Indiana General Assembly – Page 2

And So It Begins

Duck and cover: It’s a new year, with a new session of Indiana’s General Assembly. Hoosiers will be spared the chaos we are witnessing at the federal level, but what emerges isn’t likely to be pretty.

According to the Indiana Capitol Chronicle, our legislative overlords have a number of priorities–among them, continuing their focus on public education, aka telling educators what they can and cannot do in their classrooms. In addition to fiscal and personnel concerns, the Chronicle reports that

Republican state lawmakers have also hinted at the return of a contentious “curriculum transparency” bill that would limit classroom discussions about race, as well as a bill that seeks to prohibit sexually-explicit content in school library books. Versions of both bills sparked widespread debate during the 2022 session, but both failed to pass.

Top GOP legislators are additionally pointing to a draft “Don’t Say Gay” that could ban Indiana teachers from holding classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity.

I will forego my usual rant about these mean-spirited culture-war assaults to describe an (equally misplaced) impending effort to “improve” high school curricula. The article quotes Speaker of the House Todd Huston, who wants lawmakers to “reinvent” that curriculum, and responses to that effort by the “usual suspects.”

Longtime chairman of the House Education Committee, Rep. Bob Behning, R-Indianapolis, said the state’s high school curriculum needs to better prepare students to enter the workforce and should include greater emphasis on the importance of post-secondary education.

Part of that could include making math “more relevant” by tying components like financial literacy, simple interest and mortgage rates into coursework, he said. Other options include more apprenticeship programs — and making those types of opportunities more easily count towards a student’s diploma requirements.

Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner has also doubled-down on the importance of adding additional work-based learning opportunities for students and making it easier for high schoolers to access post-secondary education credentials before graduation.

I am so tired of these persistent efforts to redefine education as job training.

Let me begin by saying I have absolutely nothing against job training, practical skills, or the transmittal of “useful knowledge.” The inculcation of skills and information required to obtain and keep employment is clearly an important endeavor–both for the individual and for society–and the increasingly technical nature of work in the 21st Century often necessitates a significant amount of training.

But both individuals and society pay a steep price when we substitute the transmittal of useful knowledge for education.

It isn’t just Indiana. On college campuses, the years since the Great Recession have been brutal for almost every major in the humanities, and for the social science fields that most closely resemble humanistic ones — sociology, anthropology, international relations and political science. Technology and engineering have gained at the expense of the humanities (and with them, majors in things like sports management and exercise studies…)

That emphasis on job training and the neglect of subjects long thought to be necessary to an individual’s ability to live a good life is also reshaping high school curricula.

When an “education” is limited to the transmission of technocratic skills–when we are teaching students how to derive the one correct answer to that math problem or the one correct way to program that computer–there is a very real danger that we are creating a culture in which every issue has a “right” answer and a “wrong” answer, a prescription for disaster in a world where ambiguity and complexity require careful analyses grounded in a knowledge of history, philosophy and science abetted by critical thinking and communication skills.

Life in the 21st century will require today’s students to do more than find a job and reconcile their bank accounts. They will have to wrestle with confounding ethical and moral questions. They will be challenged to cope with social change, to work with different people having different perspectives, and to appreciate new insights. It will require them to fulfill the obligations of citizenship.

At best, a real education can only provide young people with a “tasting menu,” a sampling of the intellectual riches that generations of scholars and thinkers have amassed. But ideally, that sampling should do three things: foster a thirst for lifetime learning; give them a foundation for understanding the complexities of the world in which they must function; and inculcate an appropriate intellectual modesty–a recognition that there is infinitely more to know.

We are cheating students when we fail to at least introduce them to the intellectual and cultural products of those who have gone before. Making a living isn’t remotely the same thing as making a life.

Comments

Indiana Legislators Don’t Care What You Want…Or Don’t

The Indiana Capital Chronicle is one of a handful of new media sites trying to fill the dangerous void in news about local and state government. (As I frequently complain on this site, so-called “legacy media” like the Indianapolis Star have emptied their newsrooms of reporters as they’ve focused on cutting costs at the expense of real journalism. The result has been a news desert when it comes to informing citizens about their state and local governments.)

A recent column in The Capital Chronicle focused on what is perhaps the most annoying characteristic of Indiana’s General Assembly–its pursuit of legislation untethered to the needs or desires of Hoosier constituents.

As the columnist began;

My Christmas wish is pretty simple: I would like lawmakers to listen to what Hoosiers want. ALL Hoosiers, not just the loudest slice of their Republican constituents.

Poll after poll and survey after survey shows what Indiana residents are worried about, and what they aren’t.

Bellwether Research’s latest poll in early December surveyed 1,100 Hoosiers representing both the demographic and geographic layout of Indiana. It asked about their top priorities.

