The Struggle Over Public Education

Friends,

Happy New Year! I hope you all have stayed safe and warm in the midst of this major snowfall we’ve had in District 13. It took me about five trips with the snowshovel, but I did manage to clear the driveway and the walk - please work with your neighbors to keep the right-of-way clear so that USPS and DPW Solid Waste can do their jobs out in the dangerous cold!

Today, the main topic I wanted to discuss was the topic of public education.

Public education was established through struggle.

The right to a public education is younger than the United States of America. In the 1700s, most children did not go to any school outside of the Puritan colonies in New England. Children, and Even after fighting a revolution against monarchism and tyranny, the founders of this country left this topic alone, just like they left slavery alone. It took a massive public struggle that culminated in the Civil War to finally win this right for all people. In steps, the American people battled for universal education for women, education for Black people, and education for non-English speakers. This was often a literal violent struggle, with armed mobs of reactionaries attempting to attack groups they did not want to become educated.

We had to fight to establish free public education; we’re going to have to fight to keep it.

Public schools are under attack. Since the inception of this massively popular program, right-wing politicians and the lobbyists who pay them have been working to chip away at this public provision of public goods. 

Locally, right-wing politicians and economic opportunists have increased their attacks against IPS. Democratic collaborators are joining forces with Republicans to expand charter schools, especially with a school voucher program. Indiana’s Republican state legislature is working to crush the universal public provision of education, starting with IPS. A variety of horrific bills have been proposed for this year’s legislative session - with one of the most awful being House Bill 1136 by Representative Jake Teshka, which would totally dissolve Indianapolis Public Schools and convert every school to a charter school. Rumors abound that the pro-charter majority on the IPS Board of Commissioners will imminently seek to fire the superintendent of IPS.

Charters aren’t a solution, they are a shell game.

But the charter school movement, and the voucher system that props it up, is a way of deflecting away from the basic contention that public schools should be accountable to the public. Instead of treating parents, teachers, and students as co-creators and owners of the collective system of educating our youth,  charter school advocates try to treat education like a consumer good. The concept of “choice” is used to mislead parents into thinking that picking up and moving their child around from one school that has no obligation to respect the community or win elections, to another with the same unaccountable leadership structure, is a positive development. Charter schools attempt to move around the existing funding away from where there is clear democratic accountability, to where there is not. 

Experimental models of education require more transparency and accountability, not less.

I worked for almost four years in a charter high school. The school I worked at originally called itself a Big Picture school.  The school’s model was to have our high school students spend two days per week not in the traditional school building, but at internships in the community. Literally one day, with zero parent or teacher involvement, leadership made the decision to deprioritize that entire model and move towards spending all day prepping for standardized tests, in order to ensure that charter schools would look better to the Statehouse legislators that helped keep the lights on by pushing public money towards our school. 

When teachers like me spoke up about the massive wave of truancy and disengagement from our students that followed the changes, our principals and superintendent let us know that we should simply do what we were told or quit. We had no teachers’ union, no formal way to make requests from school leadership, and no directly elected school board accountable to parents and the community. The school leaders who made these decisions were not accountable - they did not have an elected board as IPS does, and there was no formal system of parental involvement or control. Only non-educators and non-specialists (the General Assembly at the Statehouse and the Mayor) had any appointment power or oversight - and they mostly didn’t seem to care about what was happening.

Today, we need democracy to fight for public education.

Under the current system of public education, voters have power! Elected school boards are forced to contend with the public, and I maintain this is a good thing despite the attempts by groups like Moms for Liberty to try to hijack these elections. The election process is still possible to win. Charter schools are desperately afraid of losing, which is why they spend absolutely staggering amounts of money to buy school board elections. They know that without massive spending, they will not be able to convince anyone to support their leadership. Taking away public elections by eliminating public school boards ensures that the money can be spent not on marketing, but on lobbying (or to put it another way, legally bribing) the few elected officials who get to appoint board members and hold charters accountable.

Let’s be clear here. Despite some impressive gains from the recent Rebuilding Stronger plan, IPS is definitely struggling. Nearly one in six high school students at IPS schools do not graduate on time. Students are not learning to read and read well by the time we as a society think they should. Math skills among students are lacking as well.

