PAC gets voucher money to Indiana candidates

The political tiger that used to call itself Hoosiers for Economic Growth has a new name, but it hasn’t changed its stripes. It’s up to the same thing: Funneling money from out-of-state billionaires to state legislative candidates likely to support private-school vouchers.

Now called Hoosiers for Quality Education, the political action committee has spent over a half million dollars this year to influence Indiana elections – including at least $187,500 in large contributions made in the last 10 days to Republican state legislative candidates.

As in the past, the group’s money comes primarily from non-Hoosiers. Some $325,000 – more than half of what it raised this year – was contributed by the American Federation for Children PAC, a pro-voucher group headed by Michigan GOP activist Betsy DeVos.

It got $100,000 from a Hoosier, Fred Klipsch, who organized the group and claimed credit for getting Indiana to adopt school vouchers, expanded charter schools and test-based teacher evaluations in 2011. It also got money from John Bryan, an Oregon industrialist with ties to the Koch Brothers, and Charter Schools USA, the Florida for-profit tapped to run three low-performing Indianapolis schools.

American Federation for Children files its Indiana campaign reports from the Terre Haute office of GOP super lawyer James Bopp, a primary figure behind the Citizens United case in which the Supreme Court overturned restrictions on corporate political giving.

And where does the American Federation for Children PAC get its money? Mostly from heirs to the Walmart fortune,

Another take on Indiana school funding fairness

There are several ways to calculate the per-pupil funding that Indiana school corporations receive from the state. Arguably the fairest and most transparent is to focus on the basic “tuition support” that’s awarded to all districts, plus the complexity index that provides more dollars to higher-needs schools.

If you take that approach, the claim by House Republicans that state funding for schools varies from $5,000 up to $9,500 per student is truly out of whack.

Per-pupil funding for the current year using only tuition support and the complexity index is included in a school funding chart posted to the Indiana Department of Education’s Learning Connections site. You can see that the lowest-funded districts – typically low-poverty schools like those in Hamilton County, which don’t benefit much from the complexity index – fall a bit short of $5,000 per pupil.

But the most generously funded districts don’t get close to what House Republicans said. Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, gets $7,058 per pupil. East Chicago, at $7,526 per pupil, is the highest-funded district (though several charter schools are close).

In a post on Monday, I reported that IPS received $8,300 per pupil. That figure, from a chart generated by a legislative office, included special education funding, full-day kindergarten grants and payments for students who earn an honors diploma and those who enroll in career-education classes.

The honors diploma funding is set by the state and is the same for all schools. Career education funding is supposed to be an incentive to train students for high-demand jobs. Indiana began funding full-day kindergarten in 2011. Special education funding is based on the number of students identified with special needs, with more dollars allocated for those with more severe disabilities.

In other words, these are “below the line” calculations that should not be in play when House Republicans go about trying to “fix” the funding formula.

Most of the variability in per-pupil funding comes from the complexity index, so lawmakers could be tempted to rewrite that formula. But the index is arguably one of the things Indiana does right. This year’s school funding fairness report card from the Education Law Center in New Jersey gives Indiana an A for “funding distribution,” a measure of whether states provide more money to high-poverty schools.

Legislators need to remember that old saying: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

School funding ‘fix’ would help some, hurt others

The last time Indiana House Republicans vowed to fix the state’s school funding formula, some districts saw double-digit cuts in their budgets. Now they’re at it again, and the results are likely to be similar.

House Speaker Brian Bosma announced the latest plan last week, putting school funding equalization at the top of the caucus’s 2015 legislative agenda. “I have had many teachers across Indiana tell me that the distribution of school funds is unfair,” he said in a news release. “We will fix this.”

It’s true there are discrepancies in Indiana school funding. Generally speaking, high-poverty school districts get more money per student; and growing, affluent districts get less. But those differences exist for a reason. And the GOP “fix” is almost certain to hurt some of Indiana’s most vulnerable students.

This is Indiana, after all, and we can probably rule out any kind of tax increase in 2015 to raise funding for schools across the board. That means the only way Republicans can boost funding for the typically low-poverty schools in their legislative districts will be to take from high-poverty districts.

As the civil rights leader Julian Bond said last week in a lecture at Indiana University, “In America, the education dollar follows the white child.”

House Republicans also exaggerated the size of the funding differences, telling reporters state funding for school districts varies from $9,500 to $5,000. It once varied about that much, but no longer.

‘Achievement gap’ discussion should have local focus

Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington is hosting community conversations this Friday and Sunday on “Closing the Achievement Gap.” The topic hits close to home.

We typically think of the achievement gap as a national phenomenon – as the gap between test scores for white and minority students. Or the gap between scores for high-performing and “failing” schools.

But thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, individual schools and school districts report test results for “disaggregated groups” of students: those from racial and ethnic categories, students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, special-needs kids and English language learners.

And those results raise questions for the Monroe County Community School Corp. in Bloomington. It had some of the lowest test-passing rates in Indiana this year for students from low-income families and for minority students. And it had some of the biggest test-score achievement gaps in the state.

I’ve lived in Bloomington most of my adult life, and I can’t think of a good reason why this should be the case. We know that poor kids are less likely to pass standardized tests than middle-class or affluent kids. But is poverty in Bloomington different from poverty in other Indiana cites?

Public records quest meets dead end

My obsessive quest to uncover the whole story behind the 2012 Christel House Academy grade-change saga has apparently come to an end. And not a happy one.

One year, one month and 22 days after I filed a public-records request, the Indiana Department of Education responded. “After review of your records request, it was determined the Department does not maintain the records you are requesting,” legal assistant Leslie-Ann James said via email.

Oh, well.

The request was for certain DOE staff emails concerning the A-to-F school grading system that was being rolled out in 2012. The goal was to figure out when and why the department got rid of a “ceiling” on the points schools could earn for English or math test scores or student growth. This has never been explained to my satisfaction.

Remember that Associated Press reporter Tom LoBianco unearthed DOE emails last summer that showed then-Superintendent of Public Education freaking out because Christel House, a highly regarded Indianapolis charter school, was going to get a C under the new grading system. Department staff scrambled to make changes, and Christel House ended up with an A. Officials decided to ignore test scores for the school’s high-school students. But that only pushed its grade to a B.

How did it get to an A?

Ritz focuses on students in State of the Classroom message

Give Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz credit for putting the initial focus of her State of the Classroom message where it belongs: on Indiana’s students.

In a video message posted to the Indiana Department of Education website, Ritz urged Hoosiers to “look beyond the school walls” and address the challenges that students face in their communities, which are reflected in the issues they encounter in school.

“As a 34-year veteran teacher, I have never been able to meet the needs of children in my classroom from within the school walls,” she said. “I have always had children who were in need of food, clothing, adult and community support.”

Ritz said many students enter the classroom “burdened with the weight of poverty”:

• 22 percent of Indiana youth are part of families living below the poverty line, and 48 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.
• 519,000 Indiana children live in single-parent families. Working parents “are the norm, with many adults each working two jobs to provide for their families.”
• Over 16,000 Indiana students are homeless.
• The state ranks second in the nation for teen prescription drug abuse.
• 17 percent of Indiana high-school girls report having been sexually assaulted.

“All children can learn,” she said, a line apparently added to her prepared text. “But ultimately these stresses can have a terrible impact on students’ ability to learn, especially in the area of reading, a critical life skill that opens doors of opportunity for our students.”