn’t know what any of it meant.

I graduated from Shortridge 13 years ago. And I have spent the years since watching that moment slowly reveal itself for what it was.

John Legend wasn’t there for us. He was there to give community cover to the privatization of Indianapolis public schools: a coordinated decades-long effort involving the Mind Trust, Stand for Children, RISE Indy, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), Bloomberg Philanthropies, Reed Hastings (Netflix), John Arnold (Enron), and the political allies who carried their water at the statehouse. The money trail is all public record. You don’t raise $134 million and fly in a Grammy winner because you’re running an education experiment. You do it because you need people to stop asking questions.

Since 2006, the Mind Trust has raised over $134 million (their own number, from their own website) working toward this exact moment. They used dark money to purchase school board seats. They ran a legislative process that was designed from the beginning to land exactly where it landed.

The cruelest part of this privatization agenda is that real parents with real concerns were recruited, conditioned, and in some cases compensated to be the public face of something they were never given the full picture on. Their frustration was real. What was done with it was manipulation. They took the pain of Black and brown families navigating a broken system, pointed it in the direction that served them, and called it community engagement. That’s not parent voice. That’s manufactured consent with a marketing budget.

And long before any institution took an official position, there were everyday people in this city, parents, teachers, neighbors, who saw exactly what was happening and said so out loud. They got dismissed. They got ignored. They got outspent. The community has been screaming about this for years. What happened recently is what it looks like when nobody in power listens or cares about the community they are tasked to serve.  

When nearly twice as many people testified against this plan as those who supported it, it didn’t matter. The votes were already lined up. The legislation was already written. The board members were already chosen.

That’s not democracy. That’s the performance of it.

My grandmother had a saying: fat meat is greasy. It means learning a lesson the hard way after ignoring advice that was right in front of you.

A lot of us have been saying this for years. The receipts have been public. The Mind Trust got exactly what they came for. Now all of us — students, parents, educators, communities — have to live in whatever comes next. If this is the first time you’re hearing it, I hope today is the day it becomes impossible to ignore.

I want to be clear about where accountability lives here because this is not a partisan story. State Republicans wrote the legislation and pushed it through. Local Democrats, on the city council and beyond, had every opportunity to protect democratic governance in this city and chose not to. Mayor Hogsett convened the very process that produced these recommendations and appointed the board that will now run our schools. There is no version of this story where the spineless performance of our local elected officials doesn’t deserve to be named directly.

Both parties failed Indianapolis. Full stop.

IPS spent years being held up as a broken system that needed fixing. What actually happened was a live demonstration of how to take a public school system apart and replace democratic accountability with private control without firing a single shot. The enrollment flight that became the justification for this takeover was engineered by the same organizations now running the solution. And everyone in that room when the final vote was cast knew exactly where it was going.

I say this as someone who cares about every child in this city, Black, brown, white, charter school, public school, all of them. Every student in Indianapolis will feel this. Charter families included. This was never about kids versus kids. It was always about who controls the institution.

This was never about kids versus kids. It was always about who controls the institution.

We are living through modern day colonialism dressed up in innovation language. And the proof is in the outcome. Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been. That’s not an accident. That’s by design.

The IPS that shaped me — that shaped generations of Indianapolis kids — has potentially changed forever. That matters beyond politics because schools are not just buildings and test scores. They are where communities build identity, pass down culture, and figure out who they are. This city has a documented history of coordinated institutional action against Black communities that most people were never taught. Crispus Attucks was built in 1927 to keep Black students out of white schools, segregation dressed up as institution building. Indiana Avenue, once a thriving Black cultural and economic district, was deliberately destroyed between the 1950s and 1970s through highway construction, IUPUI expansion, and eminent domain. Over 12,000 people were displaced. 400 acres of Black history erased. Coordinated by universities, hospitals, city leaders, and state government. Busing in 1981 put the burden of desegregation on Black children while white families simply moved further out. And now this. One day this moment will be remembered alongside all of those — another decision about Black children where the outcome was predetermined before the community ever had a real say. Different decade. Different language. Same intention.

IPS was first. This sets a dangerous precedent for every district in this state. The Indianapolis-Marion County townships, the rural districts, the suburban districts. Any community that powerful people decide isn’t capable of governing itself is vulnerable to exactly what happened here. That’s the part that should terrify everyone regardless of where your kids go to school. This isn’t just about Black and brown communities anymore. It’s about who gets to decide that a community isn’t smart enough or capable enough to make decisions about their own children’s education, and then build the infrastructure to take that power away from them. Indianapolis just showed them how.

