ESTABLISHED IN 2011, the Choice Scholarship Program allows parents to use state funds to opt out of the public school system and send their kids to a participating parochial or nonreligious private school. As another academic year dawns, here’s a quick review.

INDIANA’S VOUCHER PLAN IS GROWING BRISKLY. Enrollment in the Choice Scholarship Program ballooned in 2023–24 to 70,095 students, a 31-percent increase over the previous school year and the largest year-over-year jump ever. The money the state handed out for vouchers also increased massively, reaching $439 million in tuition grants to parochial or other private schools. That’s a 40-percent increase over the previous year.

VOUCHERS AREN’T THE ONLY FINANCIAL AID ON OFFER. Parents can also avail themselves of education savings accounts and tax-credit scholarships. The Indiana Education Scholarship Account Program, which went into effect in July 2024, allows students with disabilities (and their siblings) to use dedicated scholarship money for approved educational programs, therapies, and other education-related expenses. Also, a School Scholarship Tax Credit is available to those donating to scholarshipgranting organizations.

SIMILAR PROGRAMS HAVE TAKEN HOLD IN OTHER STATES TOO. According to EducationWeek, as of June 2024, 29 states plus the District of Columbia offer some form of financial assistance to parents to facilitate school choice. The first was established in Milwaukee in 1990.

THE GROUP OF HOOSIER STUDENTS WHO QUALIFY NOW INCLUDES … PRETTY MUCH ALL OF THEM. When voucher programs initially gained traction around the country, they were often presented as a way to create more educational options for low-income families stuck with whatever public school their kids were assigned to. This was also the argument originally presented in Indiana. But in 2023, the Indiana General Assembly repealed most student qualification requirements (including previous enrollment in a public school) and allowed even higher-income families to get vouchers. For the 2024–25 school year, the salary cap for a family of four rose to $230,880. In other words, it’s now possible to have private school tuition underwritten with public funds, even for children who already attend a private school and whose family’s income is well above Indiana’s household median of $66,800.

THE “GIVING DISADVANTAGED FAMILIES CHOICES” MOTIVE FOR VOUCHERS HAS BECOME HARDER TO DEFEND. The Indiana Department of Education describes the typical Hoosier voucher student as a white, elementary school–age girl from a four- or five-person household with an income of almost $100,000. White students make up 64 percent of voucher users, up about 2.5 percent from the 2022–23 school year. The number of Black students with vouchers dropped half a percent over the same time span to 8.9 percent, while the number of Hispanic voucher-using students declined from 19 percent to 17.3 percent.

THE NUMBER OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS THAT ACCEPT VOUCHERS IS ALSO INCREASING. The Indianapolis-based pro-voucher group EdChoice reports that during the 2023–24 school year, 357 private schools participated in the program statewide. That’s a near-doubling of available learning facilities since the program was instituted in 2011. The two private schools receiving the most students and funds from the voucher program, both of which happen to be in Indianapolis, are Heritage Christian School (883 students and $5,697,076) and Roncalli High School (854 students and $5,651,614). Fourteen schools joined the program in 2023–24, the biggest expansion of any year since the program’s inception. Critics worry because private schools don’t have to meet the same reporting or transparency standards as public schools. Democratic state lawmakers tried to prevent voucher funds from going to private schools that discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community on religious grounds but were unable to overcome the state’s Republican supermajority.

VOUCHERS TYPICALLY DON’T COVER PRIVATE SCHOOL EXPENSES IN THEIR ENTIRETY. The calculation of a particular student’s voucher is based on family income. During the 2023–24 school year, the average award amount was $6,264, while the average price of private school tuition and fees was $7,749.

THE NUMBER OF STUDENTS USING VOUCHERS IS STILL FAIRLY LOW, BUT THEIR RANKS ARE SLOWLY GROWING. According to the Indiana Department of Education, only about 6 percent of all Indiana students use vouchers. Almost 87 percent of Indiana’s K-12 population attended public schools in the 2023–24 academic year, roughly half a percentage point less than the 2022–23 year. That percentage is expected to shrink again when 2024–25 numbers are in.

CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND THE PROGRAM. The state still maintains that as many Indiana families as possible should be able to avail themselves of choices in education. Opponents point out that every voucher handed to a parent is essentially money out of the pocket of the public school system they rejected. Also, the latest state numbers indicate that use of the program is growing most rapidly in segments of Hoosier society that arguably need it the least. During the 2023–24 school year, almost 8,000 voucher students hailed from households earning between $150,000 to $200,000 annually. The number of students from households taking in more than $200,000 rose almost tenfold, from 354 in 2022–23 to 3,700 in 2023–24. The number of children from those two brackets accounted for more than half of the program’s total growth of 16,720 students in 2023–24. During that same timeframe, the number of voucher families making less than $100,000 grew by only 14 percent.

The post Speed Read: Spoiled For Choice appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

ON A DRIPPY October Saturday in 1973, I’m standing, cornet in hand, with 145 fellow members of the Franklin Community High School marching band, preparing to step onto the field.

Or more accurately, into the field. Here at the walled Southport High School football stadium—a regional site for the inaugural All-State Marching Band Contest—the turf has already been pounded into pudding by the several-hundred high-stepping feet that came before us. We begin our performance on a mucky plain where the white yard lines have been trampled beyond recognition, our feet sling mud like mini monster trucks, and a 90-degree turn can become a slippery 360.

Nine minutes later we unleash our brassy finale, “My Way,” and exit the field minus an array of scattered shoes and majorette boots. But in the daylong saga of band versus nature, we keep our composure as other schools lose theirs, punching our ticket to the finals of the first true state marching band championship in Indiana history.

Today, the state marching band finals aren’t soloing anymore. Two other major marching music makers also crown their champions in Indy. Bands of America arrived in the same year as the Hoosier (later RCA) Dome in 1984. Its Grand Nationals annually attract about 100 bands, including many of the nation’s high school heavyweights. (Civic pride moment: Carmel and Avon finished first and second in 2022; three other Indiana bands made the finals—Brownsburg finished in eighth, Fishers in 10th, and Castle in 12th.) In 2008, Indy managed to snare Drum Corps International, which bills itself as “marching music’s major league.” Unlike most marching bands, DCI involves independent drum and bugle corps from across the country. Band members are 14 to 22 years old, prospects must ace an audition, and woodwinds need not apply. This gives Indianapolis a trifecta of state, national, and international marching contests. 

The 50 years after 1973 witnessed an evolution in the marching arts, but the 50 years before 1973 tell a forgotten tale of how we almost stifled the development of a state marching band championship in Indiana. The state showed its musical chops early when Notre Dame founded the nation’s first collegiate marching band in 1845. Purdue claimed its own first in 1907 when its marching band audaciously broke military formation to create a block letter “P.”

Illinois sparked the contest movement for high school bands in 1923 when the Chicago Piano Club sponsored a new competition, the Schools Band Contest of America.

