The following is testimony opposing SB 167 by ICPE–Monroe County's vice chair, Jenny Robinson, at the Indiana Statehouse on Wednesday, January 5, 2022. You can watch it here.
Chairman Raatz, members of the committee: Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I am here as a parent of three children in public schools to oppose Senate Bill 167. I fear that this bill would feed division between schools and families. I agree with this bill’s authors that the connection between families and schools matters. Parental involvement in a child’s education is important, indeed crucial. It is in the best interests of children for the relationship between families and schools to be mutually respectful, supportive, and collaborative. Our structures should lay the groundwork for this. This bill assumes that school districts and classrooms are not transparent and responsive. In my personal experience, the opposite is true. As a parent, I have always had many avenues to learn more about my children’s classrooms. I am invited into them in school open houses, where I meet my kids’ teachers. I have volunteered in classrooms, in the school library, and on field trips. I have attended school curriculum nights and PTO meetings. I can become an “observer” of my child’s classes on Canvas, an online class management system. I sign syllabi that my kids are required to bring home and show me. I can email my kids’ teachers and principals at any time, and when I do, I always receive a prompt reply. And most importantly, I get to vote for my school board members. Parents can also run for school board. Our school boards are democratically elected, and that keeps our public schools accountable to our communities. Parents can already communicate if they are uncomfortable with an aspect of a literary work and how that would affect their own kids. A student in my son’s class was able to choose not to watch a movie of Lord of the Flies because of discomfort with profanity in it. I respect that they were able to make the choice for their child--but I would be alarmed and upset if other parents’ fears and discomforts were able to dictate the information and content that my own kids have access to in school. That’s why I am concerned about these curriculum review committees that SB 167 would set up. Why should a small group of parents have the power to restrict what my kids, and other people’s kids, get to learn about in school? What if this curriculum review committee didn’t like aspects of the state standards and made recommendations that conflicted with the state standards? I’m a parent, but I tell you that this bill gives too much power to parents. Children should have rights as individuals, beyond their positions in families. Their access to information and education should not depend solely on their parents and should not be circumscribed by the limits of their parents’ knowledge and imagination. A December 30 report in the IndyStar said that 50 children in Indiana died in the last year due to abuse or neglect. 80% of the 59 alleged perpetrators were parents. When children are abused and neglected, parents are often the ones responsible. Yet this bill would not only give parents power to opt their kids out of curriculum, it would also require parental consent before children receive mental health services. In some sad cases, this would give the abuser of a child the power to deny that child access to counseling, therapy, or other mental health supports. The language of the bill is not coherent. Teachers would be barred from teaching that any political affiliation is inherently oppressive. Nazism is a political affiliation. Surely we would not want to bar teachers from communicating that Nazism is bad. My greatest concern with this bill is that it would make it harder for social studies teachers to approach important topics like race. I agree–I think it’s common sense–that children should not be made to feel guilty for the sins of the past. But no social studies teacher has ever made my kids, who are white, feel guilty, and I don’t know a single teacher who would feel that was effective pedagogical practice. The bill sets up a straw man. At the same time, it would have a chilling effect on the teaching of history because it would expose schools to expensive litigation for factors that are outside of teachers’ control–the emotional response of students to a lesson. Slavery was racist. Jim Crow was racist. Neighborhood covenants that barred Black and Brown people from housing were racist. The father of my son’s music teacher had to leave the state of Indiana to marry his white wife; it was not legal for them to marry here, and that was a racist law. Would you hide these aspects of our history? Would you have teachers avoid them in the name of protecting students’ feelings? Students in Indiana should be taught actual history in school, not myth or propaganda. Senate Bill 167 is unnecessary and potentially deeply harmful. Please oppose it. Thank you for your time.
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. In school districts across Indiana this year, some loud voices are objecting to schools teaching students about race and about racism. Ten states have gone so far as to pass laws that ban the teaching of "divisive" subjects, in an effort to control ideas and confine the teaching of history to what they find to be ideologically palatable—in other words, to substitute propaganda for history.
In this guest post, the grandfather of two students expresses support for our local school district to continue to teach about race and racism. Keith Barton is a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and coordinator for the Doctoral Program in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies at the Indiana University School of Education. I encourage MCCSC to continue teaching about race and racism, both in history and in the world today. Preparing young people to become members of a democratic society requires that they understand difficult and contentious issues in the nation’s past and present. Omitting, ignoring, or downplaying such issues would undermine their ability to work toward justice in public life—an effort that represents the very foundation of U.S. social and political ideals. As a grandparent of two elementary students in MCCSC (one now, the other a year from now), I want them to learn, in regular and systematic ways, about the forces that have shaped the nation—and this includes racism and white supremacy. I want them to learn about the many people—Black, White, Asian, Latinx, LGBTQ, and of differing religions—who have struggled to bring about a more just nation and world, but they can only understand these achievements if they understand the problems that created the need for struggle in the first place. And I certainly want them to learn how these problems continue to plague our society, not just in the form of personal prejudice, but in racially-motivated institutions and practices such as mass incarceration, housing and employment discrimination, and systematic violence against minorities, among other issues. My wife, our daughter, and I talk with the children about these problems. Being of mixed races themselves, they are well aware of the importance of race. Schools should further equip them—and all students—with a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the role of race in U.S. life, and of ways to bring about a more just society. This is not simply our personal preference as parents and grandparents; it a responsibility of schools, as reflected in state academic standards, in national curriculum frameworks, and even in human rights documents. Students deserve to learn about these issues, and without the work of teachers and schools, their learning is likely to be haphazard at best, and more likely to reinforce the racist practices that schools should be working against. Part of the mission of MCCSC is to prepare “responsible global citizens,” and this cannot occur if students do not learn to face social issues—even the most difficult ones—honestly and thoughtfully. --Keith Barton 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. |
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