The only chance we have going forward is making sure our next mayor isn’t full of shit. And it means holding every elected official, Democrat and Republican, local and state, accountable for what they did and didn’t do when it mattered.

Here’s what I know. The ability to elect the people who make decisions about your children’s education is not a bureaucratic detail. It is democracy’s most basic promise. When you erode that at the school board level and nobody stops it, you have established that it can be done. And if it can be done with education, the institution we trust most with our children and our future, then nothing is off the table.

This feels like a loss because it is one. But public schools have survived worse because the communities behind them refused to quit. That community is still here. It has always been here. No appointed board can change that. The fight doesn’t stop today.

Show up for our school boards. Know who represents us. Demand better from our mayor, our city council, our state legislators.Get involved in our local elections like our kids’ future depends on it, because it does.The people making these decisions are counting on our exhaustion. We can’t give it to them.

Nigel Long is a cultural organizer, event producer, and community builder based in Indianapolis. He is the Founder of SoundOff and serves as Chairperson of BLACK: A Festival of Joy. He is a proud graduate of Shortridge High School and an IPS parent.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Indiana, Indianapolis, Inequity, Privatization

The Corporate Takeover of Public Schools in Indianapolis

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2026 //
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So-called reformers continue to pursue a fantasy: they believe that changing the governance of public schools will lead to improvement in the education of children.

And so they advocate for mayoral control, state takeovers, charter schools, vouchers.

They choose to ignore the overwhelming consensus among education researchers that the home lives of children has a far greater impact on children’s school performance than the governing structure.

Here is a case in point, offered by In the Public Interest.

If you’re worried about corporations taking over public schools, this next sentence will not allay your worry: The state of Indiana just turned over much of the responsibilities for the city of Indianapolis’ schools–public and charter–to something called the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation (IPEC).

“This new organization will be charged with building and transportation management for both charter and traditional public schools,” reports Governing. “It will also be charged with creating a single set of evaluation criteria for both types of schools.”

Admittedly, it’s a nonprofit corporation and its nine board members are appointed by the mayor with statutes to determine the corporate board’s membership: three come from the Indianapolis Public Schools [IPS] board of commissioners–which still exists, three from the charter school industry, and three with administrative and financial expertise. 

In reality, however, four board members are from the charter industry. Its board chairman is David Harris, who founded the Mind Trust-Indianapolis, the driving force pushing the charterization of the district. Harris is the President and CEO of Christal House International that operates the Christal House Academy charter chain. According to the organization’s 990 tax form, in 2025, Harris received $554,148 in compensation.

But IPEC inserts a layer of control and bureaucracy beyond–or, better put, around–Indianapolis’ elected school board. At least as troubling as that is the fact IPEC was given the authority to levy property taxes that it can use to fund–with public money–charter schools. This puts charter schools on equal footing–and funding–with public schools–a dangerous precedent that is certain to be attempted elsewhere. 

One of IPEC’s first orders of business is likely to be placing on the November ballot an operating referendum since IPS’ expires at the end of this year. While Indianapolis Public Schools expects a $40 million deficit for the year, that might have been addressed if IPS’s attempt to place an operating referendum on the 2023 ballot hadn’t been derailed by the charter school industry and the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce. 

For public school advocates, the implications of the new, non-elected board are clear–and disturbing.

“What is occurring in Indianapolis is part of a growing movement to destroy the neighborhood school governed by the community and replace it with a corporate vision of schooling that sees the marketplace and competition as the primary drivers of quality,” Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, tells In the Public Interest. “We are now more than thirty years into the charter school experiment, and we have yet to see the miracle.”

Jeff Hagan
Communications Director

Categories Education Industry, Indiana, Indianapolis, Parents, Research, Students

Andy Spears: “Reformers” Have Indianapolis Public Schools in Their Sights

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2025 //
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Andy Spears, veteran journalist based in Tennessee, writes about “reformers” plan to undermine and disrupt public schools in Indianapolis.

Indianapolis appears to be the latest front in the ongoing battle to “disrupt” public education so much that it doesn’t exist anymore. 

