Indiana’s public schooling is doomed

The news on the education front only gets worse.

It's not enough that the defeated superintendent of public instruction in Indiana rigged charter school ratings to benefit a GOP contributor and that the governor tried to remove a textbook from classrooms, the beat goes on.

"Indiana’s public schooling is doomed," proclaims the headline on Slate.com. "As governor, Mitch Daniels cut $150 million from higher education. He'll wreak more havoc as Purdue's president."

"It shouldn’t surprise us that Daniels — known for his disdain towards public education and teachers — would be appointed the head of a leading public university," write Tithi Bhattacharya and Bill V. Mullen for an article which first appeared in Jacobin (the head line there is "What’s the Matter with Indiana?").

"During Daniels’ term of governor, student tuition at Purdue increased nearly 100 percent due to state funding cuts, and student debt reached a record high of $26,000 per student."

"Indeed, his decisions at the state level made him attractive as the ideal candidate to complete the job of dismantling the public infrastructure of a land grant university such as Purdue."

"The outcomes of these processes are striking: there is now a nation-wide drop in college enrollment — according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a decline of 2.3% this year alone.

Can there be any way faster to race to the bottom than by attacking public education?