Wishes one and two were lowering health care costs and affordable housing, at 31% and 21% respectively….Next up was increasing K-12 education funding at 17%. Nothing after is in double digits

As Hoosier lawmakers prepare for the upcoming session, however, they are signaling their preoccupation with culture-war issues. Some are focusing on restricting dissemination of abortion pills through the mail; according to the polling, exactly 3% of Hoosiers care about restricting access to mailed abortion pills. (Quite the contrary: according to the article, the GOP’s own internal polling reveals that a solid majority supports abortion rights, and a survey by Ball State found that 56% of Hoosiers believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.)

That poll also found that 56% of Hoosiers believe marijuana should be legal for personal use and 29% for medicinal purposes. Only 15% say it should not be legal…

Surveys also find only 6% of Hoosiers making oversight of K-12 curriculum a top concern, but the “usual suspects” in the Indiana Statehouse are busy preparing bills to combat “critical race theory,” which is not only not being taught, but is a rather rarified field of research into American legal systems pursued by a subset of law professors. Use of the terminology is not only inaccurate, it is intentionally misleading–a none-too-subtle “dog whistle” to White supremicists who want teachers to ignore certain aspects of the national story.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Indiana if our legislature failed to pick on LGBTQ Hoosiers. House Education Chairman Robert Behning has promised introduction of a “don’t say gay” bill–demonstrating that Indiana lawmakers aren’t intimidated by that pesky court ruling that found Florida’s “Don’t say gay” bill unconstitutional.

Most lawmakers send out constituent surveys on hot topics that they know will be coming up. They are clearly less scientific than the polls I have mentioned but even when legislators directly hear from their most engaged constituents they ignore the results.

Remember gun licensing from earlier this year? Not a single survey — that journalists could find — supported abandoning the carry permit. In fact they almost all said to keep the system as-is. But legislators tossed the licensing out with the bathwater — against advice of the Indiana State Police superintendent and the majority of law enforcement groups.

Growing up I was always told, “be careful what you ask for.” It seems lately the phrase for Hoosiers should shift to, “be careful what you DON’T ask for,” because you are increasingly more likely to get it.

The disconnect between what Hoosiers want and what we get from our lawmakers is a direct result of gerrymandering that produces safe seats and allow lawmakers to ignore the policy preferences of a majority of Indiana citizens.

Gerrymandering, after all, is the very best voter suppression tactic. Why bother to vote when the result has been foreordained–or, to use Trump language, when the election has been rigged? Gerrymandering amplifies the power of the fringes–the ideologues and culture warriors who vote in primaries–and effectively disenfranchises the rest of us.

Reporting on the antics at the Statehouse is one of the very few checks on lawmakers bent on pursing their own cultural fixations, and central Indiana has been ill-served by the Star’s devolution into sports and what has been called the “beer beat”–reports on new watering holes. That makes the arrival of the Indiana Capital Chronicle very welcome. The Chronicle describes itself as an “independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to giving Hoosiers a comprehensive look inside state government, policy and elections.”

It’s probably wishful thinking, but perhaps a “comprehensive look” at what Harrison Ullmann dubbed the World’s Worst Legislature will trigger efforts at reform….

Comments

Bribes As Economic Development

According to the Indianapolis Business Journal, Indiana lawmakers are considering paying people to move here.

Members of what I still call “The World’s Worst Legislature” (despite a significant amount of competition from places like Florida and Texas) are evidently considering what the IBJ calls “an extensive piece of legislation to restructure the incentive toolkit of the Indiana Economic Development Corp.” One “key” component would create a statewide remote-worker grant program.

Senate Bill 361 has a provision that would require the department to design and implement a program giving remote workers cash incentives for moving to Indiana.

A remote worker would be eligible for a grant of up to $5,000 a year with a maximum of $15,000 over the life of the program. The total grants, which would come from the IEDC, would be capped at $1 million this year and $1.5 million in 2023….

The bill also would allow businesses outside Indiana to apply for IEDC tax credits, if they bring at least 50 remote jobs to Indiana, paying at least 150% of the state’s average hourly wage. That would be about $25.

This interesting use of taxpayer funds is essentially an admission that Indiana isn’t a very attractive place to live–that (at least, outside Indianapolis, the city our legislators love to hate) people need to be bribed to move to the Hoosier State.

A few days ago, in another blog, I noted that Indiana’s Statehouse is filled with legislators who have exactly one policy proposal to offer for any problem you can name: tax cuts. When it comes to economic development, they assure us that the only thing businesses look at when looking to relocate or expand is a “favorable tax environment.” Believing this, of course, requires a certain imperviousness to that pesky thing called “evidence,” but if there is one thing our GOP super-majority is really, really good at, it’s ignoring evidence.