Ending Public Schools IS The Goal

WFYI reports on a new governing body created to “bridge” the provision of services between Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) and the city’s charter school sector.

In an 8-1 decision Wednesday evening, the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance recommended establishing the nine-member corporation. If approved by state lawmakers, this new agency called the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, would act as a logistical bridge between the district and charter schools, managing unified busing, enrollment, and facility use.

While the IPS School Board will remain intact, the new agency will have significant authority to manage interactions between the Board and charter schools. 

Some see this as the beginning of creating an unaccountable agency to further advance school privatization in the district. 

During public comment, many spoke out against taking any power away from the IPS Board. Some suggested the board should oversee the transportation needs of charter schools. And others painted the ILEA members’ process as undemocratic.

WFYI explains how charter schools work in Indiana:

Charter schools are tuition-free public schools managed privately by nonprofit boards rather than elected officials. These boards operate under contracts granted by one of several authorizers in the state.

A parent representative on the group that reviewed proposals and recommended the new governing agency expressed skepticism:

The recommendation also drew sharp criticism for lacking specifics. Tina Ahlgren, the appointee representing district-managed school parents, cast the sole vote against it.

“I find my biggest reason to vote no is the level of ambiguity in the plan,” Ahlgren said. “I find these recommendations falling into this bizarre zone of simultaneously feeling both too much and not enough, bold in some areas but overly timid in others, with vague promises that the ecosystem will sort itself out.”

The proposal must now be approved by the Indiana General Assembly.

The Indianapolis move comes at a time when national forces are seeking full privatization of public schools, with some in the Trump Administration’s education leadership suggesting public education should all but end within 5-6 years. 

In states like Tennessee, advocacy groups are launching efforts to disrupt public education so much it is effectively a thing of the past.

·And, Indiana is not without its own challenges in maintaining a functioning system of public schools alongside a range of private options.

Indiana Vouchers: Private School Coupons for Wealthy Families

The Indianapolis Star reports:

Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Programallows families to use state dollars that would have followed their child to a traditional public school to instead pay for a private, parochial or nonreligious school.

The state releases this report annually, and for the 2024-25 school year, it showed that the state spent around $497 million on the program, which is an increase of just over $58 million from the previous school year.

Just a few years ago – in 2017 – the Indiana school voucher scheme cost the state $54 million. Now, the year-over-year increase in voucher expenses exceeds what the entire program cost just 8 years ago.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Indiana, Indianapolis

Why Indiana Refused to Redistrict to Help GOP Control the House in 2026

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2025 //
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It’s typical in American politics that the party that wins the Presidency usually loses the mid-term elections two years later. The other party picks up seats, sometimes enough seats to dominate one or both Houses, enough to stymie the President’s agenda and enough to hold investigations that embarrass the President.

With Trump’s low standing in the polls, the rising cost of living, the backlash against tariffs, and the evident cruelty of ICE, Republicans have worried about an electoral wipeout in November 2026.

Some clever Republican strategist devised a plan to protect the Republican dominance in the House of Representatives. Simple. Persuade red states to redistrict (gerrymander) their Congressional maps, creating more Republican seats while eliminating Democratic seats. This was out of the ordinary, because states usually redistrict every ten years, after the latest census.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a loyal MAGAT, was first to act. He pushed through a new map that split up Democratic districts and created five new Republican seats. The U.S. Supreme Court supported the Trump goal, as usual, and approved the Texas gerrymander.

Governor Gavin Newsom of California was quick to respond. He called a referendum that would redistrict the state and produce five new Democratic seats. Newsom’s new map is being changed in the Supreme Court, but it’s difficult to see the Court approving the Texas gerrymander while rejecting California’s.

The administration began pressuring other red state governors to follow the lead of Texas. Some Democratic states set about redrawing their maps.

And then there was Indiana. NBC News tells the fascinating inside story of how the Trump team alienated key Republicans in that state.

Indiana is a deep-red state with a Republican supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Republicans hold seven Congressional districts, Democrats only two. Trump wanted those two seats.

The Trump operatives thought the state leaders would quickly fall in line. When they didn’t, the Trump operatives decided to unleash their usual tools: bullying, pressure, threats, intimidation, even death threats. At least 14 Republican state senators received death threats.

Jane C. Timm of NBC News wrote the story:

INDIANAPOLIS — As the redistricting battle began to pick up steam in Indiana last month, state Sen. Jean Leising’s grandchildren were receiving odd text messages.

