INDIANAPOLIS — After stepping into the Indiana superintendent of public instruction's office, Republican Tony Bennett said he has faced opposition with an intensity he never would have predicted four years ago.
Along with Gov. Mitch Daniels, he championed a series of education changes that included launching a private school voucher system, making it easier for new charter schools to open up and tying education funding more closely to the students schools are serving — but that was just a start.
He also pushed to limit teachers' collective bargaining rights to wages and benefits, launched a system to use test scores to grade schools on an A-through-F basis and started a third-grade reading assessment that is in place statewide. He's used the state's authority to take over several schools that have failed to improve.
The reaction — especially from teachers — has stunned him, he said.
"I was shocked that colleagues of mine in public schools would have such an adverse reaction to educator effectiveness, to parents having more control over education, to accountability," Bennett said.
He said he believes the vitriolic reactions that some teachers have had to the advocates of the education overhaul Bennett pursued are based on faulty assumptions.
"There is this caricature of folks who believe the things that I believe in — that we are angry, anti-public school, anti-public school teacher people," he said.
"I have served public schools since 1990. I've been an educator since 1983. My wife is a lifelong educator in public schools. My daughter just embarked in a career in education in public schools. And I have a huge passion for public education and improving education."
His Democratic opponent, Glenda Ritz, is a library media specialist at Crooked Creek Elementary School in the Washington Township school district in Indianapolis. She's one of 155 national board certified teachers in Indiana.
She says Bennett should have demonstrated that commitment by bringing educators into the fold. She said teachers should have had more chances to weigh in before new measures were proposed, rather than after lawmakers were already debating those measures.
"The only opportunity that people have really been given a chance to talk," she said, "is to actually do it through the hearing process or formal testimony. There hasn't been the conversation that needs to take place to actually develop it in the first place to even present it."
She said she sees Bennett in the midst of turning education into a privately-run and for-profit enterprise — and each reform he's advanced is part of it.
"They're all tied together. It's very difficult to talk about little specific pieces of them that actually might be good if you implemented them in small, little pieces," she said.
"Everything is tied to the privatization of schools — the high-stakes testing, the A-to-F grades, the charters, the takeovers, the vouchers, even the teacher licensing pieces. They're all tied to the one political agenda of privatizing schools."
The two are in the middle of an election battle that is largely a referendum on Bennett's performance — especially since Republicans took full control of the state's legislature in 2010's elections and approved the measures he championed.
On paper, Bennett appears to be the favorite. He will benefit from Indiana's Republican lean in the presidential election, as well as a massive campaign fundraising advantage. He closed September with more than $1 million in the bank — 24 times what Ritz had.
He said he'd use another four-year term to push to give the Indiana Department of Education the authority to take over failing school districts, rather than just individual schools — the "next step"in accountability, he said.
"It is about making sure districts, under the authority of local control, fix their problems by themselves. That's what's happened with school accountability," he said.
He said Indiana needs to make sure students who graduate high school do not need remediation before they can start learning in college.
And he said he wants to use education dollars to give schools incentives to achieve results — whether those results were measured by students' growth, the A-to-F grade, the number of career and technical education certificates its students earn, or something else.
"We made some pretty big steps over the last three years in pulling fiscal policy and education policy together," he said. "What's the next step of that look like so that we're really funding the results that we want to get?"
Ritz said she decided to run because of the IREAD-3 exam that Bennett's office has put in place for all third-grade students.
"Yes, he's put a focus on reading, but it's not the right way," she said, emphasizing that Bennett has "imposed high-stakes testing" that most educators say serves as a poor measure of what students know.
"He's relegating teachers to teach reading in a manner that simply, we have to teach to the test rather than really teaching reading for the sake of making sure kids are improving in reading," she said. "He's got to focus on reading, but we're not going about it in an educational way to actually have an effect on reading."
She said she wants to do away with high-stakes testing and instead look for more accurate and specifically-tailored ways to measure students' progress.
She said she would also reorganize the Indiana Department of Education to focus more efforts on outreach and support for struggling schools.
This year's election, Ritz said, is "a referendum on the future of education in Indiana. The current changes, I would not call them reforms. We definitely can see where this is headed. To put it in the Republican term, the road map for the state of Indiana right now is headed toward the privatization of our public schools."