Much of Indiana’s local government owes its structure to our state’s early days. Hoosiers are a generally conservative bunch (and yes, that includes your neighbors who are Democrats … and there are more of them than you probably realize). As a group, we don’t like to see things we’ve known go away, even when they’ve outlived their usefulness.
For example, our school calendars are largely based on farm labor needs from a century ago. Summer vacation wasn’t created to give kids and teachers a break – it exists so farm families didn’t have to decide between sending kids to school or putting them in the fields when they were needed most. One of the biggest challenges for today’s school districts is dealing with learning that’s lost over the weeks when kids are out. It’s also one of the biggest challenges for working parents, who have to find short-term child care or risk leaving their kids at home by themselves. Still, it’s what we’ve always done here, so why change it?
Township government is another example. It was created in Indiana’s second constitution back in 1851 to make it easier for a growing population to access government services. Today, many people see it as an extra layer of government that is no longer needed, because its services could be handled by county or town government. The 2007 Kernan-Shephard plan for streamlining Indiana government called for the abolition of township government, and there have been attempts by members of General Assembly to do so, but all have failed. Why? Both major political parties see townships as kind of the minor leagues, where they can observe people who may be good choices for higher-level elected offices.
Even the General Assembly is largely structured upon an Indiana when members arrived at the Statehouse on horseback or driving a carriage. Originally, a session was held every two years during the winter so it wouldn’t interfere with farming. Our constitution’s drafters didn’t want the political process to be a full-time job, so they opted for part-time citizen-legislators. We still have that today, and legislative sessions are amazingly brief. That sounds like a good thing until you consider how difficult it is to find and agree upon the best solutions in a matter of a few weeks. It’s hard to be as thoughtful as we would hope when you’re under a tight deadline, and every session includes bills to address the unintended consequences of bills adopted in the previous session.
The holdover that puzzles me the most is the state’s refusal to make kindergarten attendance mandatory. State law says that young people are only required to enroll in school at the beginning of the fall semester for the school year in which they’ll reach age 7. At a time when state officials fret about test scores and how many kids can read proficiently by third grade, it seems counterintuitive not to get them into classrooms a year or two earlier – especially when those classrooms are already functioning and educating most of their peers throughout the state.
Bills to mandate kindergarten get filed now and then, but rarely advance, largely because of pushback from people who remember the good old days, when Mom stayed home with the kids and wasn’t eager to send her little angels off to school. It’s a beloved piece of nostalgia, but one that doesn’t match the realities of today’s lives for the vast majority of Hoosier families.
Nor does it serve children well. Today’s kids are learning concepts years ahead of when I did. I started working with algebra in eighth grade, but my kids started using those concepts as fourth-graders. Serious reading instruction starts at the kindergarten level today. It’s not an effort to punish students – it’s because Indiana requires kids to learn a lot more than you and I did. Skipping kindergarten simply for sentimental reasons doesn’t prepare them for success in today’s world.