Indianapolis schools study: Less than meets the eye?

A study of Indianapolis schools released last week seeks to quantify the need for “high-performing seats” in the city – with high-performing defined as seats in schools that earn an A or B on Indiana’s grading system.

But the study, by the Illinois Facilities Fund, ends up providing more evidence of what we already knew: School grades correlate with school poverty, and there’s not much evidence A and B schools have cornered the market on successful educational practices.

The study, funded by the Walton Family Foundation and the Joyce Foundation, was done in support of Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard’s Neighborhoods of Educational Opportunity plan. Indy hoped to win $1 million from Michael Bloomberg’s Mayor’s Challenge, but fell short. IFF, which specializes in arranging loans and financing for charter schools (including 14 in Indiana), has done similar studies in Washington, D.C., and other cities, with similar results.

You know how reformers are always saying a child’s zip code shouldn’t dictate the quality of his or her education? IFF takes the idea literally. It identifies 11 “priority areas” – Indianapolis zip codes where, it says, there is a gap between school-age children and high-performing seats.

The study identifies 80 Indianapolis schools, including public, charter and private schools, that earned As or Bs from the state in both 2011 and 2012. In a “close analysis,” the authors find 17 that, they say, serve an above-average percentage of poor children.

“In light of the increase in low-income households in Indianapolis and the higher percent of children from low-income households in the Priority Areas, these local schools and districts are an important resource for improving schools across the city,” the study says.

But a close analysis should raise questions about whether these schools can serve as models:

// Lutheran High School, one of the schools, charges tuition of $8,700 for church members and $9,500 for non-members. IFF says 91 percent of its students qualify for free lunches, data that comes from the Indiana Department of Education. But head of school Michael Brandt said by email the figure is “not accurate.”

Statehouse rally to support public schools

Organizers of this week’s Indiana Statehouse rally in support of public education are touting an “all star” list of speakers. And it’s true: Whoever put together the program did a good job.

The line-up includes parents, retired educators, a school superintendent, a school board member and the president of the Indiana PTA. Many are affiliated with the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, an organization of ordinary citizens who believe in public schools.

In a key gesture of bipartisanship, the legislators on the program represent both parties: Republican Sen. Vaneta Becker and Rep. Randy Truitt and Democratic Sen. Tim Skinner and Rep. Vernon Smith. Might Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz join the fun? Her office, after all, is right next door.

And the timing for the rally, at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday in the South Atrium, could hardly be better. House Bill 1003, which expands Indiana’s private-school voucher program and is arguably the most serious threat to public education this session, goes before a Senate committee the next morning.

Unlike the “Ed Reform Rocks” rally staged last week in support of vouchers and charter schools, this event won’t feature 1,000 or more school-age children. As Wayne Township Superintendent Jeff Butts wrote last week on Twitter, “Love to send 16,000 in shirts holding signs but they’re in class.”

Could Hinckley’s instructional focus be what IPS needs?

Peggy Hinckley, the new interim superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools, doesn’t much sound like she plans to be a caretaker. Could that present a dilemma for advocates of big-idea education reform in Indy?

Hinckley takes over from Eugene White, who accepted a buyout after he lost school board support. She retired last year after 11 years as superintendent of Warren Township schools.

The Indianapolis Star’s Scott Elliott recently pointed to reasons that Hinckley and IPS may not be a good match even for the short term. Her approach is “laser focused on standardizing instruction,” he writes. The dominant vision of reform in Indianapolis, by contrast, involves choices for parents and autonomy for schools. It’s modeled on the Mind Trust’s “opportunity schools” plan and the Center for the Reinvention of Public Education’s portfolio schools concept.

This approach seems to go hand-in-hand with a yearning for visionary, “cage-busting” leaders. Mind Trust founder and CEO David Harris argues in a recent Star op-ed that IPS should be free to hire non-educators as superintendents. Star opinion editor Tim Swarens adds that the district’s new leader should be a “reformer.”

But Hinckley suggests that meaningful reform involves what happens in the classroom.

Education panel calls for equity as path to excellence

Education policy debates have long pitted supporters of equity against advocates for excellence. A report from a congressionally chartered commission suggests we can’t have one without the other.

