Hoosier children deserve better than the education system that nearly 20 years of Republican control has left us with in Indiana.
Instead of robust solutions, the legislative supermajority churns out a patchwork of special interest-backed policies year after year. While our state drops in rank when it comes to academic performance, the policies passed by the General Assembly fail to address the root of the issues plaguing our system as a whole. We may roll out measures that manage the symptoms, but Republican lawmakers continue to miss the mark when it comes to actually solving the root of the problems. This year, the supermajority passed bills that attempt to fix two deep wounds within our education system — declining literacy rates and chronic absenteeism — with mere Band-Aids.
The state’s standardized reading test scores released in August show a reading proficiency rate of just under 82%, meaning that 1 in every 5 students are unable to read proficiently by the end of the third grade. It comes as no surprise that there is a stark achievement gap between racial groups — with Black (65.6%) and Latino (68.9%) students displaying significantly lower averages than their white (88%) peers.
The Republicans passed a solution to this problem, a bill that will hold back the thousands of third graders who don’t pass the exam. Singling students out and separating them from their friends and classmates can have devastating effects on confidence and social development. Once those students reach high school, they have a higher tendency to drop out of school. Due to the racial disparity in literacy metrics, this measure will have a greater negative impact on members of populations that already face systemic inequity.
From my experience as an educator, there are three methods to consider when a student is not performing academically: prevention, intervention and retention. Retention, or holding students back, is the absolute last resort when the other two methods have failed. This bill focuses far too much on the retention piece without giving the proper resources to intervention and prevention.
Instead of punishing the very students whom the state has failed, we must focus on preventive measures that will increase literacy rates before students take the state exam. The most effective way to do so is to fund preschool education. Studies overwhelmingly show that children who attend pre-K perform better on key benchmarks than those who do not. Currently, Indiana is one of several states in the nation that do not offer universal pre-K. The program we do have, On my Way Pre-K, allows families to apply for grants to help send their kids to preschool only if their income is 127% below the federal poverty level. In this state, a family making $225,000 can qualify for vouchers to send their kids to private schools, but a family making $45,000 is deemed as too rich to qualify for state-funded pre-K.
On top of that, the lack of oversight for charter schools has resulted in bad actors stealing money from the state that we could be using to improve public schools and fund pre-K. This year, three former charter school operators were indicted for conspiracy to defraud the state by falsely reporting attendance numbers to receive higher funding. We must stop funneling taxpayer money to private businesses that are abusing the system to make a profit instead of educating our children.
Another deep wound in our education system is chronic absenteeism. According to the Indiana Department of Education, 1 in 5 students missed at least 10% of school days during the 2022-23 school year, and about 40% of students statewide were absent for more than 10 days. When our students miss school, they lose out on valuable learning opportunities and skill-building. Similar to the literacy issue, there is a racial disparity that shows students belonging to minority populations are missing more school than their white classmates.
The solution my Republican colleagues in the legislature brought forward is a bill that requires schools to develop a truancy prevention policy for grades K-6. This may include an action plan for the student, meetings with parents and the reporting of chronically absent students to the county prosecutor. The prosecutor can then take the parents to court and hold them responsible for their child’s truancy.
While this is a step in the right direction, we must ensure that schools are taking the proper measure to address the core issue. During my 20 years as a practicing school principal, I used strategies that addressed the underlying reason behind truancy in order to improve attendance. You must work with the individual student to find out what is acting as a barrier to them getting to school. The solution could be as simple as helping families make a plan to prepare for school the night before, providing personal hygiene products at school or teaching students how to set an alarm clock. Working with individual students to eliminate barriers is a more effective solution than the threat of bringing a family to court.
The hodgepodge of education policies passed by the Republican supermajority has proved ineffective. Oftentimes, extreme measures are taken without allowing the previous policies to fully take effect. We must stop trying to put Band-Aids on bullet holes and get to the root of why our education system faces such problems.
Indiana state Rep. Vernon G. Smith represents the 14th District. He was first elected to the House in 1990 and previously served on the Gary City Council. Smith serves as the ranking minority member on the House Education Committee and has been an educator for more than five decades.
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