Democrat Ritz must navigate tricky path in Republican-dominated Statehouse

She ran as a fierce opponent of current officeholder Tony Bennett's successful efforts to have the General Assembly launch a voucher program, expand charter schools, limit teachers' collective bargaining rights and launch a merit pay system based on student test scores.

"I plan to work within the parameters of the law," Ritz said. "I'm not looking at repealing. I'm not looking at going backward."

Instead, she said, she will be "working within board policy and the powers within my purview to make sure we're implementing things in a fair, respectful, inclusive manner."

She criticized Indiana's A-through-F grading system for schools and reading requirements that have resulted in schools teaching 90-minute blocks without integrating other instruction, and cited those as examples of problems she'd like to address.

Another example, she said, are the teacher evaluations that many schools are using as a result of a 2011 law.

While that law gave local districts the authority to develop their own ways of evaluating teachers, the one-year time frame to develop such a method wasn't enough, which left many schools relying on a model Bennett's Indiana Department of Education proposed, Ritz said.

She said she intends to use the department to make sure school leaders better understand their own authority, and she is reorganizing the department to set up regional outreach programs to do that.

Meanwhile, she said, without changing any laws on the books, she can work with the Indiana Board of Education to improve rules and regulations that resulted from those laws.

"A lot of things were implemented that people opposed in totality, and it wasn't always the law. Sometimes it wasn't the implementation of the law," she said. "There's many ways to implement the law, and I believe the law in many cases gives the purview to the state Board of Education and the superintendent of public instruction."

Ritz's win was largely thanks to a remarkable grass roots effort — one driven by the National Education Association, the Indiana State Teachers Association and local unions, but also a cause taken up individually by some teachers and parents.

She leaned on the idea of a "campaign in a box" — that is, anyone who donated $25 would receive a set of 20 postcards and five bumper stickers. That, plus 2,700 yard signs she distributed, led to small, yellow reminders of her campaign popping up across the state.

Her campaign's strongest presence, though, was on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where teachers displayed their support for Ritz's campaign and posted testimonials asking their friends and former students to support her.

"I'd say to everybody I talked to — go ask a teacher. Go ask them what's happening with education," Ritz said. "But the last month, I didn't have to do that, because everybody was hearing about it."

Meanwhile, national and state unions phone-banked on her behalf. Her campaign raised and spent around $250,000, while Bennett spent about $1 million more, but her sum was enough for Ritz to air some television and radio advertisements.

The election results likely had something to do with conservatives, as well.

Bennett's loss is "astonishing" to the pro-education reform community, said Frederick Hess, an American Enterprise Institute education scholar who addressed Indiana's election during an event the organization hosted this week.

He pointed to Bennett's decision to adopt Common Core curriculum standards — a national set of standards 46 states have adopted, and President Barack Obama's administration has advocated.

"You saw a whole bunch of tea party-style conservatives voting the same way as teacher unions in a push-back measure here," Hess said. "They have now clearly come to see the Common Core as one more Obama administration initiative."

Chuck Little, executive director of the Indiana Urban Schools Association, said Ritz's win wasn't just a result of the efforts of teachers' unions.

"Anyone who looks at this as just the teachers' union made this happen is being shortsighted. When one considers there are 60,000 teachers and she got 1.3 million votes, something much bigger is going on," Little said.

"In terms of reform, people of Indiana are saying, we want to keep control of our schools; we want to keep control of what our state superintendent does; we don't want to be adversely impacted by these outside forces."

However, Pence said Hoosier voters actually affirmed the state's education measures by handing Republicans — many of whom voted for the same bills that Bennett championed in 2011 — 69 out of 100 seats in the Indiana House.

And outgoing Gov. Mitch Daniels, who appointed the state's Board of Education, said momentum for the reforms that he, too, advocated is "rock solid."

Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, said the lesson of Bennett's defeat is that "language and tone matter."

Now, the job for all involved is seeing if there are ways to work together.

Cooperation is critical because a state superintendent who is badly out of sync with lawmakers and the governor would quickly lose the power to do anything but move slowly.

"That's going to leave you on the outside looking in," said Daniel Elsener, president of Marian University and a state Board of Education member.

The state board, which is chaired by the state superintendent but includes 10 members appointed by the governor, has the authority to block the rules and regulations established by the superintendent.

Meanwhile, the Republican-dominated state legislature has written laws that leave the specifics of implementation to the superintendent's office in recent years, but could reverse course by adopting much more specific measures.

"A superintendent that is out of sync or works at cross purposes with the governor, a supermajority in the House and Senate and the governor-appointed board will not have much influence over anything," Elsener said.

"That's just kind of a practical setup the way it is. You get your resources from the legislature; you get your counsel and votes on a lot of important items by statute from the board, and of course the governor has a big bully pulpit."

He said he hopes to speak soon with Ritz, and believes the state Board of Education can work with her.

It's a position similar to Pence's. He said Wednesday that he would soon sit down with Ritz to see if they could find areas of "common purpose," even though he believes voters affirmed Indiana's recent education efforts by re-electing most Republican lawmakers.

Ritz's supporters — and those who have fought the Republican-driven education measures of recent years — agreed that cooperation will be key.

"She does have authority in quite a few areas. However, there's so many ways that authority can be limited and cut off that she's going to have to rely on cooperation," said Little, with the Indiana Urban Schools Association.

He said he hopes Pence will lean on Ritz's expertise when it comes to understanding the practical effects of measures lawmakers have approved.

"She's without question one of the most knowledgeable people in the state about how all the federal and state programs look in the classroom. She's got a broad base of knowledge, and I think the governor will listen," he said.