Indiana quickly caught the wave. “Students from all parts of the state will assemble here for what is expected to be the greatest contest of its kind in the state’s history,” a 1926 Muncie Star Press article said of an upcoming band, orchestra, and choir competition sponsored by the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce. That same year, the first band camp in history opened near LaGrange, and band contests got a governing body, the Indiana School Band and Orchestra Association (the forerunner of today’s ISSMA). In 1927, the first authorized high school band and orchestra contests in the state took place in Elkhart, where 40 percent of the nation’s band instruments were manufactured. High school band was booming. Until 1935, when Association members separated Northern Indiana from the central and southern portion. “The Hoosier state will have two groups of music champions next year,” The Indianapolis Star declared.

This created a vacuum of statewide competitions. It wasn’t until 1947 that high school marching units got their chance to square off again at the Indiana State Fair. Only 11 bands took the first Band Day challenge, but in the ensuing years, the number of participants more than octupled, drawing an all-time high of 94 in 1962. The notion of marching band as a team sport wasn’t lost on WTTV Channel 4, which began live broadcasts. Yet, Band Day was never a true state championship. Performances were on a narrow horse racing track instead of a 100-yard football field, limiting what bands could do to show off their skills.

It would be another decade before the imaginary north-south wall dissolved with the 1973 All-State Marching Band Contest. Its significance was instant, with 98 bands statewide entering.

As we leave 1973 in the echoes of contests past, I should mention how my school finished in the All-State finals. When the day came, it was sunny, the field was grassy, the yard lines were intact, our blue uniforms stayed clean—and we placed fourth in Class B, the middle of the three divisions. We should have celebrated, but we didn’t. Only the two highest finishers in each class received trophies, so we left empty-handed.

It took me decades to fully appreciate our accomplishment. The ISSMA website lists only the top five bands in each division from 1973. So there we are in elite company, one of 15 finalists out of the total 98 bands that entered. We were the first band from our school to crack a statewide top five since Band Day 1957. And except for the crew that took fourth in 1977, no Franklin marching band after us has matched, let alone surpassed, what we achieved.

The soggy fledgling event that I experienced at age 17 marks its golden anniversary this month, and aside from the basic elements of music, marching, and a 100-yard stage, the two eras have about as much in common as sousaphones and smartphones. Let’s compare.

VENUES
The current battlefield of the bands is as major league as it gets: Lucas Oil Stadium. Sure, it was conceived as a pigskin palace, but how many other NFL venues included accommodations for marching bands in their blueprints? A warmup area and a black curtain backdrop were incorporated into the original design to facilitate music competitions. The stadium sports 67,000 seats, plus luxury suites for the full geek experience. The 2023 state marching finals on October 28 and the Grand Nationals on November 9–11 will resound beneath the retractable roof.

In 1973, our last-round showdown unfolded on a grassy gridiron quaintly known as Space Pioneers Field. The Indianapolis Public Schools facility, which hosted the games of Northwest High School (now a middle school), reportedly got the gig because of its “excellent viewing tower for watching the program.”

TRANSPORTATION
The truck stops here. “Pretty much every band has at least one semi,” says Mick Bridgewater, executive director of the Indiana State School Music Association, which oversees the state finals. “In the ’70s, you might have had a U-Haul. Now, some bands need three, four, or five semis [to haul gear].”

INSTRUMENTATION
Searching for a violin player on a marching field was the 1973 equivalent of a snipe hunt. But today’s high school bands employ a variety of instruments that would never have been seen, let alone heard, at the first state finals—such as electric guitar, timpani, synthesizer and, yes, violin. Even singing won’t get your band banned.

THE MUSIC ITSELF
“In the ’70s and ’80s, and even in the early ’90s, directors picked maybe three pieces that they thought were cool,” explains Mark Middleton, ISSMA instrumental education director. “Now, there’s a theme to the show.” In the 1973 state finals, Anderson High School’s selections included Ringling Bros. circus music, “Eleanor Rigby,” and the title song from How the West Was Won.

FIELD SHOWS
Back in the day, raised steps and snappy 90-degree turns defined the marching genre. Today, field performers move quickly and constantly. It’s like watching a lava lamp with legs.

The post Time Marches On appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

Michael McRobbie swears Mitch Daniels isn’t the problem.

But it has been inconvenient trying to build a legacy as Indiana University president with the headline-making former governor nearby leading Purdue University. The Atlantic, Forbes, and CNBC covered Purdue’s years-long tuition freeze, solidifying Daniels’s reputation as a reformer in higher education. McRobbie has tackled the student affordability crisis at IU, too—with impressive results. His straightforward program to limit student debt saved alumni more than $138 million. It led to law changes in more than a dozen states. But Forbes didn’t mention it.

Beyond addressing debt, McRobbie’s significant impact on IU in his 14 years as president happened largely under the radar. He built IU’s public health and engineering programs from scratch, doubled enrollment of minority students, improved the graduation rate, and built IU’s reputation as a top research university. But even in niche industry publications like Inside Higher Ed, Daniels was at least mentioned in, if not the subject of, 114 articles since he became Purdue president. A similar search for McRobbie turned up only 26.

This dynamic is nothing new for McRobbie. “He’s always going to get attention beyond what a normal university is going to get,” McRobbie says of the man who was once floated as a U.S. presidential candidate. “I think the question of whether we’ve gotten the attention we deserve is not related to that. If there wasn’t Mitch there, or wasn’t Purdue there, I think it would still be an issue.”

Teresa Lubbers, Indiana’s higher education commissioner, has worked with both men. She says their styles are different, “but I don’t think that diminishes their individual effectiveness.” Daniels is part of a new breed of higher education presidents who are outsiders, coming into universities to shake up the establishment after a career in politics or business. McRobbie was a conventional hire, rising through the administration over decades to eventually arrive at the top job. But that’s also one reason those who work with McRobbie like him. They say McRobbie is one of the most effective higher education leaders in modern history. He’s just understated.

“He seems to have been the right person, at the right time, with the right kind of vision for where IU needed to go,” Lubbers says. “I think he has been a transformational leader. He’s proven he’s willing to take thoughtful risk.”

McRobbie describes himself now as a Hoosier by choice. But his journey to IU actually started about 10,000 miles away in Australia, where he was born, raised, and began what would become a lengthy academic career. More than a decade after earning U.S. citizenship, the Australian accent from his childhood in Melbourne and Queensland still remains. At college, McRobbie majored in philosophy. His 1979 dissertation for The Australian National University is a 280-page deep dive into proof theory, logic, and “the ways of reasonableness.” He studied automated reasoning and artificial intelligence, and eventually became an expert in computer science and information technology there.

McRobbie’s academic ventures in Australia impressed former IU President Myles Brand, who hired the Fulbright Scholar in 1997 to become the university’s chief information officer. Brand tasked McRobbie with “bringing Indiana University into the modern era as it relates to information technology,” IU trustee Pat Shoulders says. When he arrived, IU’s servers were out in an abandoned elementary school on the bypass, basically an afterthought. Under McRobbie’s direction, IU developed a high-speed fiber network linking IU with other universities, founded IU’s School of Informatics, and helped IU acquire some of the nation’s fastest supercomputers in order to push the boundaries of IU research. He was eventually promoted to become IU’s vice president for research—then again to become its interim provost.

