Governor’s Education “Innovation” Is Nothing More than Education Desperation

The latest chapter in Indiana Education “Reform” now includes the Governor’s intention
to seek more education “innovation”. This is a publicly appealing refrain. It implies that current
education efforts aren’t adequate and therefore new, innovative approaches are needed to
achieve better educational results. The Governor hopes to accomplish this by creating more
Charter Schools. This is nothing more than a “cross your fingers and hope for the best”
approach to improving education. Surely, if enough Charter Schools are created and thrown up
against the wall of education, something successful will have to stick.

The concept of Charter Schools as the answer to improving the achievement level of
students must continue to be challenged, not because there aren’t good people administering
and teaching in Charter Schools, but because there is a fundamentally false premise (and
implied promise) that for-profit education businesses hold some kind of secret solution that
public schools don’t.

There is a concerted effort to convince the public that public schools are inadequate
simply because they suffer from a kind of bloated bureaucracy, strangled by teacher unions and
ineffective teachers. The premise also contends that if schools could operate at the level of
complete autonomy (unbridled by rules and requirements), creative and innovative new
strategies will be developed and then carried out by truly effective teachers. These “free
market” schools, unfettered by teacher unions, could hire and fire at will, be fiscally conservative
by offering overall low wages and minimum benefits (offset by sporadic rewards for the most
effective teachers), and achieve new heights of student achievement primarily because they
would only retain the best teachers.

So where has this premise got us so far? Charter Schools continue to do significantly
worse than public schools. Charter School performance has been so tenuous that it has led to a
scandal involving the changing of school grading criteria so that a flagship Charter School could
maintain its “A” status.

Further, the lack of credentialed teachers in Charter Schools became so severe, it lead
to the watering down of teacher licensing requirements. Even with significant shortcuts to
gaining licensure, there is still a shortage. The shortage is so desperate that now the Governor
wants to bribe teachers to leave public schools by supplementing those “fiscally responsible”
Charter School salaries with additional State tax dollars (to be taken away, I’m sure, from public
school funds).

The public needs to ask itself how many more wing and a prayer acts of desperation
(otherwise known as “innovation”) are going to be paid for by siphoning more and more public
education tax dollars from the public schools that continue to raise ISTEP scores, national
assessment scores and graduation rates to all time highs.

The public also needs to challenge the false and misleading storyline that the teacher is
the only variable for learning that stands in the way of student achievement. It is so much more
complex than that but the Governor seems to prefer acts of desperation for learning rather than
acts of investigation for learning.

(There are  actually 4 variables that affect student learning - To be addressed in my next
column.)