“For Each and Every Child,” issued last week by the federal Equity and Excellence Commission, echoes the sense of urgency of the “A Nation at Risk” manifesto that came out 30 years ago. But its primary focus is on the dramatic inequality of opportunity that characterizes America’s schools.

“With the highest poverty rate in the developed world, amplified by the inadequate education received by many children in low-income schools, the United States is threatening its own future,” it says.

The 52-page report centers its recommendations on five themes: developing fairer approaches to school funding; training and retaining good teachers; expanding pre-school; mitigating the effects of poverty; and tying governance and accountability systems to the goals of equity and excellence.

The commission that produced the report was packed with influential figures: scholars, union and civil rights leaders and others. And the members seem determined not to let the report gather dust. They’re out doing media interviews and writing op-eds about their findings and recommendations.

Yet implementing their ideas will likely be a struggle.

Trying – oh so hard — to look at the bright side

The Indiana legislature has produced almost no good news for public schools this year. But here’s a little: Republicans and Democrats joined together this week to push for improvement to Indiana’s A-to-F grading system for schools.

The Senate Education Committee voted 11-0 to approve Senate Bill 416 and send it to the full Senate. As amended before passage, it’s a simple bill: It would repeal the grading rules that the State Board of Education approved a year ago and direct the board to adopt new criteria based on students’ test-score growth compared to established standards, not on students’ growth compared to their peers.

This is arguably a rare victory for Glenda Ritz, the Democratic state superintendent of public instruction. The Indianapolis Star’s Scott Elliott writes that Ritz wants to replace the A-to-F grades with designations of reward schools, focus schools and priority schools. The ratings would be based on the percentage of students who pass state tests and a measure of student growth on test scores, Elliott writes.

But it’s way too early for Ritz’s supporters to declare victory. For one thing, getting a bill through a Senate committee is just a small step toward making it a law. For another, while almost everyone found something not to like about the current grading system, we won’t all agree on what a better system would look like.

What’s wrong with school choice?

Columnist Dan Carpenter answers the question in Sunday’s Indianapolis Star: Vouchers, charter schools, parent trigger laws and the like “send a counter-educational message that one doesn’t have to work to improve a school; just go buy a new one.”

Another way to put it is this: Education isn’t a commodity. It’s not a product that you shop for and buy, after doing a little research on Consumer Reports. Education is, for students, parents and the public, a transaction: What you get out of it is related to what you put into it.

School choice means parents don’t have a real do-or-die stake in their children’s schools, or the public school systems that the schools are part of. If they don’t like the way the school is being run, if they’re unhappy with a teacher or a textbook, they can go elsewhere. The grass is greener … somewhere.

More importantly, they don’t have a stake in the schools attended by their neighbors’ children – or by the kids from across town. If everyone can opt out, if everyone is encouraged to shop around for a better deal, then no parent or citizen has to do the hard, demanding work of making sure the public schools do what’s best for all students.

Caleb Mills, regarded as the father of public education in Indiana, said as much more than 160 years ago. In one of his annual letters to the state legislature, he explained why he advocated “common schools”

Indiana officials to Ritz voters: Drop dead

Hoosiers who voted for Glenda Ritz for state superintendent of public instruction no doubt did so for a variety of reasons. But many of those reasons added up to this: Ritz was an unapologetic champion of public education and it often seemed that her opponent, Tony Bennett, wasn’t.

So it’s a slap in the face to the voters who elected Ritz that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Republican legislators are now pushing bill after bill to undermine public schools. For example:

// House Bill 1003 would expand Indiana’s private-school voucher program, removing the requirement that students spend a year in a public school to qualify and providing generous taxpayer tuition subsidies for many families who don’t need the help. The House Education Committee approved the bill last week, 9-3, and it could go to the full House this week.

// House Bill 1358 is a “parent trigger” bill – it sets up procedures for a public school to be converted to a charter school or taken over by the State Board of Education if parents of 51 percent of the students sign petitions calling for the conversion. Sponsored by Rep. Todd Huston, who was Bennett’s chief of staff, it’s scheduled for a hearing in the Education Committee on Tuesday.