McRobbie took over the top job at IU in 2007, when his predecessor, Adam Herbert, was driven out after a few years as president. Angry faculty members argued that Herbert wasn’t a good decision-maker. John Walbridge, president of the Bloomington Faculty Council, says that when Herbert left, a dean told him that university presidents had to move often, “because after that you’ve made so many decisions that made someone mad that it’s impossible to be effective.”

Fourteen years in, McRobbie has never had that issue. He has largely enjoyed the faculty’s support. And he has showed it in return, even in simple ways. McRobbie personally calls each IU professor when they are honored by the university or in their fields of research. While many presidents consider professors to be a “necessary nuisance,” McRobbie is different, Walbridge says. “A lot of university presidents are at war with their faculty, and he has never been. Often, when the university president retires, people are glad to see the back of him. That’s not generally the case with McRobbie.”

While McRobbie’s head-to-the-ground approach has been popular with faculty, he hasn’t always been a favorite of students. A group of Indiana Daily Student opinion writers went so far as to say in a recent headline that McRobbie “ignored student needs,” which will cost him his legacy. “You would be hard-pressed to find a student or IU worker who has interacted with McRobbie personally,” according to the piece. Those concerns came to the surface even as his tenure was just starting. In 2007, IU’s then-student government leader told the IDS that McRobbie had failed to respond to meeting requests despite repeated attempts. “It’s not just a view, it’s the truth. He is not involved enough,” the student, Betsy Henke, said at the time.

McRobbie’s record is complicated in some other areas as well, such as student diversity. IU has almost doubled the amount of minority students across its campuses since McRobbie took over. Students of color now make up 28 percent of IU’s student body, compared to 14.5 percent in 2007. But the Black population there has not followed suit. The number of Black undergraduates is about the same as it was when McRobbie started. Compare that to IU’s Hispanic population, which has more than tripled over the same period. According to Carolyn Calloway-Thomas, chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at IU, McRobbie was “devoted” to the issue throughout his tenure, but the next president needs to double down on his work. “Indiana University has not done every single thing it might have done” to improve diversity, Calloway-Thomas says.

Still, McRobbie has accomplished something rare in higher education leadership these days: longevity. His tenure is twice as long as that of the average university president. “It’s a real achievement,” Daniels says of McRobbie. “Frequently people say, ‘How are things going?’ I say, ‘Great, but that could change in five minutes at this job.’ Fortunately for Michael, those five minutes never came.”

Among U.S. higher ed leaders, McRobbie has one of the more reserved personalities, says Molly Ott, an associate professor at Arizona State University who studies higher education leadership. He has “followed the template of what historically a successful presidency has been,” and avoided elevating his own personality above the institution. That tends to go over well with faculty members, who often stay at the university long enough to experience multiple presidential administrations, priorities, and personalities. McRobbie knows he’s the face of the institution and the decision-maker. But he believes the success of a university rarely can be attributed to one person. “I’m not ego-less,” McRobbie says. “I’m proud of what’s been achieved, but I’m aware of how much is due to the efforts of hundreds of other people.”

John Watson, a plant biologist and IU professor, describes McRobbie as the “calm, steady leader that we really needed and not the rah-rah cheerleader type. Just good solid logic.”

Board of trustees chairman Michael Mirro believes McRobbie has proven himself in times of crisis. He points to McRobbie’s leadership during the early, chaotic days of the pandemic. McRobbie came up with the idea to bring IU’s COVID-19 testing in house by repurposing existing testing infrastructure. “He’s a problem-solver, and he also plans very well,” Mirro says. “He is, in that regard, unflappable by these major dislocations and dystopian events.”

McRobbie says he has stuck to the same modus operandi throughout his career: He makes decisions after gathering the experts and “having them argue out the courses of action. I really am a strong believer in the fact that if you can rigorously debate something with experts, based on data and facts and reason, you can work your way to the best solution.”

As he prepares to retire, McRobbie says he wants to be remembered for thinking strategically, for being a leader who didn’t care about “gimmicks.” If he was referring to Purdue’s media-friendly tuition freeze, he didn’t say. But IU’s approach to student debt is the opposite of flashy: The university now regularly sends a letter to each student informing them about their debt load, and what it’s likely to cost them with interest when they graduate. It hasn’t gotten much press, but McRobbie’s concept has served its purpose well, resulting in a 21.6 percent reduction in borrowing across IU’s campuses. Lumina Foundation president Jamie Merisotis, who oversees grants that go to IU, acknowledges that the university “has done a lot that hasn’t gotten attention.” But, Merisotis says, the student debt reduction program has been a success that deserved more praise. “When you’re living in the same state as Mitch Daniels, that’s certainly a complication,” he says. “But Michael has done a fantastic job.”

Perhaps the most obvious example of the way McRobbie’s brain works—and how he used his penchant for logic to put his stamp on the institution—is the extensive academic restructuring he organized. McRobbie saw that IU had been slow to adapt to some 21st-century academic trends. He combined several departments into a media school, and led the creation of 10 new programs, including two devoted to public health, an engineering program, and an architecture school. “I think that a lot of my tenure has been about modernizing and bringing Indiana University up to date,” McRobbie says. “We had slipped behind in some areas. There were opportunities that we hadn’t taken advantage of.”

His focus on improving the academic excellence of IU resulted in increased graduation rates, from 38 percent to nearly 53 percent over his tenure. The university now has more research funding—$854 million—than ever before. It is no longer one of the only public universities its size lacking an engineering program. IU’s public health schools have proven useful to the state during the pandemic, as researchers studied the virus and conducted contact tracing in Indianapolis. According to McRobbie, the full potential of the academic changes will continue to be proven over time: “The impact is not going to happen overnight,” he says.

McRobbie believes his legacy at IU will depend on whether the next president—Kennesaw State University’s president, Pamela Whitten—continues his approach or takes IU on an alternate course. “I’ve seen institutions where an enormous amount has been done by a president, and then someone else has come on—and I’m not being critical—but has decided to move in a completely different direction,” McRobbie says. Consequently, momentum is lost.

Whatever path IU takes next, Mirro, the trustee, believes they’re not likely to forget McRobbie’s impact: “He’s going to be a very hard act to follow.”

The post Michael McRobbie Is Leaving Bloomington With No Regrets appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

In 1998, recently retired multimillionaire Christel DeHaan flew to Mexico City to meet a nun who was running an orphanage in need of financial assistance. The facility had no generator or clean water, a Forbes story reported. Some children walked six miles to the school because the broken-down bus was stranded in the orphanage’s yard. 

DeHaan could have easily signed a check, boarded a plane back to Indianapolis, and patted herself on the back. It wouldn’t have made a dent in her net worth. Two years earlier, she had sold her company, Resort Condominiums International, for $825 million. But covering immediate maintenance needs wasn’t going to change the future for these orphans. DeHaan knew that, and she wanted to do more. So one of the richest self-made businesswomen in the world came out of retirement to build Christel House. 

