Friends and Constituents,
I hope you’re all well. In case you somehow haven’t gotten ten thousand texts and emails telling you so, allow me to remind you that early voting is ongoing in Indiana, and will be up until the Monday prior to election day. Check out the recently-upgraded vote.indy.gov to find all your candidates that currently represent you, and review the sample ballot to see everything that will be on your ballot.
On the left side of the sample ballot provided by the website, there are three important questions. Public Question #1 for all of Indiana asks whether we should deny the right to bail for people accused of serious crimes. I’m absolutely a “NO” on that question - our justice system is biased against the poor already without making it worse with this amendment.
Public Question #2 for the whole state is a bit more nuanced: it asks whether we should allow judges to live outside of the county where they administer justice. I’m still solidly a “no” on that question, and think if it’s hard to find judges from an area, the state should help train more judges, not allow migratory judges from outside the area.
But for constituents of District 13 in Indianapolis, it’s the third question that has been the most controversial and frustrating. Here’s the full, detailed text as it appears on ballots:
“Shall the Indianapolis Public
Education Corporation increase
property taxes paid to the
Indianapolis Public Schools ("IPS")
and participating charter schools for
no more than four (4) years for the
purpose of funding teacher and staff
retention, professional development,
and advancing academic programs
and opportunities by imposing a
property tax rate that does not
exceed $0.372 per $100 of
assessed value and results in a
maximum annual amount that does
not exceed $95,000,000? If this
operating referendum public
question is approved by the voters,
for a median residence of $150,000,
the property's annual property tax
bill would increase by $221 per year.”
Watch this week’s video for an overview of arguments on both sides, then come back to read all the details below.
Indianapolis Public Schools is in deep trouble.
Here’s some quick history about how we came to this place we’re in today.
Indianapolis is a textbook example of “white flight”, whereby wealthier white people fled urban cores rather than live with Black people as neighbors.
In 1968, the Justice Department of the United States filed a lawsuit against IPS, alleging deliberate discrimination against Black children. IPS was forced to desegregate but dragged its heels, meaning that for decades, segregation persisted.
In 1970, Unigov combined most government services for the vast majority of Marion County into one combined City-County Council. Out of fear of wealthier, whiter communities’ opposition, township school corporations were not consolidated at the same time.
We can see the impact of this today by looking at the various median residence numbers at the bottom of the referenda in other parts of the county. Whereas IPS families’ median residences are appraised at $150,000 a year, Washington Township residences are at a median of $300,000 - fully double the value just a few miles away.
Additionally, Center Township, where IPS is located, is by far the biggest site for Tax Increment Finance deals and other tax abatements that siphon off money that would otherwise go to schools.
Though the State helps moderate the impact of varying property tax dollars, it has never offered IPS the resources to deal with the intense poverty that many families face.
When I was a child in the early 90s, I attended IPS for only about a month before my single mom decided she had to somehow find the money to send me to Catholic school or risk a terrible education.
Into that toxic stew came the school privatization “education reform” agenda. Under the banner of “school choice” which was pitched as a way to help empower families like mine, new charter schools began opening in 2001. The Indiana General Assembly offered favorable financing options and funding mechanisms to help these schools get off the ground. Smelling opportunity, education privatizers began flooding into the system, heavily marketing their schools and receiving massive funding even while many of their schools closed after financial irregularities and scandals.
In 2011, two Indianapolis Democrats founded The Mind Trust, which served as a powerful advocacy and lobbying organization that continued accelerating the rate of privatization. Ed reform groups continued buying off more and more politicians.
Throughout the last several decades, thanks in part to school board majorities bought and paid for by the privatization movement, IPS leadership has treated the charter school authorizers and lobbyists as “partners” rather than what they are - parasites who intend to kill their host. IPS leaders have continued to play nice even while the “school reform” vultures continued to dismantle IPS piece by piece over the course of a decade.
Finally, last year Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett lobbied the Indiana legislature to create a sham committee to provide reform recommendations to the statehouse. That sham committee’s recommendations were used as the pretext to create a new Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, which usurped voters’ ability to elect leadership, and which has final authority over the structure of school funding referenda.
So Far This Year
Hogsett staffed IPEC with pro-charter partisans who refused IPS’s recommendation for the appropriate referendum amount and who instead insisted that IPS is not allowed to ask for as much money as it needs, but must still give away half of the money raised in the referendum to charter schools.
This political choice by Hogsett and his cronies is what forced IPS into a corner and an impossible political situation.
An existing operating referendum is set to expire at the end of this year. That means that without new referendum dollars, IPS would fly off a fiscal cliff and would be forced to take drastic action and be at high risk of state takeover.
But Hogsett and his appointees wanted to be sure that there was no scenario where IPS could flourish and continue improving as they have been for years. Instead, IPS must ask taxpayers to fork over substantially more money than we’d been paying in the past - and will still face a gap of $20 million a year even if the taxpayers approve.
I give IPS a lot of credit for their recent decisions to stop paying for the charter-created scam Enroll Indy and cancel contracts with their Innovation Schools, who previously enjoyed huge amounts of free resources on IPS’s dime. I also commend IPS leaders for focusing their efforts on helping correct the State’s funding for Special Education, which IPS loses substantial amounts of money by providing. But the gap remains, and the privatizers are sharpening their knives and licking their chops.
As the two wolves arguing inside me showed, there are a lot of pros and cons to the referendum. I try to summarize them below:
Arguments against:
-Working-class people are struggling to pay bills already. Even just an extra $100 a year is meaningful and impactful.
-Voting yes on this referendum means voting to give private organizations (charter schools) public funds, even while these organizations have misused funds before and have poor regulation.
-Paying more tax dollars, yet having fewer dollars go to your schools (and likely seeing schools close and teachers laid off) is a pretty awful political scenario.
Arguments for:
-The brave teachers of the Indianapolis Education Association have voted to support the referendum, after leveraging their power for a better deal with IPS leadership.
-Avoiding state takeover of IPS for at least a few more years buys time for anti-charter sentiment to continue growing as it has been.
-IPEC is a Mayor-appointed board; there are elections next year. With a Mayor who wanted to save public education rather than killing it, things could change substantially.
As of today, I’m leaning towards a reluctant “yes” vote on the referendum, but I haven’t yet made up my mind. What do YOU think we should do? Write me back to let me know!
And either way - please show up to vote on every single office and every single public question you can. Democracy works best when everybody shows up!
In love and solidarity,
Jesse