But what is it that will help students succeed? One of the freshmen I taught had been held back multiple times earlier in life, and was trying his very hardest to turn his life around and graduate with honors. The student, Dwayne, talked to me frequently about his refusal to become a statistic and his fears of living in poverty.

Dwayne started having attendance problems. He was late to class four times in two weeks. I asked him to stay after school and talked to him about it. I laid into him pretty hard, reminding him of his goals and his fears and asking him why he was not prioritizing his education. Dwayne looked down, tears in his eyes, and admitted it was his responsibility to get to school on time and he didn’t want to make any excuses.

It wasn’t until a week later that I learned that Dwayne’s father had not been able to pay the electricity bill on time, and thus for almost a month he had been living without the ability to charge his phone, use a plug-in alarm clock, get food from the fridge on his way to school, or use any of the strategies he had developed for managing his time. 

Dwayne didn’t need a lecture, he needed electricity.

Universal programs - without bureaucratic barriers that make you prove you’re poor enough to get help - are the best ways to help level the playing field and provide resources to the children who most need them. Many other countries with far less wealth have managed to create universal education programs that put ours to shame. The Nordic social democracies insist that education must be for all people, and provide high-quality education with zero tuition at all levels of study. In Denmark, students can attend public daycare from 9 months of age, and 98% of three-year-olds attend public pre-kindergarten programs. Teenagers are able to choose from trade school or a more classic university, and can even go to a special boarding school for a year while they try to decide which option makes the most sense for them. University students are paid a stipend for going to school, since society benefits from an educated populace. 

Many organizations and individuals are already pushing for some of these changes here in Indiana. For example, the Black Church Coalition is #ALLIN4KIDS in 2025 - pushing for universal Pre-K in Marion County.

Anyone interested in actually helping children in our society prosper and learn should be spending their time advocating for these real solutions.

Instead, the charter school movement and its corporatist allies in government seek to slice the existing pie up differently and take money away from IPS and other public schools, giving it instead to school corporations controlled by unaccountable boards and outside money. This race to the bottom ensures that fewer public dollars go to helping children and more public dollars go into the pockets of fraudsters.

We have to fight back as hard as we can against these attacks and defend public education. 

We will need socialism to truly let our children thrive.

Students can’t learn while they’re impoverished. Indianapolis, and Indiana more generally, must provide drastically increased aid to children and families if they are to have any hope at equal life outcomes, or even equal opportunities.

Thousands of children in Indianapolis are suffering from food insecurity. Providing healthy food for all students improves test scores, with the greatest improvement going to those from the poorest families. 

Hundreds of children in Indianapolis are homeless. Thousands more are in homes with unstable housing that costs more than fifty percent of the household’s income. Children with stable homes are vastly more likely to succeed than children who have experienced evictions and frequent changes to their addresses.

Over a quarter of Indiana families are defined as “Asset limited, income constrained, employed,” or ALICE. This means that families earn above the federal poverty line, but do not actually bring home enough income to pay for all of their needs as a family. When adding in unemployed and impoverished families, this means a whopping forty percent of families in Indiana require government assistance to avoid poverty.

The wealthy in Indiana can certainly afford to pay more to ensure that no children go hungry in their own state. Right now, the rich pay far lower percentages in taxes than the poor, and wealth inequality has been worsening in Indiana for decades. Between 1945 and 1973, the top 1% gathered to themselves less than 6% of growth. From 1973 to 2015, the top 1% absorbed 72% of income growth. In our state, we have seen that the rich can pay more of their fair share and still do just fine. Continuing to prioritize their increasing inequality while children suffer is class warfare from the rich against the poor.

We cannot discuss “fixing education” without fixing these underlying problems in our immoral society. Doing so equitably would best be done at the federal level, so that all children across the country could be on an equal playing field rather than funding education predominantly with local property taxes. But we could take important steps at the State and Local level that would improve the lives of children and improve their educational outcomes!

Together, we must see the forest, not just the trees. Arguments over voucher expansions, school consolidation, transportation agreements, and the like are totally missing the point. Education is failing in Indiana precisely because our economy is failing working people. We must collectively fight back against further robbing of the public and must demand that all of our children deserve food, shelter, safety, and a world-class education. After we defeat the current wave of attacks on our children, we must start pushing for a positive vision, not just a defensive posture. We need full, universal public education for all people in this country, from day care to college, and we need the housing and assistance required to let people take advantage of such a system.

In love and solidarity,

Jesse