Terry Spradlin, director for education policy with the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University, said the numbers suggest district leaders have become strategic about asking for money. They’re learning when to ask and when not to ask.

Indiana’s current system of relying on voters for some school-funding decisions dates from 2008. School referendums come in two flavors: 1) general fund questions, which levy property taxes to supplement the state funding that’s supposed to pay for school operations; and 2) construction questions, which determine whether schools can borrow for construction or large-scale renovation projects.

Last week, there were four general fund referendums: Barr-Reeve, Munster and Union Township passed, and Boone Township failed (Union Township and Boone Township are small districts in Porter County). There were three construction referendums: Hamilton Southeastern and Noblesville passed and Knox schools in Starke County fell short.

The five-for-seven success beats the state’s historic average by a long shot. Since 2008, there have been 88 school funding referendums in Indiana. Forty-two have passed and 46 failed, according to the detailed scorecard on the CEEP website.

Affluent suburban districts have had some of the best success. Districts in Hamilton County, including Carmel, Hamilton Southeastern, Westfield-Washington, Sheridan and Noblesville, have gone 9-for-10 since 2008. Some of those districts are adding students, so they need voter approval for construction. And they have healthy tax bases, so they can raise a considerable amount of money with modest increases in the tax rate.

Spradlin adds that schools are a point of pride in Hamilton County. “Folks really do self-select to live there because of the schools,” he said. “Quality of life, including the quality of the schools, is very important to residents of those areas.”

Other than that, he said, success or failure of a referendum can depend on the unique circumstances of a school district. Strong leadership, effective communication of district needs and community trust for the local superintendent and school board can make the difference between success and failure.

For example, Barr-Reeve is a small, rural district in southern Indiana’s Daviess County – the sort of district where you might expect residents to vote against raising their own taxes. But voters there chose overwhelmingly – 83-17 percent – to increase taxes to support the local schools.

One concern about the growing reliance on referendum funding is that it will reinforce the sense that there are “winners and losers” in public education. Students in some districts will benefit from an adequately funded public education; others will be left behind.

Spradlin said a CEEP analysis found that state funding of public schools school has become more equitable in recent years, but adequacy is in question: Per-pupil “tuition support” — money provided by the state to local schools — declined by 11 percent between 2008-09 and 2011-12.

During the Great Recession, Gov. Mitch Daniels cut K-12 funding by $300 million to balance the state budget. As the Indiana Association of School Business Officials and the Indiana Coalition for Public Education have pointed out, the legislature could have restored school spending this year but opted to cut taxes instead. Schools face a “new normal” of constrained budgets.

“Even though the formula is more equitable, the dollars are down,” Spradlin said. “It’s a challenging time for schools.”

The governor praised the voucher expansion for giving more “choice” to parents and students. However, you can only choose Calvary Christian if it chooses to let you in. “Families expect a higher level of achievement and behavior at CCS,” the school’s handbook says, “and as such the admission process requires that incoming students’ records be carefully reviewed.”

What about children with special needs? “We do not have the staffing to educate children that are in special needs classrooms,” says an FAQ on the school’s website.

And what will students learn? According to the website, the curriculum includes textbooks from fundamentalist Bob Jones University Publishing, which feature creationism based on a literal reading of the Christian Bible and an ideologically slanted view of America’s place in the world.

Is it a high-performing school? It got an A last year on the Indiana’s rating system because most of its students pass state exams – not surprising for a school that can pick and choose students. But its student growth scores, based on test-score improvement, were well below average.

Signing HB 1003 at Calvary Christian raises a genuine question about the purpose of Indiana’s voucher program. Is it about helping students and families? Or is it about providing taxpayer funding for religious education?

Now we’ve got an answer. According to the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s teachers overwhelmingly support the standards.

The AFT released results from a nationwide teacher survey on Common Core last weekend at the annual meeting of the Education Writers Association. It found that 75 percent of teachers support their states’ decisions to adopt the standards.

On the other hand, many teachers said their schools aren’t doing enough to help them prepare. And more than four in five back AFT President Randy Weingarten’s call for a one-year moratorium on high-stakes testing based on the standards. Of course, Indiana teachers may or may not agree with teachers in other states.

The AFT survey included 800 teachers in the 45 states that have adopted Common Core and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent. It was conducted in March, around the time Indiana lawmakers were debating whether to put the brakes on the standards.

