I have been a public school teacher for over two decades and I just want to give some advice to Hoosier parents and employers investing in Indiana public school systems. First of all, it is necessary to point out some issues.
Over the past two years, IndyStar has reported on a series of horrific events that have occurred in central Indiana public schools. To use just a few of the most egregious examples: staff forced a student at a Brownsburg elementary school to eat her own vomit. An unlicensed teacher at Ben Davis Middle School punched a student, on camera, and will be back on the payroll for the 2024-25 school year. At IPS, a special education teacher disciplined her students by promoting “fight clubs” and an unspeakable tragedy just happened to a ten-year-old boy who was being bullied at a Greenfield school.
These tragedies overshadow the more mundane and common problems of financial mismanagement: North West Hendricks Schools’ administration not only botched a case involving a predatory coach, but then put the district into debt. Many incompetent school administrators are paid high six-figure salaries for not coming to work, and many have been accused of embezzlement.
Indiana ranks near or last in educational achievement in state-by-state comparisons, yet most districts boast graduation rates that are 90 percent or higher. The inflation of graduations should constitute administrative fraud.
Parents and employers of the state of Indiana, I feel for you. In the worst cases, parents of abused children come forward and demand a change in administrative staff. Unfortunately, Indiana schools’ problems cannot be solved by finding the right administrators. The right administrators do not exist. A new system is needed where state money is not funneled through local educational bureaucracies and where parents have access to real-time data on their students’ progress in reading comprehension, math proficiency, and content area mastery (change grades by applications and educational autopsies by test until mastery).
If things are going to change for Hoosier education, it won’t be through the institutions that have failed us time and time again. If things are going to change, it will have to be the same way the learning process begins. Indiana parents and employers need the same advice I sometimes give my students: wake up and pay attention.
Chris Edwards lives in New Palestine, IN.
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