Ads from little-known outside groups had spliced the longtime Republican lawmaker’s image next to prominent Democrats like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Some of the messaging was sloppy, referring to Leising as “him.”

A conservative and supporter of President Donald Trump, Leising, 76, was furious. Following months of conversations with her constituents, she felt they were generally opposed to redrawing Indiana’s congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections — even though such an effort would favor her party and was backed by her president. So in mid-November, she fired off a statement making it official: She wouldn’t support it.

“The negative campaigning just put me over the top,” she said in an interview with 13WTHR in Indianapolis, an NBC News affiliate, at the time. “He may wonder why Indiana is struggling to get on board. Well, it’s probably the antics they used.”

It was a sign of things to come. Ultimately, the months of pressure applied by Trump and his supporters from outside of Indiana to pass a redrawn map that would split up the state’s two Democratic districts backfired. On Thursday, Leising joined a majority of Republicans in the state Senate in voting to sink the map in the face of potential future primary challenges, a flurry of online attacks — and in some cases, violent threats. 

The result was one of the biggest rejections that Trump, who has otherwise largely ruled over the GOP with an iron fist, has faced since returning to office, and it could cost the party in its bid to preserve its narrow House majority….

“You have to know Hoosiers. We can’t be bullied, we don’t like it,” GOP state Sen. Sue Glick said after voting against the map.

Despite intense lobbying by Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnston, Republican leaders in the state were not enthusiastic. They resented the pressure.

When Rodric Bray, the leading Republican in the State Senate, warned that there were not enough votes to pass the new map, Trump lashed out at him. He threatened to run an opponent to Bray, but Bray didn’t tremble because he’s not up for re-election until 2028.

Trump wrote on Truth Social:

“In the entire United States of America, Republican or Democrat, only Indiana ‘Republican’ State Senator Rod Bray, a Complete and Total RINO, is opposed to redistricting for purposes of gaining additional Seats in Congress,” Trump wrote in one Truth Social post of the well-liked Republican leader in the Senate. “The Rod Brays of Politics are WEAK and PATHETIC.”

The map passed the Indiana House by The map passed the state House last Friday by a 57-41 vote, with 12 Republicans voting against it.

When the vote shifted to the State Senate, the map was resoundingly defeated, 19-31, with 21 Republicans voting against it.

Trump lost the vote of one State Senator when he called Tim Walz “retards.” The State Senator has a child with Down Syndrome. Others said they would not be bullied.

Categories Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Indiana, Politics, Republicans, Texas, Trump

Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Behind the Republican War on Education? Part 2.

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2025 //
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Jennifer Berkshire has been writing about the politics of education for many years. She has written two books with education historian Jack Schneider, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars. This is the second installment in her excellent series called “Connecting the Dots.” Her Substack blog is called “The Education Wars.”

She writes:

BAs are out, babies are in

The Trump world’s obsession with the declining birthrate doesn’t quite rank with rooting out “DEI,” tariff-ing, or expelling immigrants but it’s up there. In a recent interview, Elon Musk confessed that a fear of the shrinking number of babies keeps him up at night. What does this have to do with education? Everything. Last year, two of the big education ‘thinkers’ at Heritage released a guide to how changes in education policy could increase “the married birthrate”:

Expensive and misguided government interventions in education are, whether intended or not, pushing young people away from getting married and starting families—to the long-term detriment of American society.

What are those government interventions? Things like subsidizing student loans, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Or requiring teachers, who are mostly women, to have bachelor degrees, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Of course there is a voucher angle—there always is with these folks. But the key here is that a chorus of influential Trump thinkers like this guy keep telling us that there are too many women on campus, and that policy shifts could get them back into the home where they belong. 

If the administration succeeds in privatizing the government-run Student Loan Program, college will become much more expensive, significantly shrinkign the number of kids who’ll be able to attend. And that seems to be the point, as conservative activist Chris Rufo explained in an interview a few weeks ago.

By spinning off, privatizing and then reforming the student loan programs, I think that you could put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing.

So when you hear the rising chorus coming from Trump world that there are too many of the wrong people on the nation’s campuses, recall that an awful lot of these self-styled ‘nationalists’ believe this: “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers.”

