INDIANAPOLIS — Sen. Tim Skinner and his wife, Mary Lou, threw in the towel on teaching careers that spanned a combined 46 years after lawmakers passed a series of education changes this year.
A sweeping voucher system, the potential for more charter schools, merit-based pay for teachers and reduced collective bargaining rights left the Terre Haute Democrat with a blunt assessment of legislators' work:
"This last year we got kicked in the teeth every day the General Assembly was in session," Skinner, who taught government and politics at West Vigo High School until July 1, said.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said the changes lawmakers passed this year will position a state whose schools were ranked 14th in the nation by Education Week this year to become a national leader in education.
But Skinner, who had been teaching for 21 years and was close to retiring, contends Daniels and Bennett have left a far different legacy than what they tout.
"His and Tony Bennett's legacy is going to be the destruction of what I think is one of the best public school systems in the nation," he said.
Skinner said the new laws were the "icing on the cake" in his decision to retire, but have created a dilemma for younger teachers.
Skinner's son-in-law, Shawn Nevill, teaches social studies at Terre Haute South High School. After three years in the classroom, Nevill is now pondering whether he wants to be stuck making $32,000 to $33,000 the rest of his career while taking on more work and getting less support from the state, Skinner said.
He said the state's licensing and education requirements make teaching one of the worst-paying professions available to smart young adults when compared with areas like law and medicine. And he thinks opponents of the state's traditional public school system are piling on when they say that teachers are not accountable for their actions.
"For anybody to assume a teacher is not accountable, they'd have to be an idiot," Skinner said. "To stand there and say that teachers are not accountable tells me just how little they know."
Daniels said Skinner and other teachers are supporting a system that has protected bad teachers and led Indiana to point where its schools are failing.
"He's representing, in my judgment, a very reactionary point of view," he said. "Paying better teachers more, protecting better teachers, having better teachers in more classrooms, has to take precedence over protecting bad teachers and other aspects of the failing system we have."
Byron Ernest sides with Daniels, likening today's public schools to the domestic auto industry decades ago.
Carmakers suffered from foreign competition for decades, but ultimately rose to the challenge and started building better cars. The same will be true for public schools competing against private schools for students under the new voucher program, he said.
"Teachers always think I'm selling us out when I say this, but I think the competition that is created there is important," he said.
Ernest has been teaching for 26 years, the last seven as the head of Lebanon High School's Agriculture Sciences program. He was Indiana's teacher of the year in 2010 and lobbied hard for the sweeping changes pushed by Daniels and Bennett in the last legislative session.
"I think when you look at the changes that have been made, we're shifting from where we used to talk about teacher quality. Now we're looking at teacher effectiveness, which I think is a much better way to look at it," Ernest said.
Whether that optimism will take hold among colleagues who say teacher morale has bottomed out remains to be seen.
"It seems like the last two years have been a downward spiral of uncertainty," Marisa Graham, an Anderson elementary teacher whose father Rick Muir runs the Indiana Federation of Teachers, said.
Graham said one friend quit teaching halfway through the school year and now works as a restaurant manager. Two of her other teacher friends were laid off by Anderson Community Schools in a series of cuts that claimed 160 teachers. They got jobs teaching at charter schools, but were dismayed when they discovered they would have to work as at-will employees, Graham said.
"When you invest your money into a college degree and master's degree and you have experience, you deserve to have some protection and have your voice heard," she said.
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