Happy Birthday Indiana!

Little Flock Baptist Church
founded by Paschal Shelburn in 1821

Today is the 200th birthday of Indiana as a State. On this day in 1816, President James Madison authorized it, and the deed was done under an old elm tree in Corydon in south Indiana almost to Kentucky.

I had several branches of my family tree here by 1840. One might have been here in 1816, but they would converge soon after Indiana became a state:

• In 1818, my great, great, great, great uncle, Paschal Shelburn, came up from Kentucky and would eventually found the city of Shelburn, Indiana. My great, great, great grandfather, his brother, Champion Shelburn, would follow in 1837.
• In 1819, my great, great, great, great grandfather George Rich married Sarah Hawkins in Lawrence County. They would end up in Sullivan County. He may have been in Indiana territory when it became a state.
• My great, great grandfather David Y. Miller married Eva Bainter in 1829 in South Bend, Indiana.
• In 1836, my great, great, great grandfather James Walls was in Sullivan, and my great, great grandfather William Tell Walls was born.
• My great, great grandfather Eli Shepherd was in Scott County by 1836 when he married Lucinda Edwards, and they would end up in Sullivan County.

Indiana's Teacher Problem

Closing of Marion schools as students
exit to the county schools.

I thought I'd link to an article yesterday in The Washington Post called, "Indiana's got a problem: Too many teachers don't want to teach there anymore." No doubt there are elements in this article that some will dispute, but some aspects can't be disputed.

The key one is this: the turn over in teachers in the Marion School system this year is epidemic. My sense is that as many as 40% of the teachers in some of the Marion schools did not return this year. As a case in point, my son was scheduled to take a follow-up course with a favorite teacher he had last year for Bio-Med. Thankfully, they were able to find a teacher for this year, but the well-liked teacher is gone. MANY teachers are gone.

There's no disputing the problem. Why are the teachers jumping ship like rats? There is a serious problem here, and someone needs to get to the bottom of it! As this article indicates, it is not just a Marion problem. It is not just an Indiana problem. It is a widespread problem in the US. (So I am not casting aspersion at any of the leadership of the Marion Community Schools.)

Perhaps the most poignant paragraph in the article is this one: "a combination of under-resourced schools, the loss of job protections, unfair teacher evaluation methods, an increase in the amount of mandated standardized testing and the loss of professional autonomy."

That all sounds about right to me. Lots of thoughts. Here's just a few.

• I understand the drive to give choices to parents. But the consequence is that the schools that need the most help get less and less. 
• The behavior problem is MAJOR. I'd say to put those that can behave together regardless of academic ability but I'm not sure how many "behaved" classes you would actually have. All I can think of is having two teachers in many classrooms, with a well-designed system of student removal when problems arise. Again, that means more money to the very schools from which the Indiana legislature is taking it away.
• You can't ignore the lowest common denominator to focus only on the middle and upper classes. The end result is out of control crime, violence, and drug traffic, not to mention a stupid majority. 
• Decades of bureaucratic interference by both parties has sucked all the fun out of teaching. Democrats are notorious for administrative nonsense, and the Republicans in Indiana last year signed into law, was it fourteen hours worth of standardized testing?
• By merit pay linked to student scores, you reward the teachers with easy rural students and penalize those that are willing to teach difficult, inner city students.

I'll leave it at that. But lest I give the wrong impression, my four children have had great teachers and have received an excellent education in the Marion school system. They have also seen lock downs, outbursts, and uncontrolled behavior in a small Indiana town that I never experienced growing up in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida public school system.

Nevertheless, let me again emphatically agree with the principal of Marion High School last week. MHS is still the best high school in the county in terms of its academic offerings. Gifted students who have fled to the counties for better behavior in middle school should come back for high school. The AP and honors possibilities at MHS are unmatched by the county schools, as far as I can tell.

What's up with RFRA?

I am truly fascinated at the firestorm over the Religious Freedom Renewal Act. I'm sure Governor Pence had no idea. So many thoughts and questions.

My main question is why it has gone up in flames in Indiana and not in any of the other places where similar laws have passed. This morning I woke up with a hypothesis.

1. I don't think it's so much what the law itself says or actually does. The law presents itself as a law that is "for" religious people. Take Indiana Wesleyan University. Part of our purpose is to form students in a certain Christian way, so it is important to us that faculty broadly embrace the religious values of the university as a matter of their free will.

So we would not hire an atheist to teach here. We do not hate atheists. We have students who are atheists. Our cafeteria feeds atheists, and atheists do not automatically receive parking tickets on campus. We respect atheists as people. It just would contradict our purposes to have them teach courses about God.

So this act purports to protect these religious freedoms. They are not meant to be against people but to allow people with certain convictions to be different. It's about the freedom of religion. If a certain synagogue believes that their building would become unclean if an uncircumcised man enters, then I am okay with them prohibiting uncircumcised men from entering.

2. But I think the reason why this particular law has caused such a furor is the context, the perceived reasons for the law. So, it would be different if there were some religious person who was being oppressed and this law was a response. Instead, this law comes in the context of a state that is on a certain trajectory in relation to issues of same-sex marriage. It's proponents have set up the context of the law in relation to the issue of same-sex marriage.