Some people are more equal than others 

I’ve been making the case that both the Department of Education and public education more broadly are especially vulnerable because of the equalizing roles that they play. Of course, education is not our only equalizer. Indeed, all of the institutions and policy mechanisms intended to smooth out the vast chasms between rich and poor are on the chopping block right now. While you were clicking on another bad news story, Trump eviscerated collective bargaining rights for thousands of federal workers. While teachers weren’t affected, a number of red states have been rushing to remedy that, including Utah which just banned collective bargaining for public employees. 

Writer John Ganz describes the unifying thread that connects so much of Trump world as ‘bosses on top,’ the belief that “the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good.” We got a vivid demonstration of what this looks like in Florida this week as legislators debated whether to roll back (more) child labor protections, allowing kids as young as 14 to work over night. 

Governor Ron DeSantis is busily spinning the bill as about parents rights, but what it’s really about is expanding the power of the boss. The ‘right’ to work overnight while still in school is actually the boss’ right to demand that young employees keep working. Nor is it hard to imagine the long-term consequences of this policy change. Teen workers who labor through the night end up dropping out of school, their futures constrained in every possible way. Here’s how Marilynn Robinson described the rollback of child labor laws in her adopted home state of Iowa: “If these worker-children do not manage to finish high school, they will always be poorer for it in income and status and mobility of every kind.”

Go back one hundred years when the country was in the midst of a fierce debate over child labor, and you’ll hear the same arguments for ‘bosses on top’ that are shaping policy today. At a time when public education was becoming compulsory, conservative industry groups like the National Association of Manufacturers cast their opposition to both child labor laws and universal public education in explicitly bossist terms, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway recount in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market:

“They believed that men were inherently unequal: it was right and just for workers to be paid far less than managers and managers far less than owners. They also believed that in a free society some children would naturally enter the workforce. Child labor laws wer (to their minds) socialistic because they enforced erroneous assumptions of equality—for example, that all children should go to school—rather than accepting that some children should work in factories.”

Back to the states

Did you hear the one about how we’re returning education to the states? Back-to-the-states has become a mantra for the Trump Administration on all kinds of favored policy issues, as the New York Times recently pointed out. Of course, education is already a state ‘thing,’ which means that we can look at the states Trump keeps pointing to as models and see how they’re faring. So how are they faring? Not so well, as the education reform group EdTrust lays out here, reviewing both NAEP scores and the track records of these states in supporting low-income students and students of color.

But there are plenty of warning signs beyond test scores. Ohio seems poised to slash funding for public education, even as the state’s voucher program balloons. (And let’s not even get into the just-enacted Senate Bill 1, which limits class discussions of any ‘controversial’ topic and goes hard at campus unions.) But for a glimpse of the future that awaits us, pay attention to another state in my beloved Heartland, and which Trump has repeatedly showered with praise: Indiana.

Now, Indiana happens to be home to one of my favorite economists, Ball State’s Michael Hicks, who has been warning relentlessly that the state’s decision to essentially stop investing in K-12 and public higher education has been an economic disaster. Hoosiers, he pointed out recently, earn less than the typical Californian or New Yorker did in 2005. As the number of kids going to college in Indiana has plummeted, the state now spends more and more money trying to lure bad employers to the state. Here’s how Hicks describes the economic and education policies that Indiana has embraced:

“If a diabolical Bond villain were to craft a set of policies that ensured long-term economic decline in a developed country, it would come in two parts. First, spend enormous sums of money on business incentives that offer a false narrative of economic vibrancy, then cut education spending.”

As for Indiana’s 25-year-long school choice experiment, Hicks concludes that it has been a failure. Why? Because the expansion of school vouchers and charter schools was used to justify spending less on public schools—precisely the policy course that we’re hurtling towards now. Today, Indiana spend less money per student on both K-12 and public higher education than it did in 2008.

GOP-run states have already begun to petition what’s left of the Department of Education for ‘funding flexibility’—the ability to spend Title 1 dollars, which now go to public schools serving low-income and rural students, on private religious education. We shouldn’t be surprised. This is precisely the vision laid out in Project 2025. (Fun fact: the same Heritage thinker who penned the education section of Project 2025 also co-authored the above referenced guide to getting young married ladies to have more babies.)