The mission of the nonprofit organization was and still is to break the cycle of poverty around the world through education, in conjunction with other services provided through its schools. Today, Christel House operates two charter schools in Indianapolis and private schools on three continents. In October 2020, its newest school opened in Jamaica, serving children in the second-poorest country in the Caribbean. This was the first Christel House school opening without its ambitious founder, though. DeHaan died four months earlier. By the time of her death last June at the age of 77, she had donated $174 million to the organization. 

In the nonprofit world, a visionary founder’s death can be devastating, especially if that person micromanaged the organization. There’s even a name for it: “founder’s syndrome,” when a nonprofit team behaves more according to what they think the founder will approve of, as opposed to focusing on a mission. 

DeHaan was certainly a big part of the brand at Christel House, but she never fell into that trap. She prepared the nonprofit for the day when she would be gone. That planning went far beyond making sure it was well funded. By putting in place many of the same policies and organizational structures that made her business so successful, she gave Christel House the fighting chance she always wanted for at-risk students.   

To understand what motivated DeHaan to dedicate her last years to poor kids, consider where she came from. In 1942, in the depths of World War II, she was born in Nördlingen, Germany. Her father, German soldier Adolf Stark, died when she was 3. Germany’s economy was in ruins, and food was scarce. Christel’s mother, Anna, was left to fend for herself and her daughters on her own. She started an ironing business and taught Christel how to haul coal and forage for food. Despite their own hardships, the girls watched their mom help neighbors in need. DeHaan said later in life, “Our mother instilled in me the philosophy of giving that has guided my actions throughout my life.” 

After high school, DeHaan spent a year as a nanny in England before returning to Nördlingen and taking a job as a secretary at a U.S. Army base. There, she met a medic from Indiana. They married and moved with their first son to Indianapolis. By the early 1970s, though, she and her first husband had divorced. She attended what is now known as the University of Indianapolis while raising two sons and working as a secretary. She married Jon DeHaan in 1973, and they began developing RCI. 

To support causes they cared about, the DeHaans established the RCI Foundation. Two years after they divorced in 1987, Christel bought Jon’s half of the company for $67.5 million. She continued to expand RCI, which at its peak employed 4,000 people across 38 countries. Cheryl Wendling, a former colleague there, says DeHaan demanded excellence from everyone, and modeled the hard work she expected of others. It wasn’t unusual to get emails from her in the middle of the night. It paid off when she sold the company, profiting an estimated $550 million. 

When DeHaan retired, she reorganized the RCI Foundation into a private family fund, the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation. She now had the means to carry out her mother’s philosophy of giving on a grand scale. DeHaan could dole out grants and enjoy her retirement. The foundation was supposed to be her sole philanthropic vehicle when she retired from RCI, but things didn’t work out that way. When she decided to found Christel House after that trip to Mexico in 1998, DeHaan asked herself if there was a practical way to change the life course of children trapped in deep poverty. She decided there was, but it was going to involve a more holistic approach than just opening a standard school.

“She had an unreasonable belief in the ability to get things done,” says former Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, who now serves as president and CEO of Christel House International. “She was totally dismissive of barriers and obstacles, and that’s how she has been able to achieve the impossible. Normal people don’t have that. That’s how the world changes.” 

For example, people told her that locating schools in places like Tacubaya, one of the poorest sections of Mexico City, was too dangerous. There were more promising spots for a safe school. But she continued to choose communities where danger was an obstacle. Peterson tells the story of a young boy who was absent from class two days in a row at the first Christel House location. On the third day, a representative from the school went to the child’s home. His mother said her son would be in school the next day, but there had been a dead body on the apartment stairs the last two days. She wasn’t going to ask her son to use the stairs until someone removed the body. From the beginning of Christel House, DeHaan put in place safety measures such as 24-hour-a-day security guards so employees could more safely look after students like that in risky neighborhoods. 

Peterson says many schools like Christel House feel a temptation to admit children from slightly better backgrounds or those who are gifted and talented. They would perform better on standardized tests and make the schools look better relative to applicable benchmarks. But that was not DeHaan’s vision or the resulting education model. Instead, the consistent focus was on children who came from very deep poverty. They were the customers. 

“Christel House is a very businesslike organization, structured by Christel to operate like a business where the ultimate goal is not profits for shareholders but high-quality education for impoverished kids,” Peterson says. He equates how she ran Christel House to his experience working at Eli Lilly and Company, with rigorous business plans and processes, clear revenue and expenditure targets, and accountability measures. Among other practices that are unusual for a nonprofit, financial incentives are offered up and down the organizational chart when goals are exceeded. 

DeHaan also wrote a detailed operations manual, which has been guiding the organization since at least 2001, when the second and third locations opened in India and South Africa. The lengthy document focuses heavily on data collection and analysis. “Christel always said, ‘What gets measured gets done,’” Wendling says. What’s more, Christel House entities were set up to be governed mostly by local boards, minimizing the impact of changes in leadership at the corporate level.  

The non-academic programming that Christel House offered from the beginning also made it unique. Each of the schools provided healthcare, character development, meals, family assistance, and college and career support. When a student graduated from high school, Christel House stayed in touch for at least five years. This, of course, took money. DeHaan set up Christel House to operate in perpetuity. A significant portion of her estate—still in the process of being adjudicated by the courts and last estimated to be $950 million—will go to support Christel House and cover 100 percent of its administrative, capital, and fundraising costs. 

By the time she passed away, DeHaan had set a focused mission for her nonprofit, drawn up some unique policies to ensure its survival, and established a large endowment. But Christel House was about to face an immediate test of its ability to succeed without its founder: the takeover of troubled Manual High School.

When former Indianapolis Star columnist Matt Tully wrote a series of columns on Manual in 2009, the southside school had a graduation rate of 39 percent. Only 32 percent of its students were passing the English and math portions of the ISTEP exam. A few years later, a private takeover of the school failed, and Indianapolis Public Schools was at a loss for what to do with the institution. IPS officials began to have conversations with Christel House about helping to save the failing school. 

Anne DePrez, a close friend of DeHaan’s and chair of the board of directors of Christel House, recalls those conversations and says it felt like teetering at the top of a roller coaster that was about to plunge into new territory. Nevertheless, in 2020, Christel House agreed to a five-year partnership with IPS to operate Manual. The agreement allows existing Manual students to graduate as Manual students, and gives Christel House Academy South and Christel House Academy West in Indianapolis more room to grow. And because Manual is a public school, Christel House can use property tax funds from local taxpayers, which will free up general fund money for facilities. The organization hired its first Manual staff member last March and took over operations of the high school program last July. 

Although she’s not around to see the ongoing transformation of Manual, DeHaan seems to have prepared the nonprofit for this challenge as well. She resigned from the Christel House board a few years ago, which allowed its local leaders to acclimate to life without her. When it came to building the board, DePrez says DeHaan valued diversity in terms of ethnicity, gender, background, expertise, and skill sets. “She wanted people who were not afraid to speak their minds and challenge the status quo,” she says. 

Like the board, the new leadership at Manual has felt empowered to try new things. In addition to serving traditional students, the building will soon house a Drop Out Recovery School run by Christel House for adults going back to earn their degree. Manual now has a relationship with the University of Indianapolis and Ivy Tech that provides dual credit for some classes. The school provides childcare for parents taking classes there. And they’re exploring the idea of an Early Childhood Center at Manual that would provide a pre-K program to get southside kids started on the right foot. It all adds up to a multigenerational campus where there was once just a failing high school.  

