Study suggests focus on charter school authorizers

Students who transfer to charter schools authorized by the Indianapolis mayor’s office tend to perform better on state assessments than their peers who stay in traditional public schools. But students who switch to charter schools authorized by Indiana colleges and universities fall behind academically.

Joseph Ferrare (University of Washington Bothell)

Those are among the top-shelf findings of a recent study of Indiana charter schools and their authorizers. And the evidence that charter school authorizers may have an impact on the schools’ effectiveness should be getting more attention from policymakers, an author of the study told me.

“Charters are here, and they are a fairly sizeable sector,” Joseph Ferrare, a social scientist at the University of Washington Bothell, said in a phone interview. “We should want them to do well.”

Pence’s education legacy

Mike Pence’s new book is called “So Help Me God,” so everything in it must be God’s truth, right? I won’t try to fact-check all 560 pages, but Pence’s claims about his education record as Indiana governor should get attention. And that part is mostly true.

He does bend the truth, however, with this statement: “All told during my term, Indiana had the single largest budget increase in K 12 education in its history.”

Pence made the same claim in 2016 when he was introduced as Donald Trump’s running mate. FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Institute, investigated and termed it misleading. It’s true that there were modest increases in state K-12 funding each year Pence was governor, FactCheck’s Lori Robertson notes; but, in constant dollars, those weren’t the biggest in history.

She consulted with Larry DeBoer, a Purdue economist and an expert on school and government finance in Indiana, who showed that, adjusted for inflation, Indiana’s K-12 budget peaked before Pence took office. “In real terms, and as a share of Indiana’s economy, education spending is a bit smaller than it was in 2010 and 2011,” DeBoer said at the conclusion of Pence’s term.

FactCheck was harsher with Hillary Clinton’s claim that Pence “slashed” education funding in Indiana, labeling it false. It did note that, under Pence, Indiana shifted funding to growing suburban districts; Indianapolis Public Schools lost $17 million as a result.

School vouchers and ‘learning loss’

Pundits have been wringing their hands over the “learning loss” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed the largest decline in decades.

But if people care about what kids are and aren’t learning, they should be every bit as alarmed by the private school voucher programs that are spreading across the country.

That’s according to Joshua Cowen, a Michigan State University education policy professor. He’s been studying vouchers and following the research for two decades, and he says the evidence is crystal clear that voucher programs don’t work when it comes to helping students learn.

In a recent episode of “Have You Heard,” an education podcast, he said thorough evaluations of large-scale voucher programs – in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C. – found overwhelmingly negative effects on learning as measured by test scores.

From school choice to election denial

Patrick Byrne has been back in the news. Remember him? If you’ve followed Indiana politics – especially education politics – for the past decade, you very well may.

Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, has as a prominent election denier trying to cast doubt on the fact that Donald Trump lost in 2020. He was part of an “unhinged” White House meeting Dec. 18, 2020, where he and others reportedly urged Trump to fight harder to overturn the results.

More recently he has been headlining election-denial events around the country and espousing conspiracy theories. He told a gathering in Omaha that he has spent $20 million of his own money to show that voting machines were manipulated to influence the election. He said China plans to take over the United States by 2030.

Vouchers prop up private schools

I’ve always thought that one of the motivations behind Indiana’s school voucher program was to create a taxpayer bailout for private schools, especially struggling Catholic schools. If that’s the case, it seems to have worked.

Enrollment for the state’s Catholic schools has held steady for the past 10 years, roughly the period that vouchers have been in place. Overall enrollment in accredited private schools has increased by 16%.

Contrast that with what’s happened elsewhere. Across the United States, enrollment in Catholic K-12 schools declined by 21.3% in the past 10 years, according to the National Catholic Education Association. Catholic school enrollment peaked in the early 1960s at 5.2 million; it’s now about 1.7 million.

A recent story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shows how this trend continues in St. Louis, where Catholic school enrollment has shrunk by half since 2000. The local archdiocese is embarking on a plan to close and consolidate schools, but that will be tricky, according to a community survey.

In Indiana, vouchers also cushioned the blow to private schools from the growth of charter schools. Indiana started charter schools in 2002 and greatly expanded them in 2011. They have grown explosively, especially in Indianapolis and Gary.

School referendum language is ‘a lot misleading’

When I go to the polls this November, I will vote in a school funding referendum that – according to the language that appears on the ballot – will increase my property taxes for schools by 35%.

That would be a hefty increase if it were accurate, but it’s not. Not by a long shot.

Detail from a Monroe County Community School Corp. referendum flyer.

The actual increase – the difference between the property tax rate that I now pay to the Monroe County Community School Corp. and the rate I will pay next year if the referendum passes – is about 15%.

But a 35% increase is what MCCSC officials have to advertise under legislation approved in 2021, and an interpretation of that law by the Department of Local Government Finance. Voters are getting misleading information, and school funding referendums could be harder to pass as a result.

Voucher program got smaller

Indiana’s school voucher program got a bit smaller in the 2020-21 school year, according to the annual voucher report from the Indiana Department of Education.

The number of students who received vouchers to pay tuition at private K-12 schools dropped by just over 1,000 to 35,698, a 2.75% decrease. The 10-year-old voucher program grew rapidly in its early years, but its growth stalled more recently.

Of course, everything changes with the school year that’s now getting underway. The legislature voted in the spring to expand the voucher program, opening the door to more middle- and upper-income families. Private schools are eagerly promoting the expansion.

IPS, Gary dominate charter school demographics

Two themes jump out from Indiana Department of Education demographic data on charter school students in Indiana. First, it’s a tale of two cities – or, more accurately, a tale of two districts.

Over half of Indiana’s nearly 45,000 charter school students live in the Indianapolis Public Schools and Gary Community Schools districts, even though those districts account for fewer than 5% of the state’s students. State charter school data are overwhelmingly skewed by what happens in those two districts.

Second, Indianapolis’ approximately 50 charter schools enroll higher percentages of Black and economically disadvantaged students than IPS schools – even though IPS has significantly more Black students and students from low-income families than most districts in the state.

White teachers are the norm

Indiana has a teacher diversity problem. This has been an issue for a long time; and even though some school districts have been trying to hire more teachers of color, change comes slowly if at all.

Data from the Indiana Department of Education are discouraging, showing most students are missing out on the experience of learning from diverse teachers.

• Over 93% of Indiana teachers are white. That compares with 66.4% of students in public and charter schools who are white.
• Fewer than 4% of teachers are Black, compared with 12.7% of students.
• Only 1.7% of teachers are Hispanic, compared with 12.8% of students.

Indiana school funding lacks effort

The second annual “The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems” report is out. And if it were awarding grades, Indiana could expect a D-minus for effort.

The report, produced by researchers at the Albert Shanker Institute and the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education, builds on the growing scholarly consensus that spending more money on schools leads to better results.

“In other words,” it says, “the evidence is clear that money does, indeed, matter.”