Local educators are disappointed but not surprised that politics are dictating the effectiveness of the first year in office for State Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz.
Ritz won the position from incumbent Tony Bennett last November in part thanks to a grass-roots movement of support from teachers and superintendents throughout the state. Last week, Ritz said that she believed Republican lawmakers would make moves to strip her of her power.
Ritz is the nominal head of the Indiana State Board of Education, a body made up of people appointed by the governor. Ritz is currently the only Democrat holding a statewide office in Indiana.
Area administrators were pleased when Bennett was ousted last year because his aggressive reforms — including the institution of a voucher system to give public education money to private school students, a teacher evaluation system, collective bargaining limits for teachers unions and an A-F grading assignment for all schools based on improvement in the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress exams — were unpopular. Ritz took office with the intention of scaling back some of those reforms, but recently, a power struggle has emerged between her and the education board.
“It’s refreshing to hear somebody say what she’d like to do, but in reality, she’s going to need a change in political power to get things done,” North Spencer School Superintendent Dan Scherry said of Ritz. “It’s highly disappointing that the public board of education does not look out for kids first.”
He added that the real victory for public schools was that Bennett was not re-elected. Though Ritz has many good ideas, he said it wasn’t unexpected that she would meet resistance from other lawmakers.
“Anybody who knew how politics work knew that Glenda was going to be up there with just about no authority to get things done,” he said. “The thing that most of us wanted was an end to the negative rhetoric, publicly criticizing and bashing teachers. As far as Glenda making changes, unfortunately its hard to get into the political realm and know what buttons to push right off the bat. There is nobody who is going to help her.”
Earlier this month, a state board meeting erupted into an argument over who controls the meeting agenda when Ritz refused to acknowledge the board’s vote to hear a staff report at the improper time during the proceedings. Ritz has said she believes there may be an effort to remove her as chair of the board soon.
“The governor has to be very careful here because she got more votes than he did,” Southeast Dubois School Superintendent Rick Allen said of Gov. Mike Pence’s Republican appointments to the state board.
Allen added that the gridlock in the state offices means that local schools are left with more questions than answers leading up to the January 2014 legislative session. Issues like Indiana’s involvement in the Common Core State Standards initiative — which Ritz favored pausing for review — are still undecided.
“We’re always concerned when the Legislature meets. We constantly are trying to get our local legislators to remember their district,” Allen said. “Anything they pass up there that may help (Marion County) with the Indianapolis Public Schools situation usually affects us and usually it’s negatively.”
Allen said there are certain proposals from Ritz, including one to further “water down” the teacher evaluation rubric, that he does not entirely agree with, but the lack of harmony at the state level is still disheartening.
“It’s frustrating sometimes,” he said. “It takes time to get things going.”
Still, Scherry said Ritz’s moves so far to put the focus back on hard-working teachers and students is change enough for now as educators wait to hear more decisions on the future of school vouchers, teacher evaluations and the highly contested A-F grading scale from the state.
“At least she’s not making people feel as though she’s got the pitchfork and the torches lit,” Scherry said. “That’s how a democracy works. You get elected and you see what you can get accomplished.
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