The legislature finally approved House Bill 1427, which calls for a “pause” implementing the standards pending a closer examination by state officials and three public hearings. It also calls for the state Office of Management and Budget to study the cost of implementing or ditching the standards.

It’s confusing enough that both supporters and opponents of Common Core declared victory.

The Indiana Chamber of Commerce issued a statement applauding lawmakers for staying the course on the standards. Stand for Children, which also lobbied for keeping the standards, praised the legislature for its “strong support” of Common Core but suggested Gov. Mike Pence veto the bill because it’s not needed. (There’s not much chance of that).

On the other side, Hoosiers Against the Common Core declared the legislation be a “historic” victory. Indianapolis Star columnist Russ Pulliam wrote a column headlined “How Indiana’s grass-root activists took down the Common Core.”

Reading the legislation, it’s hard to conclude the standards got taken down. HB 1427 explicitly doesn’t repeal Indiana’s adoption of the Common Core, and it doesn’t halt the initial roll-out, scheduled to be in place this fall for grades K-2. It says the State Board of Education must vote by July 2014 to adopt standards that, from the language in the bill, sound a lot like Common Core. That’s the same state board that voted unanimously for Common Core in 2010.

But the wild card is Gov. Mike Pence. As the Indianapolis Star’s Scott Elliott has reported, Pence has refused to be pinned down on the Common Core, but his rhetoric – insisting that “we’re going to do education the Indiana way” – suggests he may be more opposed than in favor.

Given the “Corespiracy” mind-set that has taken hold on the right, Pence may sense political gain in making Indiana the first state to junk standards that the Obama administration embraces. He could use upcoming appointments to the State Board of Education to shake things up.

Schools and teachers that have been preparing to implement the Common Core could face a whole new level of uncertainty.

The final version of the bill hasn’t yet been posted on the legislature’s website. But Vic Smith of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education says a House-Senate conference committee approved it Thursday, apparently after Democratic members were removed from the panel and replaced by Republicans.

The conference committee bill, Smith says, expands the voucher program to include income-qualified students who live in the attendance area of a school that gets a D or F on the state’s A-to-F grading system. That’s almost 400 schools – nearly one in every five public schools in the state.

When the Senate approved HB 1003 two weeks ago, the expansion included only F schools. And the vote then was close, 27-23. By rights it should be close again today.

Here’s key question for lawmakers: Why be in such a hurry? Tying vouchers to school grades has never been thoroughly debated by the legislature, let alone by the public. In fact, there’s strong sentiment from many quarters that the grading system is flawed.

There are no elections this fall, and the same legislators who are there now will be back in 2014. If expanding vouchers is a good idea now, it will be a good idea next year. If linking vouchers to school grades is a good idea now, it will be a good idea next year. Legislators could take a year to study the question and make a serious, measured decision in 2014.

Hoosiers tend to be conservative, and our conservatism has been tied to caution and common sense, ever since that canal-building business turned out so badly back in the early 1800s. The last day of a hurry-up legislative session isn’t the time to throw caution and common sense to the wind. Indiana legislators, of all people, should know that.

Typically these initial committee meetings are a chance for members to stake out their public positions and posture a bit. Then deals get done behind closed doors.

In this case, the House approved a version of the bill, House Bill 1003, that would make private-school vouchers available to children of military personnel, veterans and foster parents, without regard to family income. For those families, the House would drop the current requirement that students first spend a year in public school to qualify.

Under the less expansive Senate version, the year-in-public-school rule would be eliminated for students with disabilities, siblings of current voucher recipients, and private-school students who live in the attendance area of a public school that gets an F on the state’s grading system.

Rep. Bob Behning, the bill’s original sponsor, balked at the Senate amendments. That sent the measure to a conference committee, ostensibly to work out a compromise.

Each conference committee starts with one Democrat and one Republican from each chamber. For HB 1003, they’re GOP Rep. Behning and Sen. Doug Eckerty and Democratic Rep. Vernon Smith and Sen. Richard Young.

What happens if Republicans Behning and Eckerty strike a deal and Democrats Smith and Young won’t sign off? The Republican leaders of the House and Senate will simply kick the Democrats off the panel and replace them with Republicans. It stinks, but that’s how the process works.

