Indianapolis Business Journal. March 1, 2024.
Editorial: Retention isn’t ideal, but it’s a tool to attack reading problem
The Legislature is poised to pass a bill that would require K-12 school districts to hold back more students who fail the state’s elementary school reading exam.
The move is controversial, and we understand that. But as we said in an editorial in December, the state must take action to ensure the next generation of students can read.
State data shows that nearly 1 in 5 third-graders doesn’t pass the state’s reading exam. In 2023, that meant 13,840 third-graders didn’t meet the state’s reading standards. And Chalkbeat Indiana has reported that 96% of those students moved on to fourth grade, anyway.
It’s hard to imagine how the current system helps anyone. Those students continue to fall further behind as schoolwork requires that they can read. Teachers in upper grades must try to accommodate those students in ways that distract the teachers from moving other students forward in their learning. And eventually, unprepared students graduate (or worse yet, drop out of school) and enter the workforce.
Under the legislation, schools will be required to first administer the reading test to students in the second grade. That’s a year earlier than required now. Students that fail must be offered extra help. If a student fails three times by the end of third grade, the school must hold the student back.
There are some limited exceptions (including for English-language learners and special education students), but the goal is that the majority of kids who can’t read repeat third grade.
Some Democrats and educators oppose the bill. Many worry about stigmatizing kids who have to repeat third grade. Other critics say lawmakers should wait to see whether a change in reading curriculum approved last year will work.
And many fear the change will create a glut of students in third grade that schools aren’t prepared to deal with. The nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency estimates that as many as 7,050 students could be held back in 2026, when the law is fully implemented. That could cost the state an additional $57 million as those students work through the system and cause space problems and third-grade teacher shortages.
That would be worse in some districts. In Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, about 1 in 4 students is sent to fourth grade without passing the iRead exam, according to Chalkbeat Indiana.
We empathize with all of those concerns. But we think the problem is too great not to try to attack it in multiple ways. Retention is one approach. The curriculum changes are another. And lawmakers need to consider more ideas.
Among them: Requiring students to attend school by age 5 and fully funding pre-kindergarten programs. Republicans have been reluctant to embrace either idea. But we think it’s time to reconsider both. This problem is too important not to consider all the options.
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Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. March 2, 2024.
Editorial: Child labor violations are soaring, so Indiana loosens the rules
In FY 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor concluded 955 investigations of child labor violations, a 14% increase from the previous year. It assessed more than $8 million in penalties, an 83% increase from the previous year.
It’s with this in mind that we wonder why the supermajority would join several other states in loosening laws that guard against the exploitation of minors.
Senate Bill 146 allows 18-year-olds to serve alcohol so long as they are supervised by someone over 21. Four Republicans joined the Democratic caucus to oppose the measure.
House Bill 1093 removes restrictions on the hours teenage employees can work. It also strikes agriculture as a “hazardous occupation,” which allows 16- and 17-year-olds to work in that sector, going well past a caveat that allowed young adults to work on their family’s property.
Who gains the most in the deregulation of child labor? Not the child. Indeed, loosening laws will mean a decrease in the amount of money the state’s Department of Labor takes in due to penalties – funds used to pay for inspectors and fund outreach.
In Indiana, between 2013 and 2023, the federal labor department adjudicated 110 cases, involving 1,943 violations and more than $607,000 in fines.
We’re not anti-capitalists, but we are fervently pro-child and anti-worker-exploitation. To quote Sen. Shelli Yoder, D-Bloomington, in her trepidation about these bills: “These fees are a result of bad players who are taking advantage of our youth. I am very concerned about the pairing of these two and being able to protect our youth when it comes to sexual harassment in the workplace.”
Yoder’s words are even more fraught considering recent scholarly work on violence and child labor.
Last April, researchers from the University of Iowa and West Virginia University found that among 14- to 17-year-old workers across industries, 19% reported being harassed; 6% said they had been sexually assaulted.
Publishing in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, researchers reported that “many youth experience workplace violence (60%).”
“Verbal abuse of the sort that made victims feel scared and unsafe (53%) and sexual harassment (24%) were the most commonly reported forms of violence,” they wrote in the article’s abstract. “Females were more likely than males to experience workplace violence overall and sexual harassment in particular.”
If a child is traumatized at work, it could easily affect everything in that child’s life, from schoolwork to familial relationships.
On June 25, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which included the nation’s first child labor laws, including restrictions on age and hours. The restrictions on child labor fundamentally changed how we societally thought about children.
