Thousands of Indiana teachers recently came to the Statehouse to ask legislators for more pay, less high-stakes testing and a review of accountability measures that, among other things, tie educator salaries to school letter grades.
There’s no doubt teachers are frustrated — Indiana’s rally echoes similar events that have happened across the nation over the past two years — but are their efforts focused on the right agents of change?
When it comes to pay, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, starting with who actually determines how much educators take home.
K-12 funding comes from a variety of sources — federal, state and local. This year, Indiana lawmakers approved more than $750 million in new K-12 spending, but they don’t actually have much say over how that money gets spent.
Teachers are employed by their local school districts, which receive funding from those various sources and determine how to spend it. While large rallies at the Statehouse attract public attention, the folks at the district level, including unions that represent teachers, actually negotiate contracts, set wages and oversee school-level budgets. Their meetings are often less publicized, and their elections are far less interesting, but they have tremendous control over how much money educators get paid.
It’s easy to oversimplify a complicated issue like K-12 funding and twist data points into a narrative that’s far from reality. That often happens when supporters of traditional public education attempt to demonize other schooling types as the reason for low teacher pay or other issues within the traditional model.
While more than 80 percent of Hoosier students attend their district-assigned public school, tens of thousands of Hoosier students choose to attend a school other than the one to which they are geographically assigned, whether that’s a charter school, private school, magnet school, home-schooling experience or a school in another public district. Far more Hoosier students take advantage of a state law allowing them to move from district to district than take advantage of the state’s private school choice programs.
In the case of public-to-public transfers, non-local, state and federal money follows the child to his or her new school, but not property taxes. Charters also do not receive the same local property tax funding for transportation and capital improvements that traditional schools receive, although they do receive a stipend from the state to cover some of the loss. Students who leave a public school using a voucher, however, never access local property taxes and actually leave a portion of their state funding — between 10% and 50% — at their assigned public school district.
Last year, a national study looking at 16 voucher programs found that they generated cumulative net savings to state and local budgets worth $3.2 billion from when they were launched through fiscal year 2015.
Simply put, school choice is not the reason why public school teachers aren’t happy with their salaries. In fact, a recent national survey found 51 percent approve of vouchers, 55 percent approve of charter schools and an overwhelming 78 percent approve of education savings accounts, a program that allows families to spend student funds in a variety of ways, including private school tuition, tutoring and other support services.
When we turn to the issues of high-stakes testing and accountability, those of us who promote school choice probably have more in common with educators than the headlines would lead you to believe.
Teachers should be free to teach their students. It’s just that simple. It’s hard to do that when their time is spent filling out bureaucratic forms in triplicate or teaching to a test that can be tied to their paychecks and changes every couple years. But accountability goes far beyond high-stakes testing. There are plenty of ways we could free up teachers locally to have more control in the classroom and less top-down management. Those changes can be made locally as well as at the Statehouse.
As we move forward into next year’s legislative session, it’s clear we’re going to have a robust conversation at the Statehouse, but we also need to move beyond those limestone walls into local communities to find out what teachers truly need and what policy changes will help them achieve their goals.
In the meantime, we need to stop demonizing those families who choose non-public or alternative public options for their children. We’re lucky to have so many options available in Indiana, and we can continue moving K-12 schooling in the right direction without admonishing our fellow Hoosiers for seeking out different opportunities.
Betsy Wiley is CEO of the Institute for Quality Education. Robert Enlow is President and CEO of EdChoice.