But here’s the thing. If pro-voucher Republicans come up with a compromise version of the bill, the result – called a conference committee report – must be approved by both the House and Senate. The Senate barely approved its watered-down version last week; the vote was 27-23, with 10 Republicans voting no. So another vote creates another opportunity for voucher opponents to block the expansion.

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Yogi Berra famously said. This was in 1973, when Berra’s Mets surged from last place in their division to win the National League title. Stop the voucher expansion? Stranger things have happened.

Not on the record. There was no roll call on the amendment to disarm the bill, so no one was recorded casting an anti-gun vote. Deniability was maintained.

SB 1 is Attorney General Greg Zoeller’s proposal to help schools hire school resource officers, law enforcement officers stationed in schools to help maintain security. But in the House Education Committee, Rep. Jim Lucas got it amended to require that someone in every public and charter school in the state – if not a security guard, then a teacher – carry a loaded firearm at all times. The amendment mirrored recommendations from the NRA, which urged members to tell their representatives to vote for the amended bill.

Lucas said his intent was to prevent mass school shootings. “With Sandy Hook, with Virginia Tech, with Columbine — those were places that were gun-free zones, and we see the results of that,” he told Indiana Public Media. “This bill is trying to prevent that.” In fact, two armed officers were at Columbine High School but weren’t able to prevent the 1999 tragedy at that school. Virginia Tech had 34 police officers on duty on the day of the 2007 campus shootings.

The Ways and Means Committee later softened Lucas’ language to let schools opt out of the gun mandate. But school boards would have had to opt out every year, and the votes would have been secret. Parents would have had no right to know if teachers were carrying loaded guns.

What happened next? Maybe Zoeller objected, behind the scenes, to the hijacking of his bill. Maybe House Speaker Brian Bosma or Gov. Mike Pence intervened. Maybe common sense broke out. With little debate, the House on Thursday punted the issue of arming school personnel to a law enforcement board for more study.

And the members applauded. Maybe it was because they had defied the NRA. Or maybe it was nervous relief, realizing they had barely avoided doing something truly rash.

The good news: At least the vote was close.

Ten Republicans joined all 13 Democrats in the Senate to vote against House Bill 1003. The tally was 27-23. Bucking party leadership and standing with public schools were GOP Sens. Sue Landske, Jim Tomes, John Waterman, Vaneta Becker, Ronnie Alting, Ed Charbonneau, Susan Glick, Randy Head, Ryan Mishler and Ron Grooms.

Indiana gives private-school tuition vouchers to students whose families make up to 277 percent of the federal poverty level: $65,000 for a family of four. Until now, students have had to spend at least a year in a public or charter school to qualify. The bill passed by the Senate would lift that requirement for:

// Students who live in the attendance area of a school that gets an F on the state’s grading system.
// Siblings of students who currently receive vouchers.
// Students in special education. (And in their case, the income limit is 370 percent of the poverty level: $87,000 for a family of four).

Leaving aside questions about the appropriateness of handing over taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools – almost all of which are religious schools – the bill raises serious questions. How much will it cost? There’s no way to know how many more students will qualify for vouchers, or how many will take advantage. Legislative Services Agency analysts basically throw up their hands.

“The increase in eligible children due to these changes is indeterminable, but could be significant,” they say in the fiscal impact statement for the bill.

Other questions pertain to just who will qualify for vouchers. What, exactly, does it mean to live in an attendance area for an F school? The idea of students being “trapped” in a “failing” school because of where they live makes little sense in an era when urban districts are dotted with magnet and charter schools. And what are the rules for an area where, for example, the middle school gets an F and the high school gets a C. Does a student lose her voucher when she reaches ninth grade?

What’s next for legislators?

The version of HB 1003 approved by the House was even more generous than the Senate bill. In keeping with the wishes of Gov. Mike Pence, it granted vouchers to children of military personnel, veterans and foster parents, without regard to family income. So Rep. Bob Behning, the bill’s House sponsor, will have to decide whether to concur with the Senate amendments or take the bill to a conference committee.

Given the way the tide seems to have turned against expanding vouchers, he may be wise to take what he’s got and run with it.

What’s next for voucher opponents?

Groups like the Indiana Coalition for Public Education and the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education pulled out the stops on this one, engaging in a furious calling and letter-writing campaign to stop the bill. Wednesday’s Senate vote may have been their best shot.

