HamCo: Hillsdale's next frontier?

Indianapolis Star
·5 min read
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Happy Monday, study buddies!

An emotional and sometimes tense public hearing was held last week for a potential K-8 charter school that could be coming to Hamilton County as soon as next school year.

If it is approved, it would be the first K-8 charter school in Hamilton County. (HamCo already has a couple of charter high schools.)

For those of you in Marion County, charter schools may sound like old news but the fact that a charter school is trying to enter one of the best-performing school districts in the state highlights an interesting development in Indiana education politics.

Many of the speakers who spoke in favor of Valor Classical Academy (the charter school in question) said they just want to see more affordable school options. Right now, options are basically your traditional public school district or (often pricey) private school.

But there were also a few speakers who had another reason for supporting the school: they think liberal ideologies have infiltrated their child’s classroom and like that Valor is associated with Hillsdale College, a private school in Michigan known for promoting conservative Christian values.

This should sound familiar, friends! It's not dissimilar from concerns we've heard about “critical race theory” in classrooms that were more often about social emotional learning and diversity, equity and inclusion work (because, as we've said many times, CRT isn't taught in K-12 schools). Many times, we heard those parents threaten to pull their kids from public schools. Valor would give them another (free) option.

So, how did a charter school with ties to a private Christian college in Michigan end up in Indiana? Great question.

Hillsdale has slowly been creating more affiliated charter schools since 2010 across the U.S. Most notably in Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Lee has announced a partnership with the college to bring in possibly 50 schools to the state.

In his state of the state speech earlier this year announcing the partnership, Lee said K-12 curriculum in Tennessee needs "true American history, unbiased and nonpolitical.”

Many of those same words were echoed by speakers in last week’s public hearing.

The college has also created the “1776 Curriculum” which was born out of Hillsdale President Larry Arnn’s work on the 1776 Commission. You know the 1776 Commission, right? It was created by former President Donald Trump, partly in response to the New York Times' 1619 Project and the larger conversation about what schools are teaching students about race in America.

Holly Willson, the founding board president for Valor, has said that their interest in expanding classical education in Hamilton County is “for reasons greater than the sum of just last year.” But parents in favor of Valor at the public hearing appear to have made the connection and welcome a more conservative-learning choice for their kids' education.

So, will Indiana be the next frontier for Hillsdale's mission? That's up to the Grace College charter authorization board. A final decision on whether to approve the charter is expected next month.

Stay tuned!

Syllabus

Need to catch up on education news from last week? Here’s your required reading.

In K-12 news:

  • Job training for young people in Indianapolis is taking on a very European look, thanks to two growing apprenticeship programs, one German-inspired and a larger one that’s Swiss-inspired, that started in the city and its suburbs during the last few years.

  • Over the last year or so, books were banned at least 2,500 times by more than 130 school districts across 30-plus states, according to an analysis published last week. It’s an unprecedented trend that escalated throughout the spring and into the summer, ultimately leading to more kids losing access to literature.

  • IPS isn’t the only district trying to “right-size” right now. South Bend is dealing with many of the same challenges: declining enrollment and a tight budget that can’t support a bunch of under-utilized, ailing buildings.

  • IDOE has a new goal for elementary schools that, really, isn’t very new at all. Get kiddos reading by the end of third grade. The department has asked schools to have 95% of third-graders passing IREAD within the next five years.

  • Prefer to listen to your news? Check out this podcast episode about the pressures stressing schools and exacerbating a perennial issue: not enough teachers.

  • And a big congrats to Safiya Sankari, a 2021 graduate of Eman Schools in Fishers, who has been chosen as one of 100 Rise Global winners selected worldwide from among 13,000 applicants. Safiya will receive full tuition for her entire four years at MIT in Boston. A very proud teacher of Safiya's reached out to share the exciting news and said she was the "single hardest working student" she's ever taught. Well done, Safiya!

In higher education news:

  • If you read just one thing from this newsletter today, may we strongly suggest it’s this opinion piece from USA TODAY? No, it’s not even something we wrote. But it IS from Indiana. It’s an IU journalism professor’s first-hand account of the campus lockdown, which she spent with students, as Bloomington police looked for an armed man hiding in the sewer system nearby. “We tilted a desk onto its end and stacked it vertically against the door. We pressed our faces to the window that faced outside, where police were stringing yellow tape. The idyllic little campus creek tumbled into the storm drain opening right outside my window. That’s where he might emerge if they flushed him out. ‘Should we run for it?’ one student asked.” Whew.

  • College students have historically been absent at the polls. Could Indiana’s (currently paused) near-total abortion ban change that?

  • You know that strike vote that IU’s grad students have been working toward? Well, they’re asking folks to vote no… Awkward? Maybe. But they say they've got a good reason.

  • Ball State students say they’ve been subject to poor living conditions in some rental properties owned by a local property manager. The university is cutting ties.

  • The Neon Cactus is BACK Y’ALL! How is this an education story, you ask? Well… IYKYK and that’s all we’re going to say about it.

Until next week!

Arika & Caroline

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: HamCo: Hillsdale's next frontier?