Whatever happens with these new programs at Manual, the larger Christel House organization will continue to operate much as it has for the last 23 years. Peterson recalls discussing its future with DeHaan before she got sick. “She said, ‘I want the organization to evolve. I want it to change. You’re going to have ideas that are different from mine, and that’s good. I don’t want to control things from the great beyond,’” he says. What was nonnegotiable was sticking to the core mission: transforming the lives of impoverished children. 

DeHaan’s hometown of Nördlingen was built in a massive crater formed by a meteor millennia ago. As a result, its stone buildings are studded with diamonds. Perhaps as a child in post-war Germany, DeHaan admired those tiny gems trapped inside the rock. As an adult, she certainly had a talent for seeing diamonds in the rough—people who needed help breaking free from poverty—and she began to pluck them out.

The post How Christel House Is Keeping Its Founder’s Vision Alive appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

Weekday mornings, my sons take packed lunches and drinks to their workstations and log onto meetings that kick off their day. They aren’t marketing gurus or day traders. The devices they use to conduct their work are IPS-issued iPads; their jobs are pre-K and kindergarten classes. Their morning meeting app, Microsoft Teams, is notorious for collecting and selling user data and no one—not their parents, not their teachers, certainly not the boys themselves—has a choice about permitting it to scrape data. In virtual learning, the options are Microsoft Teams or truancy.

After the morning meeting ends, the boys launch into a schedule of activities that’s mostly disengaged from the human interactions that serve young children best: a video game to teach math, YouTube language lessons, an ebook interface that reads aloud, and more. Of all six to 10 apps my sons are required to use in their daily learning, only two  are rated “pass” by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that rates educational technology privacy. Common Sense compiles scores by assessing a range of privacy concern categories, including data collection, sharing, selling, and other aspects, and considers an app’s overall transparency on privacy issues.

One of the two that pass, Clever, is simply a portal to organize other apps. Most of the rest earn warnings from Common Sense’s evaluations; Their privacy policies allow school districts to opt-in on behalf  of their students. The primary IPS course management system, Schoology,  even bypasses compliance with FERPA, the federal law requiring school officials to guard student privacy, by exempting itself from designation as a school official and offloading responsibility for data privacy to the school administrators who elect to use it.

The worst privacy policy of the IPS-required apps belongs to Epic! Unlimited Books for Kids, an ebook subscription app. Epic!’s service is free to students during school, but requires a paid subscription afterhours. It’s safe to assume free apps generate profit from your data; as the old adage puts it, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Perhaps free Epic! use is simply enticing families to subscribe, and Epic! isn’t selling children’s data; Epic!’s privacy policy is so bad that we’ll never know. This makes sense as Epic! was created not to provide an educational service but to exploit the untapped children’s ebook market.

What’s worse, Epic!’s interactive “read to me” feature may actually decrease children’s comprehension while it mines their data. This would be concerning to their father and me even if we weren’t both writers and English professors, but as book people, we are particularly alarmed. What’s worse, the four-year-old is already demonstrating this impact—he wanders around the house reciting stories from the Epic! app without any understanding of their content. This particular “free” app comes at a significant potential cost.

Conversely, DreamBox Math, which passes the Common Sense evaluation, charges $7,900 per school. Compared with free apps, it may still be a bargain, given that it boasts a Harvard study attesting to its effectiveness. This may also explain why I keep getting emails insisting that my children log onto DreamBox for 30-60 minutes each week. Schools don’t want to waste such expenditures.

But effective or not, DreamBox leaves my children irritable, listless, and less verbal than usual, strung out in the same way that too much TV does, whereas their teachers’ video lessons, which they complete in workbooks, engage them fully in their learning. Epic! troubles us even further, as we have no control over which of its 40,000+ books they read unless we read with them while attempting to work from home, a key recommendation of the AAP for all app use which is, of course, impossible to do while doing our jobs. An app that offers such a massive, unfiltered quantity of options isn’t a curricular enhancement—it’s busy work.

And since IPS’s socially-distanced in-classroom pandemic procedures rely heavily on apps, as well, we can’t monitor our children’s use when schools are open. It wasn’t until our kindergartener came home using “fat” as a pejorative and reported the fat-phobia and gender-essentialism he’d been learning from books in Epic! that we fully understood the problem. We’re working hard to raise kind, generous children who will help build an inclusive community, so hearing marginalizing, hurtful language from them after a single day of Epic! use reinforces our perception that its purpose isn’t education but profit, whether via data collection or market development.

I emailed IPS COO Scott Martin in my capacity as a concerned IPS parent to ask for more information on data collection and privacy, but received no reply. Parental concerns about screen time requirements , which total three and a half to four hours a day if students complete everything on the schedule, wildly exceeding the American Association of Pediatrics’ recommendation of no more than one hours per day for pre-K and kindergarten children, have been met with similar dismissal by the district.

Every parent understands that schools are making difficult choices. But these inflexible requirements that violate first principles of early childhood education and the attendant data and privacy threats they introduce will seem, after all, like egregious failures. In our home, we spend hours every day working to mitigate the impact of this technology on our children. But we have the luxury to do so; my husband and I both remain employed from home and share parenting and virtual learning duties. Marginalized kids may not be so lucky: many have simply disappeared from their virtual learning environments. In all cases, the impact of the data privacy risks won’t be clear for months or years.

I’d like to think my kids will be fine, that the hardship of this experience will build resilience. But what we see is that they’re struggling with more than the isolation and sadness generated by school closures and the pandemic in general. We see a vibrant, loving four-year-old reduced to tantrums after using his school iPad, and regressing in language and self-control. We see a smart, eager five-year-old struggling harder to learn than ever before. If that’s the cost of staying enrolled in school during a pandemic, we can afford it. But if the purpose of their participation is to provide user data to Silicon Valley startups, the cost of free “educational” apps is too high.

Privacy ratings of IPS-required iPad apps with Common Sense links:

• DreamBox Math: Pass at 85% secure
• Epic! Unlimited Books for Kids: Warning at 50% secure
• Schoology Course Management System: Warning at 63% secure, and no FERPA compliance
• Microsoft Teams: Warning at 79% secure
• YouTube: Warning at 69% secure
• Clever data organization shell: Pass at 91% secure
• HMH iRead: Warning at 76% secure
• SeeSaw (option for teachers to share photos and materials with families, not required by IPS): Pass at 82% secure

The post Is IPS Doing Enough To Protect Kids’ Privacy During Remote Learning? appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed technology gaps that were putting a generation of Indianapolis Public Schools students at risk. As parents and students enjoy the dwindling days of summer vacation, here’s how the school district plans to bridge the digital divide:

IPS Was E-Failing

At the start of the last school year, IPS had just one internet-ready device for every three students. Statewide for the same period, 64 percent of Indiana’s traditional districts were 1:1 schools, which are pretty much what they sound like: Every single student has a device to use during the day and take home at night.

