Freedom Line Blog

Here at the Center for Individual Freedom, we recently launched a State Sovereignty Project that aims to encourage states to resist Washington’s encroachment on their constitutionally-protected powers. While resisting federal overreach is, in and of itself, a worthy pursuit, it becomes even more valuable when the states then use that freedom to enact major public policy innovations.

As I’ve noted here before, one of the areas where that charge is being met with the most vigor is in education reform, where a handful of Republican governors are transforming the way we think about public schools. One of the leading lights of this crusade has been Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, who successfully pushed legislation providing for the sweeping use of school vouchers in the Hoosier State. As a recent profile by The Economist notes, he’s getting results:

The voucher scheme, potentially the biggest in America, was set up a year ago as part of a big package of educational reforms led by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, and his superintendent of schools. These include teacher evaluations that take student performance into account, giving school heads more autonomy and encouraging the growth of charter schools. Jeanne Allen, president of the Centre for Education Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group, says the reforms are unique because Indiana has looked at education reform in its “totality”, rather than taking a piecemeal approach as many other states have done.

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The Indiana scheme has allayed fears that vouchers will not reach their target audience of low-income families. In the first year about 85-90% of children receiving them have come from households that qualify for free school lunches. Moderate-income families can receive a voucher with a lower value. … Indiana’s philosophy of promoting choice has also extended to making it possible for students to apply to any public school—including those outside the school district in which the child lives. And some signs suggest greater choice is having a positive effect in Indiana. For one thing, some public schools have started to compete for students. They are advertising their educational prowess directly to parents, through billboard signs on highways, mailing campaigns and clothes carrying slogans. Schools are trying to make themselves more attractive to students, for example by buying iPads.

All well and good, but we can already hear the skeptics saying that competing for students isn’t the same as generating better results. Well …

The reforms have had already phenomenal results, according to Mrs Allen. Tony Bennett, the superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, arrived in 2009. Every student performance indicator has improved he says and over the last two years the state has ranked second in the country for achievement on college-level courses taken in high school. Graduation rates from high school are at an all-time high.

Competition is working intra-state in Indiana. Now, it falls to federalism to get it to work inter-state. If the Hoosier State keeps up the progress, it won’t be long before the nation’s education laggards start to realize that they could improve their results by following Indianapolis’ lead. No such comparisons would have been possible had education reform been imposed top-down from Washington. That’s one more reason to defend the Tenth Amendment.