Monday an era ends as Mitch Daniels, who presided over eight years of whirlwind controversial changes in Indiana, leaves as governor.
Our community asks, “Did eight years of Mitch Daniels improve the condition of Indiana’s 620,000 African-American population?”
I’ve known three Republican governors in my years in Indiana. Unlike Otis Bowen and Robert Orr, Mitch Daniels was more visible, and to a greater degree engaged, in Black communities from the state’s largest in Indianapolis, to Gary and others across our state.
Daniels was comfortable with and not afraid to engage and speak with Black media, businesspeople and just plain Black folks.
Not realized is the role Daniels’ played to get his former boss, President George W. Bush, to be the only American president to visit Indiana Black Expo. And if it hadn’t been for Hurricane Katrina six weeks later, Bush’s Black Expo speech could’ve turned some Blacks on to Bush.
Daniels’ leasing the Indiana Toll Road; his privatization schemes for state government; his administration’s aggressive and sloppy job development effort; the disaster that’s the Department of Child Services; even putting Indiana on permanent Eastern time only touched at the margins of the progress of Black Hoosiers.
From a Black perspective, I argue that Daniels’ efforts at education reform and his 11th hour ramrodding of right-to-work legislation may have the greatest impact on Black progress or retrogression.
Mitch Daniels substantially changed the debate and dynamics of public education in Indiana.
Under his watch, one-in-nine Black students in Indiana’s public schools, (13,909) attend a charter school. An additional 1,922 Blacks attend private schools on the state’s dime with Daniels’ school voucher program.
Like Bush, Daniels believes Black students, if properly engaged and motivated, can succeed in any education environment. Unlike lots of conservatives who preach the rhetoric of school reform, Daniels practiced it several years before becoming governor.
In the late 1990s he helped found the private, faith based Oaks Academy on the Near Northside. Students at Oaks, which is roughly half Black with many students from poor and working class families, receive a world class education.
Daniels speaks with pride about the school and wonders why traditional public schools can’t replicate their success.
Oaks strongly influenced Daniels’ drive for education reform. If his bet is correct, his reforms could produce a better educated African-American populace. Which, in Daniels and other education reformers’ view, would vault the next generation of Blacks into a new Black middle and professional class?
But, in my view, Daniels’ efforts at education reform, runs smack into his misguided support for supporting Indiana’s entry as a right-to-work state.
Those who support education reform in Indiana and across the country can point to reams of data, studies and analysis that charter schools, school vouchers, tightening standards and other reforms Daniels’ advocated have benefited Black students.
But none of the proponents of right-to-work legislation have been able to produce any studies, data, analysis – nothing – to demonstrate that African-American household incomes increase in right-to- work states.
It was the American union movement – autoworkers, postal workers, public employees unions, and other unions – that fueled the growth of the Black middle class from the end of World War II until the end of the 20th century.
But the adoption of right to work last year in Indiana and now in Michigan threatens to eviscerate the Midwestern Black middle class base and make it difficult for the children and grandchildren of those middle class households and families to succeed.
That coupled with education reformers de-emphasis of vocational and skills training could result in stagnant Black earnings once the country truly emerges from the Great Recession.
But it’ll take to the end of this decade before we see if Daniels’ education reforms and union busting efforts moves Indiana’s African-American community forward or allows it to slide into an abyss of stagnation.
What I’m hearing
in the streets
The deal between City-County Council Democrats and Mayor Greg Ballard’s administration on the surface provides both sides with something. The council Democrats get an additional $11 million for public safety, an area the mayor’s minions didn’t want to fund.
The mayor gets his rental car and admission tax hikes, with dollars not immediately going to the Capital Improvement Board (CIB).
But the deal didn’t attack the mayor’s illegal, in my view, impoundment of tax money for constitutionally mandated county agencies. The leadership of the council Democrats chose, for the sake of getting a deal, not to directly challenge an action which was not only highly irregular but probably unconstitutional.
A good compromise is something both sides don’t like. But I think that Democrats got the shorter end of the stick. This allows Ballard’s boyz to think they can continue to play fast and loose with state law as they increasingly run Indianapolis as a fiefdom, not a democracy.
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There’s been a lot of buzz in the radio industry about the decline of listeners to right wing conservative talk shows. Here in the heart of Red State Indiana, there’s fresh evidence of that growing national trend.
According to the Arbitron Ratings for Calendar Year 2012 versus Calendar Year 2011, the average Indianapolis audience share of Rush Limbaugh’s program on WIBC-FM (93.1) was down 4.2 percent in 2012 compared to 2011. Limbaugh’s overall audience shrank 1.4 percent.
WIBC’s local right-wing firebrand Greg Garrison saw more severe audience erosion. His audience average audience share dropped 12.3 percent and his total audience fell 2.4 percent.
At the same time, the alternative to the increasingly brittle Garrison and the xenophobic Limbaugh, our WTLC-AM (1310) “Afternoons with Amos” saw its average audience share grow 35.7 percent and our overall audience increase 16.3 percent.
Our program’s growth is partly due to focusing on local subjects and unlike Garrison and Limbaugh providing an environment where guests’ and listeners’ views are welcomed not shunned.
See ‘ya next week.
Email comments to acbrown@aol.com
