Politics is a lot like real life, timing is everything.  And I couldn’t help but think that just 24 hours before it became public that Indianapolis Public schools were laying off more than 270 teachers due to declining enrollment, a study would come showing a strong majority of Hoosiers opposed “last hired, first fired” practices when it comes to teacher layoffs.

The poll, conducted by the education reform group Stand for Children, of 600 Hoosiers shows that 83% of voters believe layoff decisions should be based on teacher effectiveness and student achievement and not seniority.  The poll, based on the provisions of Senate Bill 1, has a margin of error of  plus or minus 2.4%.  Here are some other findings…

• 85% of Hoosiers support teacher tenure that’s based on results, not length of service.
• 83% support annual evaluations of teachers.
• 92% believe principals should never be forced to hire a teacher who does not a good fit for their school.
• 88% believe in higher pay for teachers who work in high poverty or low performing schools if they can increase academic performance.
• 76% believe teacher seniority should be more than a third of the factors taken into account when figuring out compensation.
• 49% thought the state was on the wrong track, but 56% thought education in Indiana was on the wrong track.
• 86% had a favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of teachers.
• 44% thought parents and good teachers were the most important factors for a quality education.  Only 7% thought money was the most important factor.

Now I know some of you are thinking, “Really, Abdul! A pro-education ‘reform’ group conducted a poll to back what they already think?! The next thing you tell me there’s gambling going on here.”  This is why I love you guys, there’s nothing like healthy skeptics.

I’ve embedded a copy of the poll results on my web blog, which you can download all 18 pages and read for yourself.   However, if that doesn’t float your boat, here’s a little bit of the demographic breakdown…

Age

• 18-34,  22%;  35-54, 39%;   55 and over, 38%.

Gender

• Women – 52%,  Men -48%

Political Affiliation

• Democrats – 28%,  Republican – 33% , Independent/Other Party – 38%

Region

• Northern Indiana – 32%, Indianapolis Metro Area – 26%, Central Indiana – 23%,  Southern Indiana – 19%.

Children in an Indiana Public School

• Children – 27%, Grandchildren – 24%,  No children – 49%.

Households with Teachers (Current or Retired)

• Current teacher – 17%, Retired teacher – 6%, None  – 78%.

Union Households

• Did not belong to a union – 77%,  Did belong to a union – 22%.

I have to give Butler credit for making it to the national championship.  And although they lost, if it’s any consolation, a championship is temporary, a great education lasts forever.

In 30 days, a very small number of Indiana voters will go to the polls and vote in the municipal primaries. I’ve always maintained municipal primaries are the pee-wee league baseball when it comes to elections, but since it’s your children playing, they are the ones closest to you and the ones you should care about the most.

What’s interesting though about these elections is how they play out.  In most places, say Carmel, if you win the primary then you win the general.  Marion County and Indianapolis is of course a different creature.   But there is one thing you have to ask?   Does the municipal election season really need to be as long as it is?   Does someone really need nearly six months to run for Mayor of Indianapolis, Lawrence, New Albany, Gary, Ft. Wayne, etc.?   If the City of Chicago can elect a Mayor in 6 weeks, surely Carmel can.

This is why when we look at election reform measures, moving municipal elections to the same as off-year general elections doesn’t strike me as the best way to engage voters.  Instead, they should be left in the off-year and consolidated.  And bring the school boards along with them.

Think about it.  You have a primary in March, two months of an intense campaign and then the first of week of May you have an election.   And while you’re at it, consolidate the primaries.  There’s no real Republican or Democratic way to run a city.  Either you get roads paved, trash picked up, criminals behind bars or you don’t.  Have a signature requirement to keep the crazies off the ballot and the top two vote-getters will face each other in a run off.  If one person gets more than 60-percent of the vote, they are the declared winner.

And by putting school board elections with municipal elections, you turn the attention of the voters to purely matters of local interest.  I’m also not above throwing county races in there as well.

I think it would save money, shorten an unnecessarily long campaign season and make life easier for the voters.  Would it put more pressure on candidates, probably.  But as the old saying goes, “politics ain’t no bean bag.”

What do you think?

There is always a moment in the Indiana General Assembly when someone says something they really shouldn’t.   If they have any common sense they apologize as soon as humanly possible.  That happened when State Representative Eric Turner said in opposition to an amendment to a restrictive abortion bill that would allow exceptions for rape and incest that some women might try to lie about being attacked in order to have an abortion.  Turner apologized the next day.

Now comes Indiana State Representative Dave Cheatham who equated the Democrats walkout to soldiers fighting in the war on terror.  You can see it for yourself below.

If Cheahtam has any common sense, he will apologize Monday afternoon when the House reconvenes.

If City-County Council Democratic candidates are expecting any financial help from their candidate for Mayor of Indianapolis, it looks like they’re in luck.   According to sources inside the Kennedy campaign, she gave them the good news this past weekend during a strategy session.

