After being invisible the first half of the year, only speaking out when the state got serious about taking over some city schools, our AWOL on education mayor resurfaced last week talking about a subject he’s not wanted to talk about – education.
Mayor Greg Ballard returned to where’s he’s comfortable talking about education. Not in front of parents and students, or teachers and school administrators. Instead the mayor returned to the closed cloister of the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce to proclaim his “vision for education.”
The mayor’s new education plan is a blend of rehashed rhetoric and alleged amped up action, mixed with hypocrisy and blatant lack of truth.
In his first four years, Mayor Ballard authorized just eight new charter schools out of some 50 applications. The low number was because the mayor wanted to concentrate on approving “quality” charters.
Mayor Ballard now advocates a rapid escalation of charters – he wants to open 20 more. Plus, authorize existing charters to open satellite locations, without public input or scrutiny.
When a public school system decides to open or close a school, public input through hearings and testimony is required. New charter schools are the same way. Now Mayor Ballard wants to create additional locations of existing charters by executive fiat.
The new piece in the mayor’s education plan is making Indianapolis the “national headquarters” of the education reform movement. To that end the mayor vowed to recruit educational non-profits to relocate in Indy. As an incentive, Ballard would use a new state law designed to encourage for-profit business to relocate to Indiana communities to also benefit non-profits.
What the mayor didn’t tell his well-heeled chamber audience was that a soon-to-be appendage of the chamber, Develop Indy, and Indiana’s Economic Development Commission (IEDC) had already cut a deal to move an upstate New York educational non-profit to Indianapolis.
Two days after Ballard’s speech, IEDC and Develop Indy announced that Project Lead The Way (PLTW), a non-profit providing science and math curricula to schools, would move here. And the city would provide county option income taxes (COIT) relief for employees of this company living in Marion County.
Giving specific tax breaks to a non-profit, which already pays no taxes, is a significant change in public policy that needs to be thoroughly debated.
But the mayor’s minions loath explaining their actions to anyone.
They learned their stuffy behavior from Mitch Roob and Gov. Mitch Daniels who got huffy when WTHR/Channel 13 dared to question them about their job creation statistics and methodology?
After I humbly asked Develop Indy and IEDC for data concerning their deal for PLTW, I discovered that folks at the city’s job creation agency really dislike uppity Black media people.
Develop Indy’s operations VP sent colleagues a haughty email about me saying “I’ve got this one. His issues are all about the city incentives, which we expected.” Adding a mild pejorative “Ugh.”
(IPhone etiquette note: When replying to email, don’t hit “reply to all” and have your reply go the media person you’re dissing).
Develop Indy creates jobs by using our tax dollars to lure businesses to come here bringing existing jobs and creating new ones. But I maintain that the jobs Develop Indy creates disproportionately go to suburban residents. That African-Americans aren’t sharing proportionately in the job creation our community’s tax dollars are helping subsidize.
Go to their website and you find no mention that Indianapolis has a sizeable and significant African-American community.
In fact, the word “diversity” is conspicuously missing from their flowery rhetoric designed to attract businesses here.
Worse, Develop Indy doesn’t do anything to get the word out to our African-American community when they bring these job opportunities to Indianapolis. They’ve never tried to build relationships with the city’s Black media, and judging by that email epithet, they don’t want to.
What Develop Indy and the state’s IEDC don’t understand is that our community’s tax dollars helps subsidize their deal making and taxpayers have a right to know what’s going on.
While I’d appreciate an apology from Develop Indy for its disreputable attitude towards us media types, I realize that won’t happen until we get a new mayor.
What I’m hearing
in the streets
It’s the biggest secret in town other than Peyton Manning’s medical condition. The real state of the mayor’s race.
By now there would have been at least one independent media-sponsored poll. But seemingly the Indianapolis Star and the TV stations can’t afford it.
Part of the reason is the cost of polling has increased because a serious, credible poll must include a sampling of cell phone only households.
So the only polling being done is by Melina Kennedy and Greg Ballard’s campaigns and their respective party organizations. And they’re not talking.
This tells me the mayor’s “lead” isn’t that great, if it exists at all. But Kennedy hasn’t attained a clear-cut advantage.
The big question in the campaign’s polling is how representative their sample of Marion County voters is?
If either Kennedy or Ballard’s polling samples aren’t at least 24.8 percent Black (reflecting the 2010 Census percentage of adults 18-plus in Indianapolis/Marion County who are Black) and if the sample doesn’t include 20 percent from cell phone only homes, then those surveys aren’t an accurate reflection of the reality of Indy today.
And those campaign pollsters should refund some cash for their faulty polling.
So, Ballard and Kennedy campaigns, how close is your pollster in reaching those sampling thresholds? And if they’re not, ask your pollster for a refund for their faulty methodology and quality control.
See ‘ya next week.
You can email comments to Amos Brown at acbrown@aol.com.
