The Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) Board of School Commissioners has undergone some changes in recent weeks, and with the election coming up in November, more shuffling is on the horizon.
At its 2016 organizational meeting to elect a president, vice president and secretary, the board unanimously chose commissioner Mary Ann Sullivan — who was unopposed — for the position of president. The spot became available after President Diane Arnold stepped down to avoid serving as president during a year when her board seat will be on the ballot, a practice that is standard during IPS board election years.
At the meeting, the board’s vice president and secretary — Sam Odle and LaNier Echols, respectively — were chosen to continue serving in their roles.
Days later, board member Gayle Cosby announced on her blog she would not seek re-election this November, citing her ongoing Ph.D. studies and other parts of her life that demand her time.
“I’ve always been an ambitious person, but folks, I am human,” she wrote. “It’s been a delicate balancing act to juggle the roles of mother, wife, doctoral student, employee, and commissioner. I cannot reasonably expect myself to be able to devote adequate time and energy to all of these demanding and highly important roles for the duration of another 4 year term.”
Later in the post, Cosby describes herself as “just one lone dissenter on a board with an established supermajority,” hinting at what she’s leaving behind, asking, “Why does my dissenting voice bother anyone? In the interest of democracy, why is there such a fuss when I simply want to speak to my convictions? Why is diversity of thought viewed as a hindrance rather than a strength? Why is it so desirable to have 100 percent total agreement on a publicly elected board?”
To help answer these questions and unpack the significance of Cosby’s announcement and Sullivan’s election, the Recorder spoke with Scott Elliott, founding bureau chief of Chalkbeat Indiana, the local arm of a nonprofit news organization covering educational change, policy and practice.
Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper: Let’s start with Gayle Cosby. She’s not going to seek re-election. What does that mean? What has her role been that she will no longer be able to offer to the board?
Elliott: I think this is a really important election, because even before Gayle announced she was not going to run for re-election, there was a big question about her viability to be re-elected, because it’s widely anticipated there would be a push to get someone to run against her, probably with a lot of financial support.
When she ran in 2012, she definitely ran saying she wanted change in IPS. That was the message many people wanted to hear in the wider school reform community. So she had a lot of support from people who probably aren’t very happy with her right now.
She is on the same page with most of the rest of the board on many topics of change, like she’s for school autonomy, she sent her own children to a charter school. But she is very skeptical of some elements of the particular brands of reform the rest of the board is pursuing. She’s sort of been the only critical or skeptical voice for a while…
The big question that has to be answered is, if Gayle is gone and replaced with somebody more like-minded and you have a seven-member board that shares very strongly the same view, is there still the opportunity for discussion with the community and to hear more points of view?
You mentioned when Cosby first ran in 2012 campaigning on reform-minded issues, she got support. Do you think that same force will mobilize behind the next candidate?
I think it’s very likely that, depending on who ultimately decides to run, if there need to be people who share the school reform mindset, there will be an effort to find them and get financial support for them.
Can you speak to how secure the other board members are in their positions, as far as their likelihood of being re-elected?
Sam Odle says he’s running for sure. He has that strong backing of the school reform community, which makes him a formidable candidate. Michael O’Connor is still undecided. O’Connor is recent to the board. He was named to fill out an unexpired term just a few months ago. He’s a little bit less of a known quantity, but he’s very much aligned with the school reform crowds. He’s also former deputy mayor, so he’s politically well connected, and he works for Lilly. So you would expect if O’Connor runs, he would have strong support.
Then Diane Arnold, who is very much in the school-reform crowd but is a long-serving board member who predates everybody, she’s undecided about whether she’s running. Again, if she runs, I think it’s likely she’ll have strong school reform community support.
That’s a lot of uncertainty.
This momentum toward school reform, is that happening in places other than Indianapolis?
I think Indianapolis is sort of one of the big examples in the country of a trend people find troubling, which is large spending in school board races. The spending in the last two IPS school board races was at unheard-of levels. Among multiple candidates, $100,000 or more was raised. We’ve never seen anything like that in Indiana before.
Generally, even large city school boards are small-dollar affairs, mostly local community people. Last school board election had big-dollar donors from outside the state who aren’t especially connected to Indiana. Indiana is one of the more stark examples of a quick change toward the city school board race being very big money and having a lot of external influence.
What’s the ultimate impact on students when the school board becomes so involved in money and politics?
Some of it just depends on your point of view. Many of the folks on the school board or in the school reform community, they absolutely believe this is a way overdue overhaul of IPS and the only way to help the kids.
There are other people who say this school district has been really managed or controlled by the local community, the people on the board have typically been ‘regular’ people, former teachers, people of the district and of the city, not to say folks on the board now aren’t true believers in IPS and the city, but they are definitely differently connected and of a different political stature.
People are worried about what that means in terms of access to the school district their children go to. Will their voices be heard? Are there people like them, who understand their points of view, on the board? I think those are fair questions.
Everyone wants IPS to do better for kids. So which vision is better? It’s going to be what we actually talk about (leading up to the election), I hope.
With Cosby out, if somebody replaces her who is not likely to be that one ‘no’ vote and all seven members are on the same page, where do you see the district going?
There is a practical question on whether one person leaving a board that’s already very unified, whether that would actually change much. But I think that’s a fair expectation that whether she stayed or not, the district was going to move in this direction, toward more autonomy, toward a smaller central office, toward changes in the way they do discipline. There’s no reason to believe that’s going to change. That’s the direction we’re heading for awhile, no matter what happens to the board.
Moving on to Mary Ann Sullivan, the new board president. What’s the significance of her taking over that role?
It’s a big deal. It doesn’t maybe feel like that big of a deal because the school board has been pretty unified in its worldview for four years now, so it’s not a surprise somebody who is strongly in favor of this brand of school reform is now president. But interestingly, it hadn’t happened until now. She’s the first newcomer to the board with this school-reform bent to actually become president… The new reform crowd now is strongly in control of the board, they have the presidency, their main critic is exiting the board. So this is why it feels like a big deal.
Overall, why does all of this matter? Why should our readers care?
I think many Recorder readers care deeply about IPS. This is the city school district; many of our children go to this school district. Its success or failure is really important to Indianapolis; it matters even to people who don’t live in the IPS school district. The city looks better to the outside world when it has a successful school district. There’s wide investment, and I think it’s a great moment that there’s a lot of community-wide interest in IPS right now.
I think people should care because IPS matters, because this is a big change moment and a lot of interesting things could happen in the next year or two.
