Lawmakers are vowing to go back to the chalkboard on education. Top Republicans vow to “reinvent” high school to expand work-based learning experiences for Hoosier students.
That’s a healthy discussion to have, and we’re all for education reforms that make the curriculum more relevant to students. But we also hope our representatives and senators will use the upcoming session as a good-faith reset for public education in another way.
Simply put, it’s time they get back to basics. A good start would be paying attention, coming to work ready to learn, and listening to teachers.
It’s no mistake, as columnist Leo Morris points out on this page, that whatever problems lawmakers may see in our state’s education system, blame lies squarely at their feet. After all, they set education laws and standards, and schools in Indiana traditionally consume roughly half of the state’s general fund dollars.
To lawmakers’ credit, they bumped up Indiana’s previously abysmal national ranking in average teacher pay with an increase in 2021. Even so, just before the beginning of this school year, the Indiana Department of Education reported nearly 1,800 open teaching positions statewide. Earlier in the summer, the number of vacancies topped 2,300.
More and more teachers are leaving the profession and fewer are entering. This should trouble lawmakers, who should study the reasons why and make evidence-based reforms to reverse these harmful trends.
Yet educators earlier this month gave some anecdotal evidence of what could be factors. As the Indianapolis Business Journal reported, “Indiana’s largest teacher unions lobbied for lawmakers to directly address the ongoing, statewide teacher shortage. They also called for increased funding to public schools, and implored legislators to focus less on ‘culture war’ issues.”
We can’t argue with any of that, and serious lawmakers shouldn’t either. Particularly that last part.
Last session, a few terrible bills sought to restrict what teachers could say in the classroom, potentially barring instruction of vague “divisive concepts.” A Republican author of one such bill starred on the national stage as the annual embarrassing Hoosier lawmaker after he defended his bill on the Senate floor by saying teachers “need to be impartial” when discussing Nazism and fascism in the classroom.
Teachers responded to such Statehouse shenanigans with earnest, honest demonstrations and testimony that felt as if they they were fighting for their professional lives.
Because they were.
We were proud to stand with teachers earlier this year and crusade in editorials against bills that targeted them and librarians for doing their jobs. We are prepared to do so again.
But we’d rather not have to. We urge House Speaker Todd Huston and Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray to spare the state from such ugliness and set a positive tone in the upcoming session. They can start by taking a lesson from this year’s session and urge their members to stop filing legislation that targets teachers.
Failing that, Huston and Bray must use the power of their positions to ensure that such bad-faith legislation doesn’t resurface in committee hearings.
Come January, we’ll see if our lawmakers — and their leaders — have learned anything.
