When you accept a chunk of someone else's money, there is often a motive or a favor owed. Don Corleone comes to mind: "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."
What favors do some IPS school board members and Indiana legislators owe? Long overdue, here is all. the. money received during the 2020 election from wealthy folks who support the privatization of public education. You can read part 1 and part 2 here. Do these elected officials work for their communities or their donors? Most of us are aware that many of these legislators (all these folks in this list below are Republicans) would have been elected without this money because Indiana is a conservative state.
The spending of large amounts in city school board races is new but not too new. And some donations are so large, that it makes a $25 donation from someone who has a legitimate stake in the game—a parent with children in the district—seem insignificant.
Also, the fact that this money appears to come mostly from out of state and then gets sent right back out is sad. Is this democracy? Is this representing you and your neighbors? Is this the only way to get change in IPS? And what change is that? Whose change is that? Is that Reed Hastings change? He doesn't believe in elected school boards last we read. And he founded a company that is a disruptor. How do kids and communities handle disruption? Folks like Reid Hastings and Alice Walton may believe they are doing good. These donations are a fraction of what they are personally worth. It's like you and me donating $20 to a campaign. They may not fully realize the ripple effect. Or maybe they might. At the end of the day, you have to wonder what favors do these elected officials— legislators, school board members—owe and to whom? Will this lead to the further privatization of public education masked under the guise of "choice"? Well, it seems like that was a success this past legislative session based on the American Federation for Children, the Wall Street Journal, and Jeb Bush. And if legislators were so successful in pushing more policy that supports the privatization of public education following their landslide win in 2020, what's on the to-do list for IPS board members? Will this lead to the privatization of IPS? Well over $1.5 million was spent in the name of education privatization in the 2020 election in Indiana. It's a drop compared to the giant, leaky bucket of tuition support funding in Indiana. But these elected decision makers will have control over how tax dollars are used. Read more on this matter: "Indianapolis Public Schools for Sale" "Dark Money Clouds IPS Election" "Why Is There So Much Money Fighting in the IPS School Board Race" "IPS School Board Race Election Results"
–Keri Miksza
P.S. If you have yet to see the documentary Indiana's Choice, please take the time to do so. It is related to the above. And save the dates: May 10th at 6pm on "Bring It On" on 91.3 WFHB, contributors to the film and members of ICPE will discuss Indiana's Choice. "Bring It On" is Indiana’s only weekly radio program committed to exploring the people, issues and events impacting the African-American community. It is also available on Apple Podcasts, May 19th at 7pm there will a film panel discussion on Zoom sponsored by a host of organizations. Stay tuned for more information.
Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County (ICPE–Monroe County) advocates for all children to have high quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities.
We are a nonpartisan and nonprofit group of parents, grandparents, caregivers, teachers, and other community members of Monroe County and surrounding areas. Outschool LEGO classes and 3D printers. Routers, computers, and Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions. Ballet lessons and a model train. These are just a few of the items that homeschoolers are buying with state funds through a new program run by a Utah-based company in collaboration with an Indiana public school district. Here’s how it works, as reported by Chalkbeat Indiana and education blogger Steve Hinnefeld. Tech Trep, the Utah company, advertises its services to homeschoolers. Cloverdale Community Schools, the Indiana public school district that partners with Tech Trep, receives tuition support from the state for each kid who enrolls. Cloverdale keeps 20% of the state funding and passes the rest to Tech Trep. Of that, families can use a point system to order up to $1,700 worth of educational items or services per child. Meanwhile, Indiana’s refusal to fund public school textbooks means that parents and guardians of children in public school must pay to “rent” basic curricular materials such as books and technology—including parents who send their kids to Cloverdale's public schools. For a family with three children in public school, that can mean an annual expenditure of over $500. And public school teachers routinely pay out of pocket to decorate their classrooms and to provide books, Kleenex, snacks, and writing utensils for their students. In the pandemic, some public school staff have needed to purchase their own PPE. Yet somehow Indiana has money to spare when it comes to private educational expenditures, even when “educational” is loosely defined. A recent discussion in a private Facebook group for Tech Trep families and others interested in joining Tech Trep made it clear that some enrollees are there just to make purchases with state money. Speaking of other Tech Trep services, one commenter said “I use NONE of TT resources. It’s nice that they are there if I need them but I don’t.” The parent continued, “I school my children on my own and at home. I consider that homeschooling. Tech Trep calls it distance learning and that works legally for them...” Why is this legal? Resources invested in public schools benefit all the kids in a community across years. Whether such dollars pay for online math textbooks, school playgrounds, or science labs, an elected board has the responsibility of making sure resources are fairly distributed across school populations. But a state handout to homeschoolers is different. A model train may benefit one child. A Netflix subscription may entertain a home. But does Indiana really want to pay Cloverdale, a rural school district, to launder state funds so that homeschoolers can purchase Netflix subscriptions and trips to the zoo, while many public school districts struggle to pay and retain teachers, maintain and repair school buildings, and offer high-quality curricular materials that they hope their parents and caregivers can pay for? Lots of public school families would benefit from state-subsidized private lessons, LEGO bricks, and personal computers. Is Indiana ready to extend those benefits to all? Or perhaps more on point: Is Indiana actually preparing to substitute those kinds of à la carte purchases for the structured education and opportunities provided in public school classrooms? While Senate GOP leaders have backpedaled a bit on the concept of a new choice path to benefit some students, education scholarship accounts (ESAs) are still being considered this legislative session. The bizarrely under-the-radar Tech Trep arrangement, with its lack of oversight, may be providing a glimpse of the Wild West of ESAs—a program which wouldn’t even be administered by the Indiana Department of Education, but would fall under the purview of the state treasurer. Lots of public school families would benefit from state-subsidized private lessons, LEGO bricks, and personal computers. Is Indiana ready to extend those benefits to all? Is Indiana actually preparing to substitute those kinds of à la carte purchases for the structured education and opportunities provided in public school classrooms?