Kennedy reportedly told her fellow Democrats that she was skeptical that incumbent Greg Ballard raised nearly $500,000 at a recent fundraiser and said she can keep up with his efforts.   She didn’t disclose how much she had on hand, but Kennedy is said to have come across as more than cofident enough to keep up with the Mayor and help her fellow Democrats with some cash as well. The last round of campaign reports  showed Ballard with $1.4 million on hand.  Kennedy had raised just under $1 million.

My sources also tell me Kennedy planned to spend most of the money she raises on television ads, but will also promote some of the candidates as well.  They plan to use the Marion County Democratic website’s talking points on Ballard’s Broken Promises as their own talking points.

The primary is May 3.  Kennedy faces former City-County Councilman Ron Gibson and Sam Carson, the son of the late Congresswoman Julia Carson. The three are also scheduled to debate this weekend.

Apparently fighting incumbent U.S. Senator Dick Lugar isn’t enough for some members of the Indiana Tea Party movement, they’ve now decided to start fighting each other.   I’ve heard rumors for quite a while about growing tension in the movement dating back to their winter gathering in Tipton.  Now things are spilling over onto the Internet and being waged on two fronts.

The first fight is between the Tea Party movement and Freedom Works, the Dick Armey organization that has been teaching tea parties how to organize.  Apparently Armey’s endorsement of Mitch Daniels for President rubbed several of the Tea Party folks the wrong way.  Daniels supports his political mentor Dick Lugar in his Senate re-election bid.  That got the Freedom Works people an earful from tea party activists who were livid at the endorsement.   I’m told that left several Freedom Works organizers scratching their heads and seriously entertaining the thought of taking their resources to some other organization.

The second part of this appears to be over simple egos.  In an e-mail to Fox Business News host Neil Cavuto, Peter Recchio of the Elkhart Tea Party movement with regards to Monica Boyer (who was scheduled to appear on Cavuto’s show) and Greg Fettig of the Hoosiers for Conservative Senate.

We at TEA-MAC, and others in the state movement, are being kidnapped by a small group, Hoosiers for Conservative Senate, recently formed and run by tea party opportunists Monica Boyer and her associate/side-kick Greg Fettig. They simply do not have our movement first at heart, and are in this cause for the most part for personal gain and aggrandizement. This can be corroborated by MANY tea party leaders and general tea party members throughout the state with little research.

Recchio told me that Boyer and Fettig don’t speak for most of the Tea party movement.  I e-mailed Fettig to get his response, however he declined citing Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment that you don’t speak ill of another Republican/Conservative.  Recchio tells me plans to continue his fight.

Like I said, this is not the first time the Tea Party folks have taken political shots at each other,  and some how I get the strange feeling this won’t be the last.

The Indiana House of Representatives will vote today on the budget and school voucher bills.  Last night there more than 450 amendments filed  for both bills.  Here’s a breakdown according to House policy staff…

HB 1001 (Budget)

• Filed: 349 – R-12; D – 337
• Offered: 42 – R-3; D -39
• Accepted: 13 – R-3; D -10
• Defeated: 24 – R – 0; D – 24
• Withdrawn ; 5 – R -0; D -5

HB 1003 (School Voucher Bill)

• Filed: 75 –  R – 18; D – 57
• Offered: 25 – R -8; D – 17
• Accepted: 9 – R -7; D – 2
• Defeated: 14 – R – 0; D-14
• Withdrawn: 2 – R – 1, D – 1

So after a five-week delay, Democrats came back with 417 amendments, offered up 82 of them, 16 passed, 58 were defeated and 8 were withdrawn.   Now help me out here, what was that walkout all about again? Oh yeah, about a half-million dollars lost in productivity.

To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of referendums.   I believe that in a representative democracy you elect people to make decisions and if you don’t like it, throw them out of office and get new people.  However, the world we live in is the world we live in. Indiana lawmakers have completed step one of a three step process to enshrine into the Indiana Constitution that marriage shall be between one man and one woman.  So that means that sometime in 2014, there’s a 1 in 3 chance that Hoosiers will go to the polls and vote on the “marriage amendment”.

The language is pretty simple on its face…

Marriage. Provides that only marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Indiana. Provides that a legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized. This proposed amendment has not been previously agreed to by a general assembly.

Proponents say this is necessary to defend “traditional” marriage and protect the family. Opponents say it enshrines discrimination into the state Constitution and makes Indiana less inviting.   Frankly, I subscribe to the theory that if you don’t like gay marriage, don’t marry someone who is gay.  However, there’s a little more to it than that.

I truly believe this a generational issue.  My parents, who are in their 70s can’t fathom the idea of same-sex marriage, even though they were active in the civil rights movement.  My nieces and nephews who are teenagers frankly don’t care.  Those attitudes are reflected in a lot of the polling data that I have seen, younger don’t see what the big deal is, while older folks just can’t come to terms with the idea.    The fight over the marriage amendment will be won or lost with the 40-55 crowd.  And even then I think it comes down to how libertarian your attitude is toward marriage.  Now of course there are always exceptions to the rule.