And just like in Indiana, school privatization will be used to justify reducing the investment in K-12 public education. So when an economist tells us that school choice “risks being Indiana’s single most damaging economic policy of the 21st century,” we should probably listen.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, DeSantis, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Funding, History, Indiana, Iowa, Lies, Privatization, Republicans, Trump

Karen Francisco: The Roots of the Charter School Grift in Indiana

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2025 //
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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.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Funding, Indiana, Indianapolis, Privatization

Indianapolis: Privatizers Want to Eliminate Public Schools, Replace Them All with Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2025 //
7

The Indianapolis Public School District is approaching a red zone: the total elimination of public schools. A bill sponsored by a Republican legislator would require the dissolution of the district, the conversion of every public school into a privately-managed charter school, and the replacement of the elected board by an appointed one.

Amelia Pak-Harvey of Chalkbeat Indiana wrote about a recent meeting of the elected school board, where the pressure campaign to privatize the district was discussed.

“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.

She wrote:

The Indianapolis Public Schools board is strongly opposing a bill that would dissolve the district and force it to convert to charter schools, a proposal that has spurred calls for an organized campaign against it.

The pushback against HB 1136 at the first meeting of the new school board on Tuesday comes as IPS faces the start of yet another legislative session Wednesday that could leave the district more financially strapped and struggling to stay alive.

The bill also became the focus at Tuesday’s meeting, where new board members were sworn in at a historic moment for IPS — for the first time, a board made up entirely of women of color leads a district overseen by its first Black female superintendent.

“This legislation is not student focused, and fails to reflect the community’s input on how they envision their public schools thriving,” board President Angelia Moore said in a statement on behalf of the board at the meeting. “Instead of fostering growth and innovation, HB 1136 risks dismantling the very foundation that supports student success and community collaboration.”

The bill would require Indiana districts to dissolve and transition into charter schools if more than half of students living in the district boundary enroll in a school outside the district. Under the proposal, IPS would dissolve, and 50 of its schools would convert to charters, according to the bill’s latest fiscal impact statement.

Four other districts — Gary Community School Corp., Union School Corp. in east-central Indiana, Tri-Township Consolidated School Corp. in the north, and Cannelton City Schools in the south — would also dissolve.

The bill, proposed by Republican State Rep. Jake Teshka of North Liberty, would also dissolve the IPS’ elected board and replace it with a seven-member board appointed by the governor, the mayor, the president of the city-county council, and the executive director of the Indiana Charter School Board.

IPS to face challenging legislative session

In addition to this bill, a number of other proposals could spell financial ruin for the district, at a time when it faces mounting pressure to share more resources with charter schools. Amid mounting competition from the charter sector, the district has already tried to right-size itself through its Rebuilding Stronger reorganization, which closed several schools last school year and reconfigured grades districtwide this school year.

A new charter advocacy group, the Indiana Charter Innovation Center, will push for charters to receive the same amount of funding from property taxes that traditional districts receive. That would require IPS to give more than the $4 million in property tax revenues it is estimated to give to charters this year, in accordance with a law passed last year.

And incoming Gov. Mike Braun has pushed for capping increases in property taxes, which could further restrict funding for traditional public schools.

IPS grapples annually with competition from Indiana’s strong school choice environment, which state lawmakers have bolstered in previous sessions. The district faces a fiscal cliff once additional property taxes from the 2018 operating referendum expire in 2026. Federal pandemic relief funds have also expired.

“Urban education systems face complex and nuanced challenges that may be unfamiliar to some policymakers,” Moore said at the meeting. “We invite legislators who are genuinely interested in public education to visit our district, gain firsthand insight on our unique mission and vision, and work alongside us to ensure sustainable and meaningful outcomes for students, educators, and families.”

Community members raise opposition to bill

Parents and staff also voiced their opposition to HB 1136 at the meeting Tuesday and called on the board to loudly protest it. Four people spoke against the bill, while three others suggested the board partner with charters, respond to the demand for educational choice, or work with lawmakers to improve the district.

The public support follows a separate call from a group of community leaders who last week called on IPS to consider how to remain operational amid “strong financial headwinds.”

“The legislature has taken notice and seems ready to act if needed,” read the statement from former mayors Bart Peterson and Greg Ballard; former IPS board president Mary Ann Sullivan; and city-county councilors Maggie Lewis, Carlos Perkins, and Leroy Robinson. “It is preferable, however, that any structural changes in IPS are driven locally and to the benefit of our Indianapolis students and community.”