Which brings me to yet another bit of unwelcome research, sure to be dismissed and ignored.

The Brookings Institution has been examining ways to “rejuvenate” states in the Midwest that have, as we say, “missed the boat.” The report begins by noting that there are currently two Midwests

One Midwest features communities that have diversified and turned an economic corner in today’s urbanized, global knowledge economy. In this Midwest, many of the region’s major metro areas and university towns have found new economic dynamism and relative prosperity.

In the other Midwest, however, factory towns that have lost anchor employers continue to languish. Most of these small and midsized industrial heartland communities rely on traditional economic development strategies to reinvigorate their economies, including doling out incentives to attract or retain employers or attempting to create a more “business-friendly” environment with lower taxes and labor costs.

Most of Indiana clearly falls into that second category. But as Brookings reports, there is “compelling new data” telling us that these traditional economic development tools are–if not entirely ineffective–far less effective than investments in quality of life and place.

Research on smaller communities has found that community amenities– recreation opportunities, cultural activities, and especially “excellent services (e.g., good schools, transportation options, including connectivity to urban areas)” significantly exceed so-called “business-friendly” policies in their ability to contribute to healthy local economies.

Smaller places with a higher quality of life experience both higher employment and population growth than similarly situated communities, including those that rank high by traditional economic competitiveness measures.

Research has confirmed that people are willing to pay higher housing prices and even accept lower wages to live in places that offer a higher quality of life.

Indiana’s lawmakers will have great difficulty getting their heads around another finding (assuming they would even bother to consult the research); studies, including this one, have shown that businesses are willing to pay higher real estate prices and offer higher wages in order to locate in places with more productive workers.

More productive workers, of course, are produced by better schools. Not religious indoctrination academies supported by Indiana’s voucher program with monies drained from our struggling public schools, and not schools in which teachers are forbidden to teach accurate history…

The bottom line:

After estimating quality of life (what makes a place attractive to households) and quality of business environment (what makes a place especially productive and attractive to businesses) in communities across the Midwest, we found quality of life matters more for population growth, employment growth, and lower poverty rates than quality of business environment.

Or, of course, you can just take some of the tax money generated by those low rates and try to bribe people to move to the “hanging on by a thread” areas of Indiana.

Given the pathetic history of Indiana’s General Assembly, I expect they’ll opt for bribery.

Comments

What A Great Idea!

As state legislatures around the country move to censor the teaching of accurate history, a number of people have evidently abandoned the usual opposition tactics–political argumentation and (if those measure pass) lawsuits, in favor of a new and better approach.

I recently came across one such effort by students in Pennsylvania. They formed a student “banned book” club.

Junior high school students in Kutztown created a teen-banned book club to discuss and celebrate challenging stories, discussing both classic novels and current hot topics.

The club’s first meeting, held at the Firefly Bookstore in Kutztown on January 12, was attended by a group of nine young people, primarily from grades 7 to 11 in the Kutztown area.

14-year-old Kutztown 8th grade Joslyn Diffenbaugh founded the club after reading about a public protest to ban books in national and regional schools based on the topics of race, gender identity and sexuality.

Evidently, several communities are seeing the formation of similar clubs; they are entirely voluntary after-school activities, and several meet in public–not school–libraries. They are prompted by a characteristic of teen-agers that is well-known to anyone who has ever parented one: nothing–absolutely nothing– is as alluring to a teenager as something that has been declared off-limits.

The same kid who wouldn’t read a particular book for class will absolutely consume it after being told not to do so.

I especially loved a different, albeit related response from Tennessee.

Following a school board’s ban of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus, Davidson College professor Scott Denham is offering a free online course for eighth- through 12th-grade students in McMinn County, Tenn., where the board voted 10-to-0 to remove the book from use in middle school classes.

“The McMinn Co., TN, School Board banned Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II, so I am offering this free on-line course for any McMinn County high school students interested in reading these books with me. Registration details for those students coming soon,” Denham tweeted Wednesday as news of the book’s removal began to circulate online.

The ban, according to minutes from a Jan. 10 school board meeting, stems from eight curse words and a depiction of a nude woman in the graphic novel, which tells the story of the Holocaust by depicting Jewish people as mice and the Germans as cats. The highly acclaimed book is an academic standard and the first graphic novel to earn the Pulitzer Prize.

In fact, that is such an excellent response that I would be willing to round up a couple of former colleagues and offer a similar course in “banned history” for kids deprived of that history should our legislature pass the currently pending “anti-CRT” bill.

The Indiana House has passed HB1134 and sent it to the Senate for consideration.