// Several bills are being considered that would reduce Ritz’s authority as state superintendent

Indiana voucher expansion scheduled for vote

It looks like the Indiana House Education Committee will vote Thursday on a plan to significantly expand the state’s already generous private-school voucher program. Hoosiers who care about public education should fight this every step of the way.

Some observations, based on news stories – Indy Star, Evansville Courier-Press and NPR — about Tuesday’s hearing on the proposal, included in House Bill 1003:

First, it’s astonishing how vouchers, a fairly radical idea until recently, have morphed into a middle-class entitlement. Would-be voucher parents imply that they have a right to taxpayer funding of tuition at private schools, most of which are Christian schools. That would have seemed like a far-out idea a couple of years ago.

Second, some Republican officials seem to have embraced the Libertarian position that self-interested parental choice should be the primary driver of education decisions. The logical end point of this thinking is that we should abandon public schools and replace them with a marketplace of school “businesses”

Voucher expansion would undermine public education

Mitch Daniels and Tony Bennett sold Indiana’s voucher program with the argument that children shouldn’t be stuck in failing schools because their parents can’t afford anything better – that children have a right to a good education “regardless of background, income or zip code.”

But the changes now being pushed by Gov. Mike Pence and some legislators suggest the program has nothing to do with social justice. They want to award vouchers to students who have never enrolled in public schools – and in some cases, to families that clearly don’t need help paying private school tuition.

Vic Smith of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education isn’t exaggerating when he writes that these proposals are steps toward a universal voucher system, “a goal that would eventually undermine and marginalize the non-partisan, non-sectarian public schools that for over a hundred years have brought people from all walks of life together in our communities and have undergirded our democracy with citizenship education and our economy with college and career readiness.”

The first test is Senate Bill 184, scheduled for a vote today in the Senate Education and Career Development Committee. It would provide vouchers to siblings of previous voucher students, even if they haven’t met the current requirement of first attending public schools.

The Indiana voucher program, billed as the nation’s most extensive when it was adopted in 2011, provides public funding for low and moderate-income families to send their children to private schools, most of which are religious schools. The family income cutoff is 277 percent of the federal poverty level – about $67,000 for a family of four.

Pence, in his State of the State address, said that’s not enough of a handout and the state should go further.

Legislative roundup: Pre-K, vouchers, Common Core and more

The 2013 session of the Indiana General Assembly is in full swing. Here’s a look at some education issues, with help from Terry Spradlin, director for education policy of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University.

Pre-kindergarten

Pressure has been building to address the fact that Indiana is one of only 11 states that don’t fund pre-K programs. Legislative leaders seem to be on board but Gov. Mike Pence has been lukewarm on the issue. He barely mentioned it in his State of the State address – he again cited the Busy Bees preschool in Columbus as a model, even though Bartholomew County voters rejected a property-tax referendum to fund the program, making it unaffordable for many families.

The bill to watch appears to be House Bill 1004, which establishes a pilot program of state-funded vouchers allowing families to send their children to preschools that earn a Level 3 or 4 in the state’s Pathways to Quality voluntary rating system. Lawmakers have suggested funding the pilot with $7 million. If it’s a full-day program, that would serve about 1,000 of the 81,150 Indiana 3- and 4-year-olds in low-income families.

Many of us would prefer state support for public schools to provide free, high-quality preschool for needy children. But given political reality, that’s probably not in the cards.

The state is looking at pre-K after finally implementing full-day kindergarten. Spradlin noted that Gov. Frank O’Bannon and Superintendent of Public Instruction Suellen Reed made a big push for FDK in 1999. The first grants were awarded to schools in 2001, but it wasn’t until last year that the program was fully funded.

“Hopefully it will not take 13 years” to fund pre-K, Spradlin said. “The evidence is there – 39 other states are doing it and we know from those states what’s working and what’s not working.”

Vouchers

Indiana has one of the most expansive private-school voucher programs in the country, but Pence and House Republican leaders want to be even more liberal in directing taxpayer dollars to private schools.