“Rebuilding Stronger shut down schools. The loss this community felt cannot be overstated. Don’t let their loss be in vain,” parent Kristen Phair told the board in between sobs. “I am asking each of you commissioners to take a united stand and be loud in advocating against this bill. Please help us organize. Our families want to organize against this.”

The group urged IPS to share more property tax funding with charter schools.

But Noah Leninger, a teacher at Robert Frost School 106, urged the board not to accept any such compromises.

“More charter schools will not save IPS,” he said. “No matter what they’re called — if we’re honest and we call them charter schools, if we lie to ourselves and our community and call them Innovation Network schools — whatever the name, the rapid and unchecked expansion of these unaccountable grift mills has not gotten IPS out of this mess.”

Board member Gayle Cosby, who beat an opponent backed by political action committees supportive of education reform to return to the board, said that she was encouraged by the crowd. She also scrutinized the often repeated call by charter supporters for IPS to “partner” with charters.

“My definition of partner does not include any entity that is actively seeking to destroy or dissolve our district, as noted in the proposed legislation,” she said.

Board member Nicole Carey said the challenging times will require courage from district leaders.

“To everyone tonight, I want to say stand with us, stay engaged, hold us accountable to this promise of prioritizing the needs of our students,” she said. “It is going to take all of us.”

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Indiana, Indianapolis, Privatization

Indiana: Vote for Jennifer McCormick for Governor

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2024 //
0

Jennifer McCormick was the last elected state superintendent of schools. She switched parties because of the Republicans’ hostility to public schools.

She is running for Governor of Indiana against Senator Mike Braun, who is a far-right Republican. Braun and his running mate, an evangelical extremist, want to get rid of public schools.

The 74 reports:

U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, a conservative Republican, is still ahead in the state’s gubernatorial race but his lead among Indiana voters over Democrat Jennifer McCormick has shrunk in recent weeks.

Polling released this week by the Democratic Governors Association shows Braun just three points in front of McCormick, 44% to 41%. That’s a dropoff from the Sept. 17 results of an Emerson College Polling/The Hill voter survey that had Braun with roughly 45% of the vote and McCormick with 34. Libertarian candidate Donald Rainwater also picked up more support but less dramatically so, going from 5.8% to 8%.

Indiana has not elected a Democratic governor since 2000 and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a comfortable 14 percentage point lead, 57% to 43%, over Democrat Kamala Harris, according to an ActiVote poll released Tuesday.

If elected to succeed Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, Braun and his running mate, pastor, podcaster and far-right Christian nationalist Micah Beckwith, have pledged universal school choice for every Indiana family while focusing on parental rights and school safety. 

McCormick, a career educator, was the last person elected to the superintendent of public instruction’s office before it became an appointed position in 2021. She seeks to expand affordable child care, fight what she believes is excessive state-mandated testing and call for an equitable school funding formula. 

She also wants to place limits on the state’s private school voucher initiative: The program grew to encompass more than 70,000 children in 2023-24, a 31% increase from the year before. The state allocated $439 million in tuition grants to private parochial or non-religious schools last year — up from nearly $312 million the year before.

McCormick said the program, which might have been intended for lower-income children, is often utilized by white suburban families and is too expensive. 

“We can’t afford it,” she told The 74, “and it is sucking the resources out of our traditional schools.” 

Braun, 70, wants to expand school choice by removing the $220,000 annual family income cap from the voucher program, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, and doubling the $10 millionallocated to the state’s Education Scholarship Account Program. The program, which has also seen tremendous growth in participation, gives special education students and their siblings funds for tuition and support services. 

Braun did not make himself available for an interview and attempts to reach various supporters were not successful.

“School choice programs put parents in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose schools that prioritize their children’s needs,” he states in his education plan. “Providing universal school choice will ensure every Hoosier family has the same freedom to choose their best-fit education.”

A former school board member, Braun also wants to create an Indiana Office of School Safety to streamline the efforts of several departments, including the state police — and implement age-appropriate cyber training for students regarding online safety. He said, too, that the state should limit cellphone use on campus. 

Braun wants to increase Indiana’s public teacher base salary — and financially reward educators whose students perform well. 

Keith Gambill, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, said his group endorsed McCormick, 54, because of her commitment to funding traditional public schools. 

