Well, we guess we'll add our voice to the chorus: Education is the priority for legislators during this budget-writing session of the General Assembly.
There seems to be near-unanimous agreement on this, with but a few renegades who have other ideas, wacky as those ideas (and they, themselves, for that matter) are.
While education is the priority, when we start to peel away the layers what we find is that there are many different views as to what making education the priority of the session actually means.
For lawmakers, making education the priority means many things, from requiring students to pass a civics test before they can receive their diplomas to establishing a state seal of “biliteracy” that's awarded to students who have shown proficiency in English and another language; from defining dyslexia to teaching methods, from testing to studying ethnic history; from reading assessments to cursive writing to figuring enrollment.
And there are other bills that deal, in one way or another, with the role of state superintendent Glenda Ritz and with members of the Indiana State Board of Education.
Literally dozens of proposals, all tied in some way to education, have been filed in the legislative hopper.
Most of these won't make it to the finish line to become law; many won't even get a second reading in committee.
For us, all these bills are merely lagniappe to what really matters, to what is the priority of lawmakers during this session: money.
In Indiana, education spending takes up around 50 percent of the state budget, a sizable serving of the pie — until you stop to consider that maybe the pie, itself, isn't in fact all that big and therefore “half” proves to be wholly unsatisfactory in sating our appetite.
Education funding in Indiana is a disaster, unequal in its distribution and inadequate in its application.
There's talk among the leadership in Indianapolis of trying to equalize the amount of money the state provides per student. But so far the proposals seem to be headed in the direction of trimming from the top to fill out the bottom.
The governor wants to spend more money on vouchers and charter schools, but without really adding more money to the overall education budget.
Democrats … well, there are so few of them what does it matter what they want to do.
Money is always important, there's no point in pretending it isn't; it's an integral function in the complicated equation that is education.
Money provides the tools, the expertise, the man-hours that make learning possible.
Money, ultimately, measures the level of investment a state is willing to make in its future, and if it's not willing to adequately invest in the educational opportunities of its residents, then it's a state that really has no future but merely a long twilight struggle with its relevancy in the present.