Then COVID-19 Hit

Forced to turn to e-learning, IPS conducted a survey to assess the technology needs of its students. The results had to be troubling to a school district suddenly required to teach from a distance: 40 percent of responding families lacked access to a device with a keyboard, and about 30 percent had no reliable internet connection. By contrast, a national poll in April by Pew Research Center showed that 21 percent of schoolchildren didn’t have a keyboard device and 22 percent didn’t have internet access.

The Quick Fix Was High-Tech and Old-School

IPS sent laptops to all 4,500 students (mostly high-schoolers) who indicated a need, and provided internet hotspots to anyone lacking them. For its elementary and middle school students, the district went retro and worked from paper packets of assignments.

But it Was a Band-Aid

Without sufficient technology at home, students tend to struggle to finish homework and they get lower grades, which affects how they’re perceived by their peers and teachers, says Jessica Calarco, associate professor of sociology at Indiana University. Her research focuses on that very topic—the impact social inequities can have on families, children, and schools. Negative perceptions in the classroom can have lifelong ramifications for under-resourced students, says Calarco, affecting graduation rates, job opportunities, and future earnings.

The Pandemic Prompted Bigger Steps

“What COVID-19 revealed is the depth of responsibilities that are put on school districts, and in particular our highest-needs school districts, that has very little to do with just teachers instructing students,” says Sarah Robinson Chin, director of strategy and planning for IPS.

Part of the Problem Goes Back to 2015

That’s when Indiana changed the way it funded schools. As the current formula stands, for the last funding cycle, lower-needs schools like Carmel, Zionsville, and Hamilton Southeastern received a higher percent increase in funding than higher-needs schools like IPS. At the same time, IPS is serving a student population with a higher rate of poverty, as well as more students with special needs and English learners than those neighboring schools.

A Lot of IPS Families Can’t Afford the Tech They Suddenly Need

Just 15 percent of students qualify for free and reduced-price meal services in the Hamilton Southeastern district. At these 1:1 schools, students bring their own devices or pay a fee to rent from HSE. Those additional costs aren’t something IPS can ask families to absorb in a district where 65 percent of students qualify for free and reduced-price food because of low income levels, Chin says.

So the District is Lending a Hand

This school year, IPS estimates it will spend $12 million to provide every student with a device—iPads for K–3 and Chromebooks for grades 4–12—and ensure internet access for those who need it.

And Looking for Help Footing the Bill

Part of the money for the program will come from IPS’s operations fund, and the district will issue some debt to cover the rest of the costs. The Indianapolis Public Schools Foundation launched the IPS Equity Fund in April, hoping that private donations will help close the gap.

Illustration by Sébastien Thibault

The post How IPS Plans to Bridge the Digital Divide appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

The post The IPS Magnet School Conundrum appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

Originally posted on Chalkbeat by Shaina Cavazos on October 31, 2017

One of Indiana’s largest high schools ended this past school year with almost 5,000 students, but no desks and no classrooms. The school also had very few graduates — 61 out of more than 900 seniors graduated last year.

What Indiana Virtual School did have: Tens of millions in state dollars due to come its way over the next two years, and a founder whose for-profit company charged millions of dollars in management fees and rent to the school.

Thomas Stoughton founded the school in 2011, taking advantage of a new law allowing Indiana charter schools to serve students exclusively over the internet, rather than in brick-and-mortar buildings.

In recent years, students have signed up in droves, responding to social media advertising campaigns. The school they end up attending differs widely from other online charter schools emerging across the country, with far fewer teachers per student — 1 for every 222 students last school year, according to state data — and fewer students taking and passing state exams.

As enrollment at Indiana Virtual School ballooned, so did the school’s state funding, which is distributed on a per-student basis. Some of that money has gone to AlphaCom Inc., a for-profit company also founded and led until 2016 by Stoughton. Since 2011, AlphaCom has held multiple contracts with Indiana Virtual School totaling about $6 million to provide management services and office space. A company run by Stoughton’s son also held a contract with the school.

AlphaCom’s involvement was necessary for Indiana Virtual School to launch and has now waned, according to the school’s lawyer, Thomas Burroughs. He said the school’s “innovative” approach offers a last chance to students who would have no other way to graduate. Burroughs also defended the school’s graduation rate and student-to-teacher ratio.

State education officials say they can’t intervene, and the tiny school district that oversees Indiana Virtual School has not pressed the school to improve until recently.

That leaves Indiana Virtual School operating with few checks in a state where lawmakers have pushed for an open education marketplace, with a wide menu of school options for families. In addition to schools run by traditional districts, the state also has charter schools, vouchers and tax-credit scholarships to help families pay for private school, and a new hybrid known as “innovation schools,” where charter school operators join forces with school districts.

Online charter schools, also known as virtual charter schools, are expanding quickly. Last year, more than 12,000 students across Indiana were enrolled in the schools, and that number is growing — a trend U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos supports, but some researchers find concerning.

“For the vast majority of kids,” said Michael Barbour, a Touro University California professor who studies virtual charter schools, “the way in which we currently practice full-time online learning in the U.S. is a recipe for disaster.”

***

Indiana Virtual School did not respond to requests about exactly how it spends its money. However, financial documents that the school reports to the state suggest that it is using public dollars differently from other schools like it.

Indiana Virtual School’s most recent financial report, from the 2015-16 school year, shows that it received more than $9.7 million from the state that year. That figure is based on a state formula that awards online charter schools 90 percent of the funds per student sent to brick-and-mortar schools.

That year, Indiana’s two other major online charter schools spent about two-thirds of their state dollars on instruction, a category that includes programming, remediation, and salaries. Indiana Virtual School, by contrast, spent about 10 percent of its funding on instruction.

Yet the school directed 89 percent of its state funding toward “support services,” a catch-all category that can include essential supplies such as textbooks, as well as legal and administrative services or staff training. The two other online charter schools spent about a quarter of their budgets on support services.

Another big difference: the portion of Indiana Virtual School’s budget that went to teacher salaries. Indiana Virtual School spent 7 percent of its funding on teachers and other staff. That’s compared to 19 percent for Hoosier Academy Virtual and 28 percent for Indiana Connections Academy.

With a total of 21 teachers for 4,682 students according to state data, Indiana Virtual School had one teacher for every 222 students at the end of the last school year. Many of the teachers were only part-time, according to former teachers who spoke to Chalkbeat anonymously, saying they feared retribution from their former employer. Advertisements the school posted on the state education department’s jobs website earlier this year confirm the school sought part-time teachers.

Asked about the school’s student-to-teacher ratio, Burroughs, Indiana Virtual School’s lawyer, provided updated figures for October 2017. He also disclosed a new development: As of August, Indiana Virtual School became two separate online charter schools, though they share the same principal and office address.

Between Indiana Virtual School and the new Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy, Burroughs said student enrollment surged to 6,332 since last school year. The number of teachers grew to 40, making the student-to-teacher ratio 158-to-1.

Either ratio far exceeds the 30-to-1 average at virtual schools nationwide, according to the National Education Policy Center, where researchers have studied virtual schools for years. The average ratio for brick-and-mortar schools was 17-to-1.

