Dear Representative Randy Truitt:
I am an Indiana citizen and taxpayer who found a school choice flier from schoolchoiceindiana.org in my mailbox today. The flier disgusted me with its manipulation of phrases and over simplification of what choice means. It casts House Bill (HB) 1003 as an effort to create competition that will help schools get better. Sadly, it merely uses pro market and individual choice related phrases to advocate a pro school choice position without a shred of evidence that this will practice will actually help students and the state of Indiana of which they are a part.
The flier included your smiling picture in it. Ergo, I was left with the impression that you are endorsing this bill. If that is not the case, then please instruct schoolchoiceindiana.org that you do not want them to use your image in this manner.
If it is the case, then please consider the following before you cast your vote.
1. HB 1003 is a clear effort to move public monies into the hands of private religious schools. This has the potential to violate the 1st Amendment’s anti-establishment clause. You come from a party that clings to the Framer’s Constitution as the reason for opposing any effort it does not like. Yet when it comes to that document’s stance on the separation of church and state, it seems as if your party’s approach is to pick that which it likes and play ignorant about that which it does not. Indiana's citizens deserve better; they deserve consistency.
2. The flier talks about the potential academic impact of voucher programs, but reams of credible research shows that voucher programs lead to no difference on educational outcomes. In this case, the term flier should be spelled "F-LIAR" – because it is not based on independent and valid scholarship but instead duplicitously promotes a myth to advance a position.
3. The brochure fails to mention any form of accountability for the private institutions that receive the money. There is none as far as I can tell. In this era of accountability and decreased state budgets, we cannot afford to shift public monies into private institutions without the same accountability measures required of the public schools. If the private schools are in for a penny of our tax dollars, then they need to be in for a pound when it comes to accountability associated with how the resources are spent.
4. The plan does not require private institutions to accept students. The private schools may continue to have selective admission requirements – which mean that only the best students will be able to benefit from the “choice” scholarship. Given the overwhelming connection between income and academic performance, this bill will serve the rich far better than anyone else. It is a classic case of a special and well-funded interest using populist jargon to advance the interests of “the select.” In this regard, the phrase “Choice Scholarship” is fitting – it is all about the “right cuts of people” getting into the right kind of institutions.
5. The plan does not regulate tuition at private schools in any way. Therefore, private institutions looking to make ends meet can and probably will raise costs and will still get the funding from the state without any mechanism for control. Meanwhile, public schools will lose students – thus losing the economy associated with scale. Ergo, this effort uses market-based jargon to undermine a true economic advantage of public education. It won’t save money for the state – it decreases the state’s educational advantage and increases cost per pupil.
6. According to the indianaschoolchoice.org web site, the effort is being led by Luke Messer – who quit his state legislative post to work for the Ice Miller law firm to help the latter make millions from the privatization of the Indiana Toll Road after he helped pass the legislation that privatized the road. Here is a link that includes information about Messer and his departure from government to help Ice Miller – http://indianalawblog.com/archives/2006/08/iind_govt_polit.html So this just seems like the next step in someone’s efforts to get rich from the shifting of tax payer monies to the private sector. He did it before, and it seems like he’s trying to do it again – that is, when he is not getting pulled over for operating a vehicle with a blood alcohol level above the legal limit. That happened on I-65 – no wonder he hates public roads . . . .
7. And who will NOT get to go to the selective private schools – why the special needs students who don’t make the cut and/or who cost too much for the private schools to take, and low-income students whose challenging circumstances are disproportionately correlated with lower test scores and profiles though no fault or action of their own. And because income and race are often correlated, the indianaschoolchoice.org folks are playing a game with you and me by showing images of racial minorities on their web site – because let’s face facts, Randy, the overwhelming majority of students who will get to use the monies to go to private schools will look like you, not like the people that the web developers chose to put on the web site as examples. If you think I am making this up, check out the following report titled Vouchers: A Trap, Not a Choice and see for yourself.
Given what is found in item 6, perhaps what concerns me the most is I have no clue who funds schoolchoiceindiana.org and it strikes me like a case of a few people trying to make a lot of money via the transition of a public function to private hands. Of course, that might not be the case. But someone is funding this effort as evidenced by the professionally formatted and produced glossy propaganda that was in my mailbox. And because it comes across as slick propaganda, I can only come away with the notion that if this is not about shifting control to the private sector and benefitting a few rich friends/people, that this might actually be funded by a terrorist sleeper cell – an entity that is trying to undo our state’s education system and thus make us weaker so that they can ultimately destroy our democracy and establish an extremist new world order right here in the Hoosier heartland.
However, if I am to believe that this is really funded by good old Hoosiers who want freedom of choice, and if I am to believe by virtue of your photo being in the brochure you are one of them, then I will gladly accept a school choice voucher program if you and yours are willing to be consistent on all matters involving choice.
Ergo, the only way I would support you and your ilk with regard to this effort is if you immediately propose and pass in connection with HB 1003 a bill that protects and promotes personal choice with regard to one’s body (including reproductive rights) and marriage (regardless of the gender of the partners). Failure to do so would mean that you are accepting the fact that choice only matters in regard to issues involving one’s wallet and funding streams associated therewith; and, by extension of what I shared in the list above, that choice only matters when you can give money to people who already have it at the expense of those who do not.
I am all for choice – as long as choice means that you can’t tell me the choices I can and cannot make and that you do not disguise efforts that benefit a few rich people with verbiage about choice for all.
If you do support this bill, then know that I had higher hopes for you Randy. And I still have higher hopes for Indiana’s children. This is why, if you are unsure on how to vote, I urge you to vote NO on HB 1003.
Sincerely,
Andrew Koch
West Lafayette, Indiana