The bill, which would limit what teachers can say regarding race, history and politics in Indiana classrooms, is nearly identical to a piece of legislation that senators already abandoned after its author said it would require teachers to remain neutral on topics including Nazism, Marxism and fascism and promptly became the subject of national outrage.

The bill lists a series of “divisive concepts” that would be banned from Indiana’s public school classrooms, including those dealing with the superiority/inferiority of “sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin or political affiliation” or any that might make an individual student feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish responsibility, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin or political affiliation.”

Rather obviously, if a teacher is teaching about slavery or the civil rights movement, s/he is “dealing with”such subjects. (How a teacher is supposed to tell whether an individual student feels “discomfort” is anyone’s guess….)

The linked article noted the “considerable opposition” to the measure mounted by Indiana teachers. No kidding! I imagine teachers were already getting pretty tired of the legislature’s constant efforts to tell them how to do their jobs, and are understandably hostile to a bill that essentially tells them to revise history and be nice to the Nazis…

If this barely-veiled effort to bolster White Supremacy actually passes, I can think of a number of excellent, accurate history books that might form the core of an online, free, absolutely voluntary class–and might well appeal to teenagers who could be curious about what it is our legislative overlords don’t want them to know.

I don’t have hobbies, and retirement is pretty boring. I’d have plenty of time to replicate that Tennessee professor’s approach….

Comments

Speaking Of The World’s Worst Legislature…

Every time I refer to Indiana’s General Assembly as “the World’s Worst Legislature” (note capital letters), readers remind me that there are other worthy contenders for that title–Texas and Florida among the standouts.

Granted, the competition is fierce, but Indiana’s lawmakers–not content to rest on their embarrassing laurels–have engaged the contest with what I can only describe as a bravura performance. As James Briggs of the Indianapolis Star explained:

While you were preparing for Thanksgiving, and maybe for a run in Broad Ripple, the Indiana General Assembly’s gobbledygook plot to set a new speed record for bad policymaking ended in a sloppy, embarrassing fiasco.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s understandable, because you were probably supposed to miss it. Legislative Republicans barely a week ago revealed that, as part of a rare one-day session intended to help Gov. Holcomb end the state’s public health emergency, they also were going to jam through severe constraints on businesses that require workers to either get vaccinated or find a new job.

As Briggs patiently explained, this effort was insane both substantively and procedurally. The bill that had been drafted would have required employers requiring vaccinations to adhere to onerous testing burdens. It would have required them to accept any and all “religious objections,” despite the inconvenient fact that no major religion has asserted that getting a COVID-19 vaccines violates its faith.

Perhaps most egregiously, the draft language gives credence to vaccine disinformation by carving out an exemption for pregnant women despite no evidence that vaccines pose a risk to them and much evidence that COVID-19 kills pregnant women at higher rates than women who are not pregnant.

And as Briggs also noted, as ridiculous as the draft language was, the process by which the Republican super-majority planned to ram it through was worse. They intended to pass the employer vaccine mandate ban on Monday, “the first business day after a major holiday weekend, while bypassing normal procedures to establish a consequential law faster than anyone could remember.” Even Kevin Brinegar, CEO of Indiana’s extremely conservative, Republican-loving Chamber of Commerce, testified that in his 42 years interacting with the Indiana General Assembly, he’d never seen anything like what they were preparing to do.

“The chamber and, I believe, the entire employer community is opposed to this legislation,” Brinegar said.

Briggs described the seven-hour hearing as a disaster filled with vaccine lies and confusion, and he noted that the most effective–albeit unintentional– opponents of the bill were the anti-vaxxers in attendance who were urging lawmakers to pass it. Following the fiasco, the Speaker informed lawmakers that the one-day session was cancelled.

One item missing from Briggs’ report was how much that fiasco cost Indiana taxpayers. The last one-day session, held in 2018, cost 30,000.

The issue of employer vaccine mandates could return once the legislature begins its session in January, but the brake-slamming suggests that a critical mass of Republicans either were horrified by what they heard during the committee hearing or they were unwilling to consent to ramming through new rules for employers on an extraordinary timeline.

If you have been reading this and thinking “this is insane–why would the presumably “pro-business” party, a party that has been unwilling to regulate even the most socially harmful business practices, call an expensive special session and ignore their own rules of procedure in order to prevent businesses from safeguarding the health of their employees and customers? Especially as news of a new COVID variant is emerging?

If rational Hoosier voters need any more evidence that the state GOP has gone completely off the rails, this exercise should provide it.

A recent Doonesbury Sunday cartoon captures the moment, illustrating that Republicans are not only willing to infect their families and friends, they are willing to die from an almost completely preventable disease–all in order to “own the libs.”

In the contest for “worst,” I submit that Indiana’s legislature has secured a place in the very top tier…..

Comments