How long will one small rural school district and an out-of-state business be able to profit off sending state money to homeschooling families for private purchases, as the Indiana Association of Home Educators pointed out back in October? For shame, Indiana. It’s time to shut this “program” down.
P.S. In a legally dubious move (at least in Indiana), Tech Trep advertises to families in its order form that "New Technology items purchased 100% with state funds remain the property of the state for 3 years. Many families like to pay for part of the cost to be exempt from this rule and be able to keep the items at the end of the year. This year, you may privately purchase an Amazon gift card for approximately 10% of the cost of the item and give the gift card number to the person placing the order during the zoom meeting, so that we are only paying for 90% of the cost and you can keep the item at the end of the year as a surplus item." Our public school districts have never offered that if we pay 10% up front, we can keep the iPads and laptops that we rent from the district through textbook/technology fees!
Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County (ICPE–Monroe County) advocates for all children to have high quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities.
We are a nonpartisan and nonprofit group of parents, grandparents, caregivers, teachers, and other community members of Monroe County and surrounding areas. BackgroundIn January 2020, a faculty member from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs approached the Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County to see if we might be interested in being a “client” for a capstone course for master’s degree students. We were thrilled to participate and proposed three questions as possible areas for the students’ research. The O’Neill capstone team, led by Dr. Ashlyn Nelson, selected our most local and concrete question, which dealt with Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) school attendance zone boundaries and their impact on segregation of students by race and income. The capstone team launched an examination of the MCCSC school catchment zones with two questions. (1) Are there significant differences across schools in the distribution of students by race or income? (2) If so, would it be practical and plausible for the school district to redraw these zones with the goal of achieving a more equitable demographic balance of students within our schools? They concluded their work in July and presented a report over Zoom to our board Sunday, July 26, 2020. How does the question of redrawing school catchment zones overlap with the ICPE–Monroe County mission? Our group’s vision is for all children to have high-quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities. At their best, public schools bring students from myriad backgrounds together and provide environments where children get to know, respect, and learn along with others of diverse races, family incomes, religions, and worldviews. We believe that integration by income and race can help realize the full potential of our public schools. Schools’ standardized test scores mirror free and reduced lunch rates (a proxy for family income); this holds true across all school types, whether public, charter, or private voucher school. In Indiana, schools that serve low-income populations are routinely penalized for low test scores by the A-F system. Mixing student populations more by income has the potential to protect our schools and neighborhoods from the state’s punitive school grading system. The drawing of school attendance zones can only be undertaken by the school system itself, led by the superintendent and our elected school board (in consultation with experts/experienced consultants and the MCCSC community). The capstone report makes recommendations to ICPE–Monroe County, but we ask that when you read it you consider these as recommendations to the Monroe County Community School Corporation. Summary of the O'Neill capstone reportThe O’Neill capstone report begins with a summary of research supporting integration of schools by income and race (page 6 of the report): The capstone project sought not only to evaluate the current school boundaries’ impact on equity but also to determine if alternative boundaries could be drawn to provide more equitable representation in each school. The team made extensive use of geographic information system (GIS) and census data. An examination of enrollments in MCCSC schools indicates high and middle schools are reasonably well balanced in terms of race and poverty. However, there is considerable disparity across the 13 elementary schools. The team found the percentage of black and Hispanic students ranged from 25% to 0% and the percentage of free or reduced lunch ranged from 84% to 9%. Importantly, it was not just one extreme school creating this wide range; rather, the schools are spread out along a continuum. The following charts are from page 8 of the capstone report. With this disparity established, the team looked to explore alternative school boundary lines. They interviewed almost 20 citizens of Monroe County, including school board members, business leaders, representatives of organizations serving those in poverty, and individuals involved in the 2005 redrawing of the MCCSC boundaries. Some key groups of stakeholders were not among those interviewed: Due to delays in obtaining evidence of exempt status from Indiana University’s Institutional Review Board, the capstone team was not able to interview MCCSC administrators or teachers, and they were not able to make contact with students (because of FERPA) or PTO members. Overall, interviewees identified challenges the district would face in redrawing boundaries, but indicated the benefits would justify the effort. The team also looked to strategies used in other parts of the country to achieve equity. Using input from the