CALL TO ACTION

Action Item: February 24, 2013

NO to HB1337 (Contact full House)

House members will vote tomorrow, Monday, on House Bill 1337, a massive partisan rewrite of the bipartisan Public Law 221 which has governed Indiana’s accountability program since 1999. Public education advocates should tell House members this weekend that passing the voucher bill is enough damage to public schools in one session. They should call a halt and defe...at House Bill 1337.

House Bill 1337 in any normal year should be the center of discussion and debate in non-partisan forums to direct the next generation of Indiana’s accountability program to replace the 1999 bipartisan reform, Public Law 221. Instead, House Bill 1337 was squeezed through the education committee on the last possible day with very little attention or debate, and certainly with no bipartisan support. It would:

1) let the State Board empower turnaround academies to become independent schools with the status of a new, small school district with an appointed school board, not elected. This fragmentation contradicts recent efforts to consolidate small school districts into bigger districts.

2) remove “improvement” as the stated goal of PL 221, replacing it with “performance.” This is a major philosophical change from the 1999 bipartisan reform.

3) require science assessments to be included in high stakes school letter grade decisions by 2014-15. The testing budget has not been increased to pay for this.

4) delete well-known PL 221 language we have had since 1999 saying results should be adjusted “for student mobility” and saying “Compare each school and each school corporation with its own prior performance and not to the performance of other schools or other corporations.” This latter deletion would open the door to assessing students compared to peers which has been at the heart of the failure of the current A-F system.

Ask your House member, especially if they let you down and voted for the voucher bill, if they would please stop further confusion and turmoil in our public schools by deferring this complete rewrite of our entire accountability program to another session when broad based discussions about changing our accountability system can be held. House Bill 1337 is a partisan law that few have even seen or discussed.