Indiana updates: You think your child’s summer break was short?

The Warren Township school district on the east side of Indianapolis wins the prize for the earliest start to the 2010-11 school year. Their students returned to class on Monday (Aug. 2).

Peggy Hinckley, the Warren superintendent, cites a recent Time magazine article in explaining the rationale for the short summer break. She says summer vacation can be “devastating” for low-income kids. “The article describes what we as educators know, and that is a three-month summer break is not good for children,” Hinckley tells the Indianapolis Star.

The Time cover story, titled “The Case Against Summer Vacation,” makes a powerful case for year-round school.

‘Dollars to the Classroom’ — less than meets the eye?

The recent Dollars to the Classroom report from the Indiana Office of Management and Budget brings to mind Mark Twain’s oft-quoted line about “lies, damned lies and statistics.” Not that the report is dishonest – but gleaning truth from its hundreds of pages is no easy task.

Key points, according to Indiana OMB director Ryan Kitchell, include that Indiana schools spent only 57.8 percent of their dollars “in the classroom” in 2008-09, and that this figure “continues to trail the U.S. average by 5 percentage points.”

But calculations of how much is spent in the classroom can vary dramatically, depending on how spending is recorded and categorized. And the comparison of Indiana with the national average isn’t quite the apples-to-apples comparison that Kitchell implies.

Indiana’s Dollars to the Classroom reports grew out of a nationwide push a few years ago, led by the CEO of online sales company Overstock.com and endorsed by columnist George Will and other prominent conservatives

A funding slope, but not a cliff

Eric Knox of Support Our Schools has written a helpful analysis of Indiana’s budgetary and school-funding problems and their implications for the Monroe County Community School Corp. It’s posted on the Bloomington Online community forum.

His key point: The so-called “cliff effect” – the impact on education and other programs from the state’s loss of $2 billion in federal stimulus funds – may not be the problem that MCCSC Superintendent J.T. Coopman and other school officials have sometimes suggested. “The State of Indiana has a self-inflicted budget problem, but there is no $2 billion ‘funding cliff’ and 2012 is likely to be better than 2011,” writes Knox, who relies on budget data from Purdue professor Larry DeBoer’s website.

It’s true that Indiana was awarded $2 billion in federal stimulus dollars in 2009 under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the state has been using that money to balance its budget during the economic downturn. The money has been used to fund both education and the Medicaid health-care program. But by design, the funding was “front-loaded” — about half was budgeted in the first half of 2009 and Indiana’s reliance on stimulus is being gradually phased out.

In other words, the big drop in stimulus funding has already happened, and the decline is leveling out as the money nears zero.

Tony Bennett on ‘Noon Edition’ — easy listening?

Did anyone else think that Tony Bennett, the Indiana superintendent of public instruction, came across as unusually conciliatory on the WFIU radio “Noon Edition” program last Friday? There was no teacher-bashing. No school-of-education-bashing. Not even any real union-bashing.

Was Bennett striking a friendlier tone because Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, had singled out Indiana (along with Virginia and Minnesota) for failing to include teachers’ unions in its initial application for federal Race to the Top funding? Did “Noon Edition” host Bob Zaltsberg’s reasonableness rub off on his guest?

Bennett did offer some interesting comments. He said the current state of education is challenging but also rewarding. “These are definitely unique times in Indiana education,” he said. He repeated his contention

Welcome to School Matters

Welcome to the School Matters: Indiana K-12 blog, our modest attempt to be part of an essential conversation about education in America, Indiana and, especially, our community of Bloomington, Ind.

Why are we doing this? Primarily because we think it’s the right thing to do. Our schools matter more than anything else to the future of our nation and the well-being of our children and youth. Yet it’s not easy to get access to a full range of news and views about education. As a report in December by the Brookings Institution lamented, “During the first nine months of 2009, only 1.4 percent of national news coverage from television, newspapers, news Web sites, and radio dealt with education.”

We are grateful, living in Bloomington, that the Herald-Times has experienced, full-time reporters covering both K-12 and higher education, a rare commitment of resources these days. We’re also inspired by the growth of online communication about school matters, such as the Support Public Education in Monroe County Facebook group and the Support Our Schools online forum. We hope to augment these traditional and new-media sources with news, analysis and links that are timely, accurate and relevant.

We both spent years covering K-12 education for the Herald-Times, and we remain intensely interested in the topic. We find ourselves thinking and talking about education nearly every day. As journalists, we try to make sense of the world by reporting and writing about it. And nothing is more in need of making sense right now than the state of our schools.

The immediate impetus for starting this blog was the MCCSC’s decision, in response to state funding cuts, to reduce spending by $5.8 million and eliminate the jobs of 142 teachers, librarians and administrators – 79 of them through reductions in force and the rest through retirements. Nearly every week has brought new questions to address: Why these reductions and not others? Will state legislation provide a way out? Will the MCCSC launch a tax-increase referendum this fall or next spring? What will it take for a referendum to win?

But local school issues don’t exist in a vacuum. Teaching jobs are being slashed across Indiana. Schools are closing in Kansas City, Detroit … and New Albany. Debates are raging over charter schools, public school choice, merit pay for teachers, school turn-around methods, and how to best prepare, motivate and evaluate teachers. There’s so much to learn, so much to say – let’s get started.