interviewees and examples from the literature, the team used GIS and census data to examine alternative approaches to redrawing boundaries with an eye to bringing poverty rates and Black and Hispanic rates closer to the district average across schools. They proposed new boundary maps and compared the poverty rates and Black and Hispanic student rates with those in the current maps. Because of limitations in the data available to the capstone team, the team’s proposed new maps do not reflect accurately the poverty rates at the different schools, and therefore should not be perceived as a starting point for actual boundary proposals, but rather as indicative of a strategy for redrawing boundaries. The capstone team emphasized that MCCSC, should it embark on redistricting, would have access to all the relevant street-by-street student data. The model the capstone team recommends as most effective in producing equity is one in which some school boundaries are not contiguous. Allowing noncontiguity was a powerful tool that significantly increased the ability to achieve more economic and racial balance because the students receiving free and reduced lunch tend to live in concentrated locales. The team also examined transportation time, an issue identified by several interviewees, and found that the boundaries they proposed did not increase transportation times significantly for most students. Other political factors: How school choice changes the equation In Indiana, privatization efforts that were marketed to voters as “school choice” have defunded public schools and made it harder for them to undertake difficult tasks such as redrawing school attendance zones. State vouchers for private school tuition were introduced in 2011, and have been steadily expanded by the Indiana legislature ever since. Charter schools were also expanded in 2011 and garner increasing amounts of state funding. Legislation also allowed students to leave their own public school district for another (so-called “public-to-public transfer”). The choice environment casts families as consumers. They can turn away from the public school system to charter or voucher schools, or leave their own school district for another, and state tuition funds will follow them. The job of school boards is therefore more complicated than before. We now have two brick-and-mortar charter schools in Monroe County, as well as a number of online charter options, and seven local private schools accepting vouchers. School board members have to weigh the likely gains for students of school populations that are more equitably balanced by race and income with the potential fiscal impact (whose brunt would also be felt by students) of a redistricting process that could, at least in the short term, make some families unhappy and lead them to flee the public school system. Conclusion We share the O’Neill capstone report in the spirit of contributing to ongoing discussions regarding diversity and equity in MCCSC schools. We hope the thoughtful and methodical work by this team of talented master’s degree students can help spark a larger conversation about how we as a community can best address racial and economic disparities in our community schools’ populations. We believe the data they have gathered and analyzed to be powerful, and that they have made a strong case for the benefits and plausibility of redistricting school attendance boundaries with the goal of reducing those disparities across schools. At the same time, we recognize the challenge of a process such as redistricting amid the likelihood of funding shortfalls related to the pandemic and a state legislature that continues to find more ways to funnel taxpayer money out of the public school system and into private hands and privately managed schools. Any process undertaken by the school district would need to establish common ground and clear goals, and engage the full community so as to be understood broadly to be worthwhile and fair. NB: Please note that the report is the work of master’s students in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. We are grateful to them for their intense and valuable work. Any practical maps will need to be based on fuller, more specific data than what was available to the capstone team. P.S. Why did we wait until 2021 to share a report which was given to us in July 2020? As coronavirus cases mounted in July, the question of whether our schools should open in person during the pandemic was being contested and negotiated throughout the nation. Our community was no exception. Our school board members were besieged by heated demands from all sides. Our district was working around the clock to figure out the safest and most effective way to deliver both in-person and online instruction, and our group called on the state to issue science-based metrics and guidance for school districts. Once school started in early August (all online for about a month), parents were frantically trying to figure out how to use the technology to ensure that their kids were able to access their online classrooms. With MCCSC’s superintendent search put on hold by the pandemic, our long-serving superintendent had postponed her retirement in order to see our district through until they could complete the search. Additionally, a school board election was underway, and our group held two school board forums. We are all volunteers working with finite amounts of time. We wanted to present the report with adequate context in a more stable environment, both of pandemic understanding and of district leadership. Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County (ICPE–Monroe County) advocates for all children to have high quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities.
We are a nonpartisan and nonprofit group of parents, grandparents, caregivers, teachers, and other community members of Monroe County and surrounding areas. |
Categories
All
Archives
September 2024
Friends
|