“Thinking of the children as more than just their economic value eventually helped change the role of the children of the working class in American society,” wrote author Michael Schuman in a 2017 article about the history of child labor in the U.S. Bureau of Labor’s Monthly Labor Review.
It’s a history that we’ve forgotten, that socioeconomic class and child labor are often inextricably linked. What may be a confidence building rite of passage for some is often also much-desired extra income for some families.
Indiana is not an outlier here. Deregulation of child labor laws has been a coordinated effort among Republican-led states over the last decade. The fear is where this push may ultimately bottom out.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Labor uncovered violations reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
In February 2023, the labor department issued new findings on an ongoing investigation of Packers Sanitation Services Inc. for illegally employing more than 100 children between the ages of 13 and 17 in hazardous occupations at 13 meatpacking facilities owned by some of the nation’s largest conglomerates, including JBS, Cargill and Tyson.
Children were working illegally on overnight shifts cleaning razor-sharp saws and other high-risk equipment on slaughterhouse kill floors. At least three of them suffered injuries, including burns from caustic cleaning chemicals.
Packers is owned by Blackstone, a private equity firm that is launching a $10 million fund to “enhance the well-being of children in the communities we serve and help reduce the prevalence of the rising problem of underage workers.”
Blackstone’s total assets as of Dec. 31, 2023, are $40.288 billion.
It’s odious that the Indiana legislature votes to deregulate child labor while simultaneously adding to education requirements, thus creating an even more stressful environment. Rather than seeing a child’s life as a holistic system, the GOP’s siloed approach is more likely to harm this generation than as it is to be of benefit.
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Terre Haute Tribune-Star. February 29, 2024.
Editorial: ‘Intellectual diversity’ or unnecessary intrusion?
Indiana lawmakers continue to work aggressively in the current session of the General Assembly to solve “problems” that don’t exist.
Among perplexing pieces of legislation this year is a controversial bill targeting higher education. Proponents say the bill would ensure university faculty are encouraging the fuzzy concept of “intellectual diversity,” meeting adequate performance expectations and refraining from pushing political views in the classroom that are unrelated to the scholar’s expertise.
Republican state Sen. Spencer Deery of West Lafayette authored the bill — S.B. 202. Deery thinks it is needed because he believes conservative views and voices are discouraged and discriminated against in the halls of academia. He produces no evidence to support such claims, but says perceptions concerning his grievances against higher education institutions are real.
The bill would instruct diversity committees to consider “intellectual diversity” as well as cultural diversity in employment policies and handling of faculty complaints.
But it doesn’t stop there. According to an Indiana Capital Chronicle report, the committees would be instructed to promote recruitment and retention of “underrepresented” students rather than the “minority students” specified by current law. It would also change tenure and promotion polices for faculty, requiring boards to “prevent a faculty member from getting tenure or a promotion if the board thinks the member is ‘unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity’ and unlikely to offer students scholarly works from a range of ‘political or ideological frameworks.’”
Tenured professors would also be reviewed every five years based on the new provisions. If they fail the reviews, they could face termination, demotion, salary cuts and more.
The bill represents increased intrusion by the legislature into the administration of institutions of higher education, all because someone perceives that their ideological point of view did not receive the degree of respect they thought it deserved.
With Republicans holding legislative super majorities, the bill passed the Senate in a party-line vote earlier in the session. The same occurred in the House on Tuesday, although amendments were added. Differences in the bills are being resolved and could be headed to the governor’s desk soon.
In addition to Democrats, faculty groups and administrators at state universities are pushing back.
Opponents complain that the bill is similar to those passed by Republican super majorities in other states where the results have not been good. Indiana State University professor Lindsey Eberman, who has protested against the bill at the Statehouse, says this legislative overreach will be detrimental to the state.
“We intend to make sure the legislature knows they will be held accountable for when this creates chaos, decreases enrollment and has the economic impact that we’re seeing in other states who are experiencing bills like this,” Eberman said.
Hidden behind language purporting to be upholding First Amendment rights is the real issue of conservative, culture-war intrusion into an academic process that is already tightly governed by college administrators and trustees.
State Rep. Tonya Pfaff, a Terre Haute Democrat who herself is an educator and represents a district that includes ISU, is blunt in her assessment of the bill.
“This legislation is just a heavy-handed attempt at censoring discussion of topics that some may find offensive,” Pfaff said. “A crucial part of the college experience is being exposed to difficult truths.”
Little can be done in a super majority legislature to stop unnecessary bills such as this. Gov. Eric Holcomb would be wise to draw attention to the adverse impacts it could have on the state when it reaches his desk. A veto would be in order.
END