He noted she did not have the group’s endorsement when she initially ran for the state superintendent’s office as a Republican. But, Gambill said, after filling the role and understanding the state’s educational needs, she switched parties and her values more closely aligned with the union’s. 

“She really stood up to members of — at that time — her own party in working toward what was best for our schools,” he said, speaking of her time in office. “And, of course, as soon as they were challenged, they didn’t like that. She realized that if she was going to make a difference in public education, she would have to move in a different direction.”

McCormick aims to secure a minimum base salary of $60,000 for pre-K-12 educators, and adjust veteran teacher salaries to reflect their non-educator peers. She wants to increase academic freedom, safeguard university tenure and protect the ability of teachers unions to collectively bargain for wages and benefits. 

Her running mate, Terry Goodin, a former state representative, was a teacher, assistant principal and public school superintendent at Crothersville Community Schools.

Braun, in his education plan, said he wants schools to notify parents about their child’s request to change their name or use different pronouns on campus. He has denounced gender-affirming surgery for minors and opposes transgender students playing on girls’ sports teams. Braun has the backing of Americans for Prosperity and CPAC — and maintains high ratings from the NRA. 

Braun was endorsed by Trump in 2023 and won his party’s nomination for governor in May after beating out a crowded field of GOP contenders. He acknowledged last month, according to Axios, that Harris’s presence at the top of the presidential ticket has complicated down-ballot races, including his own.

“I think that’s had an impact,” he said, “but I’m going to plow through that because this is a lot about kitchen table issues once you’re starting to run for governor.”

 Jo Napolitano is a senior reporter at The 74.

This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Elections, Indiana, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Indiana: Vouchers Gain Momentum as Income Limits Are Removed

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2024 //
11

Indiana started small with vouchers. They were supposed to “save poor kids from failing schools.” But it was the old camel’s-nose-under-the-tent routine. The real goal of voucher advocates was not to help poor kids escape “failing schools,” but to subsidize upper-middle-class and wealthy families who already had children in private schools.

And although 87% of Indiana’s students are enrolled in public schools, the Republican governor and legislature continue to expand the voucher program.

A new state report described the voucher expansion. Mind you, no one claims that students are getting a better education in nonpublic schools, just that are getting public money to subsidize the costs.

WFYI, the NPR station in Indianapolis, summarized the report:

Enrollment in Indiana’s private-school voucher program surged to 70,095 students in 2023-24. That’s a 31 percent increase compared to the previous year, the largest ever jump in a single year.

The state paid $439 million in tuition grants to private parochial or non-religious schools — 40 percent more than in 2022-23, according to a new state report.

The jump in voucher use comes after nearly every Indiana family became eligible to receive a voucher. A 2023 law repealed most requirements for students, such as previous enrollment in a public school, and it allows upper-income families to use public money to help pay for a private-school education. A family of four making $222,000 qualified for the Choice Scholarship Program in the recent school year.

The program’s expansion is a direct result of the Indiana Statehouse Republican supermajority’s efforts to expand policies that allow families to choose what they believe is the best school, or type of school, for their children.

Researcher R. Joseph Waddington, who studies Indiana’s school choice systems, said the monumental growth is not surprising.

“Without question, a lot of the enrollment growth in the voucher program is a result of that increase in income eligibility,” said Waddington, the director of Program Evaluation and Research at University of Notre Dame. 

The number of families who earn more than $200,000 a year and receive vouchers increased nearly tenfold. The report does not detail how many of these families were already attending a private school and became eligible for a voucher in the past year. 

“But there is growth in other parts of the program as well, even for lower income families,” Waddington said. 

The number of participating families earning less than $100,000 grew by 14 percent from year to year. [Note that the increase for this group was 14%, compared to a ten-fold increase for families earning over $200,000 a year.]

Kindergarten student participation grew by 4 percent — the most of all grades. That increase is directly tied to the repealing of the previous eligibility requirements, according to the report.

This year, 6 percent of all Indiana public and private-school students received a voucher, according to the report. Traditional public schools make up nearly 87 percent of enrollment — about half a percentage point less than the previous year….

As Indiana has expanded its voucher program to more high-income families, critics also contend that the state is paying tuition for students who would have attended private school without a voucher.

The report shows roughly 67.5 percent of students using a voucher have no record of prior attendance at an Indiana public school in 2023-24 — an increase of around almost 4 percentage points from the previous year.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Indiana, Vouchers
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