But if Behning agrees with the Senate changes, the bill will go back to the full House for a concurrence vote – one more chance to lobby. And if he doesn’t and the bill goes to a conference committee, the resulting measure will have to be approved by both the House and Senate.

While 23 no votes represented progress, some of the pro-voucher votes were disappointing. Sen. Luke Kenley, the voice of reason on many issues this session, expressed serious reservations about the voucher bill in the Senate Education Committee. But he voted for the expansion. So did Republican moderates like Tom Wyss and Joe Zakas and conservative but maverick lawmaker Brent Steele.

And Sen. Brent Waltz, the Republican who was endorsed by the Indiana State Teachers Association last fall over Democrat Mary Ann Sullivan — remember how ISTA President Nate Schnellenberger said Waltz and the union had a “meeting of the minds,” and the Republican had been “helpful to us in the legislative process”?

Waltz voted to expand vouchers.

That’s one conclusion to draw from research by education economists Tim Sass, Lin Feng and David Figlio. Looking at data for Florida schools, they found teachers were more likely to leave schools that received Fs in the state’s grading system. And effective teachers were especially likely to leave.

Sass, a professor in Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, talked about the research last week at an Economics of Education Seminar at Indiana University Bloomington. “It’s really that scarlet letter F for a school that seems to impact teacher decisions,” Sass said.

Florida was the first state to adopt the now common practice of giving schools letter grades based on student performance and/or improvement on standardized tests. It started in 1999, when Jeb Bush was governor. Indiana got on board with letter grades a couple of years ago.

Sass, Feng and Figlio keyed their research to a 2002 change in the Florida grading system, which meant schools couldn’t precisely anticipate what their grades would be. The result was that some were “shocked” into lower categories than school personnel had reason to expect. Consequently, the researchers could isolate the impact of the grades from other school-related factors.

Their data show that teachers are always more likely to leave low-performing schools. But in the year of “grade shock,” teacher mobility was even higher in schools that received an F, suggesting the grade itself was influencing teachers to move to higher-performing Florida schools or leave the profession.

Teachers were more likely to leave if, according to the researchers’ calculations, they had high “value-added” scores –if they were effective at improving students’ test scores. (Ineffective teachers were apt to stay put). And if there’s anything struggling schools need, it’s to keep their best teachers.

Sass said the effect of an F grade on teacher mobility was greater in high schools and middle schools than in elementary schools. And it was greater for teachers of core academic subjects, such as math, English and social studies, than for PE, music and art teachers.

An earlier National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from the same study is available here,

What’s the lesson to take from the research? For one thing, beware of unintended consequences. Advocates of school grades no doubt think they’re doing what’s best for kids. But to the extent they make it less likely the best teachers will teach in the worst schools, they’re not.

So far, the Senate has held back the wave of support for a nearly universal school voucher system pushed by the Friedman Foundation, Gov. Mike Pence and House leaders. The House passed a bill, HB 1003, that provided multiple add-ons to the state’s already generous voucher program. The Senate Education Committee scaled back the expansion.

As it stands now, HB 1003 would extend vouchers to:

// Students in special education whose families make up to 370 percent of the federal poverty level.
// Siblings of students who are already receiving vouchers.
// Students who live in the attendance area of a school that gets an F on the state’s grading system for one year, or a D for two years, and whose families make up to 277 percent of the poverty level.

The current system, created by a 2011 law, provides state tuition subsidies for students who attend private and religious schools if 1) the students first attended a public school for at least a year, and 2) their family income isn’t more than 277 percent of the poverty level. About 60 percent of Indiana families with children meet that income threshold.

Rep. Robert Behning, who authored HB 1003, wants to extend vouchers further: to special-needs students and children of veterans, military personnel and foster parents, without regard to income. He also wants to give vouchers to all income-eligible students who sign up in kindergarten, with no requirement that they first attend public schools.

That didn’t fly with Sen. Luke Kenley and others on the Senate Education Committee. The Senate Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee, which also includes Kenley, will consider the bill Tuesday because of its fiscal impact. From there, it will go to the full Senate.

Extending vouchers to students who would otherwise attend F schools makes some sense, if you allow that vouchers make sense at all. The original argument for vouchers – used to justify programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, D.C. – was that they would help poor children escape “failing” public schools and get a good education. But it’s a potentially costly idea (See comment below by Libby Cierzniak).