So why not let the people vote on this one.  Let both sides put together their political campaigns and take it to the voters and turn out their supporters.  And even opponents suffer a loss in 2014; if I were them I’d wait until 2020 and give it a shot at repeal.  By then attitudes will have changed and most of the proponents will be dead.

This is going to be my last word on the 5-week walkout that ended this week for a while.  But I thought it would be worth it to do a comparison of what Indiana House Democrats asked for when they left and compare that to the “concessions” they received when they got back.

List of  “Concerns”

Education

• HB 1002 – Charter School Expansion.  Diverts state funding to experimental schools at a time when the state has cut funding to local schools by $600 million over the past two years.

• HB 1003 – School Vouchers.  Allows a family of four making over $80,000 a year to receive taxpayer dollars to send their children to a private school.

• HB 1479 – Private Takeover of Public Schools.  Allows the state of Indiana to take over poorly performing schools and for these schools to be managed by for-profit companies.  It removes local decision making in schools.

• HB 1584 – Public School Waiver of state laws. Allows school boards to seek waivers of almost any school law or regulation.

Labor

• HB 1468 –  Right to work.  Places the government between employers and their workers. It weakens the ability of working people to bargain for fair wages and safe work environments.

• HB 1216 – Public Works Projects and Common Construction Wage.   Weakens the ability of government to ensure that tax dollars are paid to the best and most qualified workers on public works projects, and that these tax dollars are spent at home.

• HB 1203 – Employee representations.  Ends employee rights to join a union by secret ballot and opens employees up to retaliation and firing by an employer who finds out they are trying to use their right to bargain.  This is preempted by federal law.  Will require the state to use taxpayer dollars to defend this legislation.

• HB 1450 – Unemployment Insurance. Shifts hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes from big businesses to small business and will cut benefits for unemployed workers by 25%.

• HB 1585 – Right to work for Public Employees.  Removes collective bargaining rights at the local level.

• HB 1538 – Minimum wages.  Precludes a community from determining what wages are appropriate for its area.

• HB 1001 – Budget Bill.  Allowed no public testimony on a school funding formula that cuts state support for K-12 across Indiana.

List of   “Concessions”

• Right-to-work legislation is off the table, preserving collective bargaining rights;

• The permanent ban on public employee bargaining is off the table in the House;

• Enabling legislation for private takeover of public schools is off the table in the House;

• Private school vouchers will be limited to 7,500 students in the first year and 15,000 in the second year, rather than the largest voucher program in the nation the Republicans originally wanted;

• Rather than an outright ban of Project Labor Agreements as Republicans wanted, PLAs still can be included with projects passed by public referendum; and

• The threshold for applying the common construction wage to projects would be $250,000 for 2012 and $350,000 for 2013, rather than the job-killing $1 million threshold the Republicans wanted.

So apart from a five-week stalemate, what was accomplished here?

Yes, I’ve been waiting all day to write that one.  I’m still trying to find out how Indiana House Democrats can claim any real victory outside of “right to work” when they returned Monday to the Indiana General Assembly.   Despite that, here’s what the politicos are saying…

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels

“Our pro-jobs agenda of low spending, low taxes, and educational improvement is squarely in the Hoosier mainstream.  The only thing ‘radical’ about this session has been the decision by one caucus to walk off the job for five weeks. Now that it’s finally over, let’s make up the lost time.”

Dan Parker, Indiana Democratic Party Chairman

“The Republicans called us names, threatened us with fines and tested our resolve, but in the end, compromise and negotiation trumped their radical agenda. This timeout gave thousands of Hoosiers the chance to take part in the process and have their voices heard by Republicans.   Is this the perfect solution? No. But it is a solution that protects Indiana’s middle class from the GOP plan to lower wages and eliminate worker rights.   I can only hope that Republicans will conduct the rest of the session in a tempered, moderate fashion instead of trying to ram their agenda through.”

Eric Holcomb, Chairman, Indiana Republican Party

“Now that the State House Democrats have decided to return to their jobs after a 36 day absence, they need to stay.  Valuable time has already been lost on crucial legislative items important to Hoosier taxpayers and families.  Speaker Bosma has stood strong for the majority of Hoosiers who cast their ballots for these important reforms last November.  Now, for the next month, members of the General Assembly have much to do in a short time.”

Mike O’Brien, Hendricks County GOP Chairman

“My fellow Hoosiers, our long statewide national nightmare is over.  Five weeks after it began.”

Jon Easter, Marion County Democratic Blogger

“The Democrats were back at work today in the Indiana House today ending the much ballyhooed walkout to stop the destructive work of the Republican caucus on Hoosiers.”

Jeff Harris, Indiana AFL-CIO*

With the return of the House Democrats all previously schedule “Stand Up for Hoosiers” rallies have been suspended.

*That is the best thing I’ve heard all session.