The school’s attorney said the current ratio is appropriate and suggested that schools with lower ratios are prioritizing the interests of educators, not children.

“The schools’ focus should be and is on helping students learn and graduate, and not on employing the maximum number of teachers deemed appropriate by teachers unions,” Burroughs said.

***

If Indiana Virtual spent such a small proportion of its funding on teachers, then where was the money going?

At least some of the school’s budget went to companies connected to the school’s founder.

Before launching Indiana Virtual School in 2011, Thomas Stoughton was involved in dozens of business ventures. He had worked in nonprofits, property management, consulting, public relations, finance, and higher education — but not as a K-12 educator.

His goal in opening Indiana Virtual School, he told Chalkbeat, was “to help and identify those kids over the years that, for whatever reason, the large educational system isn’t working for them.”

But Stoughton has combined his prior business experiences and Indiana Virtual School in a way that raises ethical questions.

Until last year, Stoughton chaired the school’s board while he was president of a for-profit company that the board hired to help manage the school. The company, AlphaCom, has charged the school more than $2.5 million in “management services” since 2011. The school also agreed to spend another $3.5 million between 2014 and 2023 to rent space in AlphaCom’s northern Indianapolis office park home.

This is an excerpt from Indiana Virtual School’s 2013 audit. During this time period, Thomas Stoughton was school board chairman and president of Alphacom.

The school also was charged more than $500,000 in 2015 by a company headed by Stoughton’s son, also named Tom Stoughton, for technology and website design services. Other clients that the company, A Simple Reminder Inc., listed on a previous version of its website included Kickity Dragons, a local karate studio for toddlers, and a now-closed restaurant called Avec Moi.

An older version of A Simple Reminder’s website, including a list of clients.

Burroughs said the relationship between the school and AlphaCom was appropriate, and the school could not have launched without them. Before the school opened, it had none of its own money and relied on the company to procure office space and buy essential supplies, he said, adding that Indiana Virtual School rented from AlphaCom because it could not obtain its own lease.

“Without AlphaCom,” Burroughs said, “the schools would not exist.”

IRS rules prohibit nonprofit leaders from individually benefiting from the organizations they run. And Indiana charter law requires that contracts disclose potential conflicts like the ones that set Stoughton’s company up to profit from the school’s spending.

“Violation of any of these federal or state laws could almost certainly be grounds for charter revocation,” said Amy Osborne of the Indiana Charter School Board, one of the state’s charter school authorizers.

It’s not clear whether Stoughton or Indiana Virtual School breached any laws. But none of the recent contracts provided to Chalkbeat identifies any possible conflicts of interest. And the original contracts between the school and AlphaCom — ones that were signed while Stoughton headed both entities — have been lost, according to Burroughs.

“Unfortunately, when Indiana Virtual School was audited for the 2015 audit report, the auditor took possession of the original of that agreement and numerous other agreements and never returned them,” Burroughs told Chalkbeat.

Burroughs, who also until recently sat on Indiana Virtual School’s board, said the school no longer contracts with A Simple Reminder. He also said Stoughton eliminated conflicts when he divested from AlphaCom in June 2016. Burroughs added more detail in October 2017, saying that Stoughton had recused himself from board votes related to AlphaCom and more recently had resigned from the board entirely, “now that the schools have a solid operating foundation.” Stoughton was a board member in September 2017, according to board minutes.

The school’s board never took issue with Stoughton’s overlapping roles or the fact that the school contracted to pay his company and his son’s, according to Stoughton. “Nobody has ever questioned it,” he told Chalkbeat in May. After that brief interview, he stopped responding to questions.

The school’s board has included several people with close personal ties to Stoughton: Founding board members James Tilford (who died earlier this year) and Thomas Krudy went to the same high school as Stoughton in the 1960s. Jeff Sparks, another founding board member, said he’s known Stoughton and his brother, Steve Stoughton, a former Indiana state representative, for 30 years.

***

Many of Indiana Virtual School’s students are a lot like Lexie DeVine: They have had difficulty succeeding in a traditional school setting.

DeVine started looking into online schools a couple years ago after dealing with bullying at her school in Perry Township. When she became pregnant with her daughter, that sealed the deal.

“That’s when I really decided, yeah, I think online school would be best,” DeVine, now 18, said. “I can hold my daughter with one hand and type with another.”

DeVine is the kind of student that Percy Clark, a longtime educator and Indiana Virtual School’s superintendent, said the school was designed to serve. About 85 percent of the school’s students are poor enough to qualify for meal assistance, and Clark said many have been expelled or dropped out from their previous school.

“When you see our kids and what they’ve gone through in terms of homelessness and pregnancy or drugs or abuse, and they’ve been able to get the Core 40 diploma,” Clark said, “that’s a chance for our state to celebrate.” The Core 40 diploma is Indiana’s primary high school diploma.

Burroughs, the school’s attorney, also said the school offers a safety net for students who have left other schools or been expelled.

“A diploma, or an enhancement of their skills may open doors and allow these ‘throw away’ students to become self-supporting, tax-paying citizens rather than welfare recipients or correctional facility residents,” he said.

But DeVine’s classmates largely aren’t graduating. The school had the lowest graduation rate in the state in 2016 at 5.7 percent. In 2017, Clark said, 61 of the more than 900 seniors earned diplomas.

DeVine said she hopes to graduate by the end of this year, though she’s still working on her junior year coursework. She started at Indiana Virtual School in February 2016 when she was 16.

Many schools with needy students struggle to get them to graduation, but it’s unclear whether Indiana Virtual School has adopted practices that other schools have found can make a difference.

School officials say they are pursuing strategies that they think can help students learn. Burroughs pointed to an effort to help students who are not strong readers with a “text-to-speech” tool. He also mentioned a plan to begin “gamifying coursework,” which he said would “help students better learn and retain knowledge.”

But unlike some other virtual schools in Indiana and beyond, Indiana Virtual School says it does not provide students with free computers, an essential tool for accessing their schoolwork.

It also offers few organized ways for students to interact with each other. Some efforts appear to be underway: The school has recently posted on its website about a basketball program.

And its barebones teaching staff means students and teachers rarely connect in real time, leaving students on their own.

A science teacher who taught during the school’s early years said the lack of student interaction felt abnormal. She spoke about her experiences on the condition of anonymity.

“I found it very hard because I’m a very hands-on teacher, and I like to have that communication and contact with the students,” the former teacher said. “Not to have that, especially for the at-risk kids, was hard because those are the students who really need it.”

Unlike in other online schools, Indiana Virtual isn’t designed for teachers to give live lessons. They do not actively teach material to students whom they can see on video, hear over headphones, or chat via online messaging. Students work through class material on their own time, at their own pace, and contact their teachers only when they need or want to. Sometimes, teachers will follow up with check-ins for certain lessons.

Those conditions are challenging even for college students, said Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University who researches virtual schools.

“We recognize at a university that even these mature students who can self-regulate and who are highly motivated” need to interact with their teachers, Miron said.

One signal that the school might not be paying close attention to student participation is its 100-percent attendance rate. The information it reports to the state is based only on whether students have signed up for courses, not whether they log in to do work, according to Clark and the teachers Chalkbeat spoke with.