Also, many Hoosiers lack faith in the state’s A-to-F grading system. Data suggest the primary difference between A schools and F schools may be poverty. And as Vic Smith of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education notes, the Senate’s more modest voucher expansion will still cost $22 million next year – including $17 million that would otherwise go to public schools.

Tuesday’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee vote, followed by action in the full Senate, will give voucher opponents more chances to make their case. If the Senate does pass an amended HB 1003, Behning will decide whether to accept the changes or take the bill to a conference committee. He told State Impact Indiana that some provisions in his bill came from Pence – the governor’s campaign “roadmap” called for unlimited vouchers for military families, veterans and adoptive parents. So Pence may have a say on whether to compromise.

But Kenley seems to have taken a stand. Terry Spradlin of Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy told School Matters that it seems unlikely Pence and Behning can get the Senate to bend further on vouchers. Whatever comes out of the deliberative body may be what we get.

And as the court’s decision emphasizes, the citizens who challenged the law had a steep hill to climb. In Indiana, anyone contesting the constitutionality of a state law must meet an overwhelming burden of proof. The court defers to the legislature in all but the most egregious violations of the constitution.

Still, the 5-0 decision, written by Chief Justice Brent Dickson, has to leave supporters of public education feeling a bit devastated – especially coming as lawmakers are weighing further expansion of vouchers.

And the program is expansive already. After this year, there will be no limit on the number of students who can participate. It’s open to children from middle-income families, not just poor families. And there’s no requirement that students first attend a low-performing public school in order to qualify.

As Indiana University School of Education school law expert Suzanne Eckes suggests, the program flies in the face of conceptions of freedom of religion and fair access that we’ve come to expect under the federal and state constitutions.

For example, Indiana’s law is unusual in that it lets parochial schools compel voucher students to take part in religious activities. “Interestingly, no other voucher program in the country includes this type of requirement,” Eckes says. And voucher schools get a pass from the usual state rules against discrimination. They can’t bar students because of “race, color or national origin.” But they are free to discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, test scores, IQ, family income, parental politics or just about any other criteria you can imagine.

The plaintiffs in the voucher case alleged the program violates three sections of the Indiana Constitution: Article 8, Section 1, which requires a “general and uniform system of Common Schools”; Article 1, Section 4, which says citizens can’t be forced to support a place of worship or ministry; and Article 1, Section 6, which forbids spending state money to support a “religious or theological institution.”

The key issue, arguably, was the third. Almost all the schools enrolling voucher students are Christian schools. Many describe themselves as ministries. As mentioned above, they typically require students to participate in worship. If giving them state money doesn’t violate Article 1, Section 6, what does?

The court resolves the issue by making a distinction between direct and incidental support. The direct beneficiaries of vouchers, it reasons, are the students and their families, not the schools. Under this reasoning, the benefits that religious schools get from the $38 million voucher program are no different from the benefits they derive from police and fire protection.

“Any benefit to program-eligible schools, religious or non-religious, derives from the private, independent choice of the parents of program-eligible students, not the decree of the State, and is thus ancillary and incidental to the benefit conferred on these families,” Dickson writes.

Of course, it would be easy to stretch this argument to allow just about any state support of a religious institution. Should the state pay clerical salaries? After all, the sermons don’t benefit the church; they serve the spiritual well-being of the parishioners. Pay wages for those folks who knock on my door and ask me if I’m saved? Why not? They’re not proselytizing for the church; they’re doing it for me?

A couple of additional elements from the decision call for comment.

First, the court relies on a selective reading of 19th century Indiana history to make its case. It cites Indiana historian Donald Carmony to establish that private and religious schools were supported by taxes in the early 1800s. But it ignores Carmony’s account of how the 1851 constitution’s education provisions resulted from the advocacy of Wabash College professor Caleb Mills, who explicitly rejected public support for private and sectarian schools.

Second, the court either doesn’t understand who qualifies for the Indiana voucher program, or it has a skewed idea of the typical income of Hoosier families. The decision says five times that the beneficiaries of the vouchers are “lower-income” families. But Indiana provides vouchers to middle-income families as well – for example, a family of five that makes over $76,000. That’s well above the median household income for the state.

The court makes clear at the outset that it’s not endorsing vouchers as public policy. “Our individual policy preferences are not relevant,” it says. In other words, if we don’t like it, we should take it up with the legislature. Indeed we should.