And there is the reason for the firestorm, I suspect. The law has come in a context that makes it seem against a group of people rather than for a group of people. Perception is reality. I can see clearly that no amount of explanation is going to change the perception on this one. You can re-read the law out loud and explain it till you're blue in the face. The damage seems to be done.

Once again, Pence is left looking like a deer in the headlights.

3. As a sideline, these laws do not usually result in any discrimination of the sort we are hearing about, from what I hear. In case of conflict, anti-discrimination laws generally trump. That's probably Indiana's best bet, to pass a strong anti-discrimination law as a clarification.

As for Christians, the New Testament has done away with the category of clean and unclean, at least in the public sphere. We are strangers and aliens in that land anyway. We need to stop thinking of America as sacred space we need to keep from being defiled.

Every time we waste our energies trying to make broader America behave by our rules, the less we will have any capital left to spend when our churches and institutions actually do need defending.

8th Grade Biology Textbook

I was helping my son with his 8th grade biology homework tonight and came across this fun paragraph:

"Science aims to be objective, but scientists are humans too. They have likes, dislikes, and occasional biases.  So, it shouldn't surprise you to discover that scientific data can be misinterpreted or misapplied..."

I was fine with the paragraph so far.  Then the thrust of the paragraph changed.

"... by scientists who want to prove a particular point.  Recommendations made by scientists with personal biases may or may not be in the public interest.  But if enough of us understand science, we can help make certain that science is applied in ways that benefit humanity" (Miller & Levine, Indiana Biology, 14).

I thought to myself, "Gee, I'm sure glad we can depend on the scientifically astute Indiana legislature to sort out the personal biases of those stinkin' subjective scientists.  We would hate for them to hurt humanity with their so called 'scientific knowledge.'"  

P.S. Those last couple sentences should be read with the following tone.

A Tale of Three States

Saturday for me started in California, stopped in Texas, and ended in Indiana. On the flight to Texas, I sat next to a business woman who started in California and moved to Texas for a better business environment.

Texas is of course Tea Party heaven. The legislature only meets once every other year to set a budget. It's really the counties that run their own show. There's no income tax. Not a great place to be poor, I suspect.

California is over-regulated and over-burocracied on every level. The legislature couldn't balance its budget to save its life. Great place to be if you aren't interested in working... ever.

Indiana is somewhere in the middle. I think our welfare system needs massive fixing too. A lot of waste there, but it's not like we have a lot of jobs right now either.

I'll just leave it at that. The contrast just struck me as I was traveling. I'm not in a position to try to fix anything. And I can't imagine any politician having or being able to pass a balanced solution anyway.

Indiana Education Reform

Governor Mitch Daniels signed into law yesterday a bill that allows students to take the tax money appropriated for them in the public schools and use it toward private schools.  If I understand correctly, it mainly funds middle and lower income families, which I presume is what Governor Daniels meant by social justice.

First of all, I like Daniels.  I voted for Daniels.  I consider him an honorable man.  He would make a better Republican President than anyone else I know in the field.

I have two strong concerns about this particular program.

1. The first is that the public school system, when it functions properly, is meant to provide a neutral education zone that equips the public to be profitable and fully functioning members of society.  Private schools, on the other hand, like home schools, are often mechanisms for insulating children into tribal backwaters.

Let's say there was a city where most people were Schenckacrucians, a new religion that believes the earth is flat and that we should abolish the Constitution in favor of my Book of Schenck.  The redistribution of funds for public education will only add to the return to pre-modern tribalism that is well underway in America by allowing the loony parents of Cultsville to send their children to my private school.

2. The problem with the public schools--I say as someone with several children in them and very, very close friends who are on the ground in them--is not the teachers.  The problem are the kids who daily call their teachers obscenities in the middle of class that I can't even mention here (I'm talking elementary school).  These are the kids who have all manner of defiance disorders who, because of funding cuts, have nowhere to go but the public school classroom.  They flip desks, daily cause classrooms to be emptied of the good students so that whoever--sometimes funding cuts have reduced support staff almost to secretaries in the office--can talk them down.  School personnel are not allowed to touch them and are discouraged from calling the police.

These are the kids who are in class with your children who, if they were adults, would be locked up or be put in a mental health facility.  Funding cuts take away support systems like behaviorists and clinical social workers--four such jobs have been eliminated from the Marion Community Schools system already for next year.  And we criticize and hold accountable teachers who are not trained to do that level of psychotherapy and abnormal behavior management on a daily basis. These are not special ed issues--they are mental health issues beyond the competency of teacher training.

How can a school pass ISTEP when these students, and mentally challenged students, and students who have  massive attendance problems are part of the assessment?  And then we tell the teacher they will be penalized if their class as a whole doesn't improve?  We discourage them from taking on hard classes because their pay would be contingent on a no win situation.

My son takes Taekwondo and occasionally, the master will have them play a game where they compete to see who can pull a strip of cloth out from behind their opponent.  But he sometimes ties it so that, without the person knowing it, there's no real chance he or she can win.

That's what we've been doing to the public school system these last ten years.  We've set it up for failure and then treated our teachers like dirt when their students' test scores don't improve.  This new law, however well intentioned, is yet another example of hamstringing an incredibly important part of the American social contract... in my opinion.