If students do not make progress, the immediate downside for the school is minimal. And because Indiana law allows students to remain enrolled in school until they graduate no matter their age, Indiana Virtual School can continue to collect state funds while keeping costs low.

***

There is one group that is explicitly charged with stepping in if Indiana Virtual School does not fulfill its mission. That’s the school’s authorizer — the tiny, rural Daleville school district located near Muncie.

The Indiana State Board of Education is required to get involved once a school has four F grades in a row. So far, Indiana Virtual has received two failing grades.

Some authorizers have chosen to shut down poor-performing schools or made swift, substantial changes to improve them before the state intervened. But nothing in state law or regulation compels them to — an omission that drew recent criticism from federal authorities.

Daleville has chosen to take a more passive role in spite of the school’s small teaching staff and low graduation rate and test scores. Last year, 20 percent of sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students and 8 percent of 10th-graders at Indiana Virtual passed the English and math state tests. Statewide, about half of elementary and middle school students and one-third of high school students passed both exams.

Daleville’s top official said he feels that his hands are tied.

“I can’t say, ‘Do this!’ And you have to do it,” Daleville Superintendent Paul Garrison said. “You’ve got a death sentence you can use and nothing else.”

The charter authorizer system also contains a perverse incentive to keep low-performing schools open: Authorizers are paid by the schools they oversee.

Daleville collects 3 percent of Indiana Virtual’s funding from the state, although there’s disagreement among Indiana legal experts about whether districts that authorize charter schools should. In 2015-16, the district received just shy of $300,000. After the school’s enrollment spiked, Daleville was on track to receive more than $750,000 during the last school year.

In principle, those funds are supposed to defray the district’s costs of supervising the charter school. But it’s unclear exactly how that money fits into the district’s budget, which was about $9 million in 2016. Garrison said past years’ fees have gone toward salaries for staff working with the virtual school, computers, and online course fees for Daleville district students.

Some of the fees have gone toward working with the virtual school to design a new evaluation system for it. Daleville hopes the new system will be fairer than the state’s current approach to grading schools, which looks primarily at test scores and graduation rates.

The district paid a Fort Wayne company, The Summit, $52,000 to design a model called “Evaluation of Online Learning and Virtual Efficacy,” or EVOLVE, which got an early test this summer.

“We need a different A-F system,” Clark said. “Not only for virtual schools, but for other schools, especially those schools that have unique characteristics of students.”

It’s too early to know if state officials will consider the alternative evaluation system. But there’s no question that even as poor results mount for online schools, Indiana officials are easing rules meant to hold virtual charters accountable for helping students learn.

The Indiana General Assembly this year passed bills that give even more leeway in how virtual schools are assigned A-F grades, calculate graduation rates, and expel students.

In 2017, every online charter school in Indiana received an F grade except for a hybrid school called Hoosier Academy-Indianapolis, where students attend some days in person and some days online. That school received a D this year, up from an F last year.

State Superintendent Jennifer McCormick has long said

that she is distressed by Indiana online schools’ performance.

But in an email to Chalkbeat, McCormick said the Department of Education, which she oversees, is not responsible for policing Indiana Virtual School — that falls to Daleville and, ultimately, the State Board of Education. McCormick, who also chairs the state board, has said authorizers need to get involved in virtual schools sooner, but she emphasized that’s not the education department’s call.

“The state does not equal the department when it comes to responsibility for policy,” she said. “Our role can be one of influence but is largely one of implementation of existing policies.”

While some state board members have joined McCormick in criticizing online charter schools, as a group they have consistently voted to let low-performing virtual schools stay open. The board chose not to close Hoosier Academy Virtual even though the school got seven years of F grades. Hoosier Academy’s own board voted last month to close at the end of this year because it feared repercussions from its authorizer, Ball State University.

Indiana Virtual School performed worse than Hoosier Academy, based on state data.

***

There’s one more group responsible for online charter schools in Indiana — lawmakers.

Virtual schools got a slow start in Indiana but took off once voters put a majority of Republican legislators in the General Assembly. Once there, they passed laws to allow full-time online schools and slowly increased their funding.

A number of powerful Indiana Republicans who supported those laws have received campaign contributions from K12, one of the largest online school providers in the country. That includes education committee chairs Rep. Bob Behning and Sen. Dennis Kruse, former Senate Appropriations chair Luke Kenley, House Ways & Means chair Tim Brown, and House Speaker Brian Bosma.

Kenley, who won’t be running for reelection in 2018, voted in 2011 to allow full-time virtual schools. But he has stopped proposals to increase virtual schools’ funding from making it into the state budget, and he wants his colleagues to think carefully about what they’re spending on online charter schools.

“Indiana is trying to be a leader and develop a platform with a lot of choices for a lot of different kinds of people,” Kenley said. “That’s a worthwhile pursuit, but you can’t shut your eyes and just throw money at things without the sense that success is being created there.”

Student enrollments at Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy compared to those at Indiana Connections Academy and Hoosier Academy Virtual, two other major online charter schools in the state, from 2011-12 through the beginning of the 2017-18 school year.

With the people who have the power to intervene at online charter schools allowing them to continue to grow unchecked, Indiana faces a perfect storm for problems to arise according to Diane Swanson, a Kansas State University researcher who studies government transparency and ethics.

“We can’t really rely on the people who are causing the conflicts of interest to fix it,” Swanson said. “If the policymakers don’t care and the citizens don’t apply pressure, then nothing can be fixed.”

***

For now, Stoughton appears to be oriented toward growth, not possible consequences. He and his colleagues at Indiana Virtual School are working to launch schools in Texas and Michigan, as well their second Indiana school, Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy.

Neither the Michigan Department of Education nor the Texas Education Agency has approved the schools’ charters.

Daleville officials authorized Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy to open in August. By Sept. 1, state records showed the school enrolled 2,958 students, 2,918 of whom came directly via Indiana Virtual School. The remainder came from 35 other schools across Indiana.

An excerpt from Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy’s charter proposal to Daleville Public Schools.

The school is billed as an alternative school, meant for students who struggle in a regular high school or have discipline issues. Alternative schools typically offer intensive services and support for students who would otherwise be at risk of dropping out.

Will Indiana Virtual Pathways offer those services even though Indiana Virtual has not? Clark, the school’s superintendent, did not respond to questions about the new school’s offerings for students. The school’s proposal for a new charter promises individualized “service plans” for each student, internship opportunities, and more support for needier students. But the proposal also names a “top end” of what the school’s student-to-teacher ratio can be: 250-to-1.

Even before Stoughton opened the second school, people with experience in education expressed concerns about what his ventures mean for students.

“It’s almost become a new business model for these groups, and they’re shortchanging kids in the end,” said Terri Austin, a Democratic state representative and former educator.

“How fair is it to kids when you know that some of these shady practices are going on and we turn a blind eye?” she added.

“Kids only get one chance.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The post Millions Spent In Graduating Few appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

The post Phil Gulley: A Lesson On Education appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.

The post How An Executive Order Changed A Butler Study-Abroad Group’s Travel Plans appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.